accompaniment of Collinet's band that Almack's was regarded as, perhaps, the greatest matrimonial market of the aristocracy. The maximum attendance recorded was seventeen hundred. Almack himself died in 1781, bequeathing the Assembly Rooms to his niece, who married Willis, after whom they were subsequently named. By 1840 their glory had largely departed, but so serious a review as the _Quarterly_ wrote respectfully of their decline: "The palmy days of exclusiveness are gone by in England. Though it is obviously impossible to prevent any given number of persons from congregating and re-establishing an oligarchy, we are quite sure that the attempt would be ineffectual, and that the sense of their importance would extend little beyond the set." Yet Almack's lingered for several years. In its august precincts, which had welcomed and sanctioned the waltz (originally condemned as an unseemly exhibition), the ravages of the successor of the waltz and quadrille--the polka--are described by _Punch_ (after Byron) in the lament of the sentimental young lady at the close of the season of 1844. The craze for dancing was not so widely diffused as in 1920, but to judge from the "History, Symptoms, and Progress of the Polkamania," all strata of Society were affected:-- [Footnote 16: _Vide_ Grantley Berkeley's _Recollections_.] [Illustration: THE POLKA 1. My Polka before Six Lessons. 2. My Polka after Six Lessons.] [Sidenote: _Polkamania_] [Illustration: MANNERS AND CVSTOMS OF YE ENGLYSHE IN 1849 AN "AT HOME". YE POLKA.]