his principal society, and by whom he was surrounded up to the moment of his death, generally picking them up from the dregs of that class, and changing them according to his fancy and caprice. Here he was to be seen driving about the town, and lifted by two footmen from his carriage into the brothel, and he never seems to have thought it necessary to throw the slightest veil over the habits he pursued. For some months or weeks past he lived at Dorchester House, and the Zichys with him; but every day at a certain hour his women, who were quartered elsewhere, arrived, passed the greater part of the day, and one or other of them all the night in his room. He found the presence of the Countess Zichy troublesome and embarrassing to his pleasures, and he made her comprehend that her absence would not be disagreeable to him, and accordingly she went away. He had then been ill in bed for many days, but as soon as she was gone, as if to celebrate his liberation by a jubilee, he got up and posted with his seraglio down to Richmond. No room was ready, no fire lit, nevertheless he chose to dine there amidst damp and cold, drank a quantity of champagne, came back chilled and exhausted, took to his bed, grew gradually worse, and in ten days he died. And what a life, terminating in what a death! without a serious thought or a kindly feeling, lavishing sums incalculable on the worthless objects of his pleasures or caprices, never doing a generous or a charitable action, caring and cared for by no human being, the very objects of his bounty only regarding him for what they could get out of him; faculties, far beyond mediocrity, wasted and degraded, immersed in pride without dignity, in avarice and sensuality; all his relations estranged from him, and surrounded to the last by a venal harem, who pandered to the disgusting exigencies _lassatæ sed nondum satiatæ libidinis_. He left vast sums to the Strachan family, a considerable legacy to Croker, to whom he had been formerly under obligations, largely provided for his servants, and, with the exception of a few bequests to his executors and one or two other people, and a very large property to an old mistress (formerly Lady Strachan's maid), he left everything to his son Lord Yarmouth, with whom he had always been on very moderate terms. [Footnote 36: [Francis Charles, third Marquis of Hertford, born March 11, 1777; married Maria Fagniani in 1798; died March 1, 1842.]] [Footnote 37: The Duke of Bedford wrote to me: 'I see Peel's carriage followed Lord Hertford's remains out of London! What is the use of character and conduct in this world, if after such a life, death and will as Lord Hertford's, such a mark of respect is paid to his memory by the First Minister of this great country, and this not "the loose and profligate Lord Melbourne," but the good and honest and particular Sir Robert Peel?'] [Sidenote: THE WHIGS ON PEEL'S MEASURES.]