employ his utmost industry and art, to insinuate himself into the good graces of two persons that stood on each side the throne;[2]the one on the right was a lady of large make and swarthy complexion; the other, a man, that seemed to be between fifty and sixty, who had an air of deep designing thought: These two he managed with a great deal of art; for the lady he employed all the little arts that win her sex, particularly, I observed, that he frequently took hold of her hand, as in raptures, to kiss it, in such a manner as made me suspect she did not always draw it back empty; but this he did so slily, that it was not easy for anybody to be certain of it: The man on the other hand, he plied his own way with politics, remonstrating to him the several things he had before the throne; which however, as might be presumed from his manner of attending to them, seemed to make little impression; but when he came to lay before him the great advantages that might accrue from thence to their mistress, and consequently to him, he heard him with the utmost eagerness and satisfaction; at last, having plainly told him, that he himself should be a considerable gainer by it, and thereupon, that every thing that came to his hands of that nature should be at his service: As a sort of token or earnest he kissed his hand in the same manner he had the lady's, and so retired; by these and the like means he soon brought over both parties to him, who, with a whisper or two, procured him the royal licence; whereupon he immediately fell to making up a metal, if it deserved the name, of a very strange composition, wherewith he purposed to refit the implements of that useful deity, but in such manner, that for the base metal he put into them, he would take care to draw away from them an infinitely more than proportionable quantity of gold and silver, and thereby render him almost incapable of taking flight to foreign countries; nay, at last perhaps utterly so, when under pretence of their not being completed, he should filch in more of his metal, and filch away more of theirs. [Footnote 2: The Duchess of Kendal and Sir Robert Walpole. [S.]]