It seems that our hero was a very pugnacious defender of ladies’ top-knots and ribands, for he relates another quarrel of a similar nature, in the case of a Scotch gentleman, “who, taking a riband in the like manner from Mrs. Middleton, a maid of honour, in a back-room behind Queen Anne’s lodging in Greenwich, she likewise desired me to get her the said riband. I repaired, as formerly, to him in a courteous manner to demand it; but he refusing, as the French cavalier did, I caught him by the neck, and had almost thrown him down, when company came in and parted us. I offered, likewise, to fight with this gentleman, and came to the place appointed, by Hyde Park; but this also was interrupted, by order of the Lords of the Council, and I never heard more of it.” His lordship, notwithstanding his constant quarrels, which he most decidedly sought for, by his own account, asserts “that, although I lived in the armies and courts of the greatest princes in Christendom, yet I never had a quarrel with man for mine own sake; so that, although in mine own nature I was ever choleric and hasty, yet I never, without occasion given, quarrelled with anybody: for my friends often have I hazarded myself, but never yet drew my sword for my own sake singly.” It is difficult to reconcile this assertion with a quarrel he picked with the same Balaguy, so much renowned amongst the ladies, of whom he had already spoken. “I remembered myself,” he says, “of the bravado of M. Balaguy, and, coming to him, told him that I knew how brave a man he was, and that, as he had put me to one trial of daring when I was last with him in the trenches, I would put him to another; and saying that I had heard he had a fair mistress, and that the scarf he wore was her gift, I would maintain I had a worthier mistress than he, and that I would do as much for her sake as he, or any one else, durst do for his.” Balaguy very wisely declined the meeting, with a joke of somewhat an indelicate nature: to which Lord Herbert replied, “that he spoke more like a _paillard_ than a cavalier!” And here, strange to say, the matter ended. To doubt the courage of Balaguy, is out of the question; and it is but reasonable to infer that Lord Herbert was looked upon in the court of France as a crackbrained knight-errant. In the case of the young lady’s top-knot, there is little doubt but that the French cavalier was her favourite, whom in a pettish moment she sought to embroil with our hero; and the Frenchman very wisely considered the whole business a childish joke.