"Her ladyship's next attempt at notoriety was her grand masked ball at the Argyll rooms in 1818; an entertainment which, for elegant display and superior arrangement, did great credit to her taste, or to that of her broad-shouldered Milesian friend, to whom it is said the management of the whole was committed. The expense of this act of folly has been variously ~318~~estimated; and the honour of defraying it gratuitously allotted to an illustrious commander, whose former weakness and culpability has been amply redeemed by years of truly r----l benevolence and public service. We can state, however, that neither the purse or person of the royal D----contributed to the _eclat_ of the _fete_. An amorous Hebrew city clerk, who had long '_looked and loved_' at humble distance, taking advantage of his uncle's absence on the continent in a _diamond hunting_ speculation, having left the immediate jewel of His soul, his cash, at home, the enamoured youth seized the very 'nick o' time,' furnished half the funds for the night, for half a morning's conversation in Upper Y--street: her ladyship's indefatigable industry furnished the other moiety in a couple of days. A Mr. Z--ch--y contributed fifty, which coming to the ears of his sandy-haired lassie, his own paid forfeit of his folly, to their almost total abstraction from the thick head to which they project with asinine pride. Since this splash in the whirlpool of fashionable folly, her 'ladyship,' for she clings to the rank with all the tenacity of a fencible field officer, has lived in comparative retirement near E--dg--e R--d, nursing a bantling of the new era, and singing '_John Anderson my Joe_' to her now 'gude man;' only occasionally relapsing into former gaieties by a sly trip to Box Hill or Virginia Water with the grandson of a barber, a flush but gawky boy, who, forgetting that it is to the talents and judicial virtues of his honoured sire he owes his elevation, rejects that proud and wholesome example; and, by his arrogance and vanity, excites pity for the father and contempt for the son. Her ladyship, who by her own confession has been 'just nine and twenty' for the last ten years, may still boast of her conquests. Her amour with the _yellow dwarf_ of G--vs--r P--e is too good to be lost. They are followed by one, who, time was, would have chased them round the Steyne ~319~~and into cover with all the spirit of a true sportsman; but his days of revelry are past,--that is the celebrated _roue_, C---- L----, a '_trifle light as air,_' yet in nature's spite a very ultra in the pursuit of gallantry. To record the number of frail fair ones to whose charms he owned ephemeral homage would fill a volume. The wantons wife whose vices sunk her from the drawing-room to the lobby; the{4} kitchen wench, whose pretty face and lewd ambition raised her to it; the romance bewildered{5} Miss, and the rude unlettered {6} villager, the hardened drunken profligate, and the timid half-ruined victim (the almost