tory out of all
proportion, to give you a just notion of the society into which I fell
after John Paul left London. It was, above all, a gaming society. From
that prying and all-powerful God of Chance none, great or small, escaped.
Guineas were staked and won upon frugal King George and his beef and
barley-water; Charles Fox and his debts; the intrigues of Choiseul and
the Du Barry and the sensational marriage of the Due d'Orleans with
Madame de Montesson (for your macaroni knew his Paris as well as his
London); Lord March and his opera singer; and even the doings of Betty,
the apple-woman of St. James's Street, and the beautiful barmaid of
Nando's in whom my Lord Thurlow was said to be interested. All these,
and much more not to be repeated, were duly set down in the betting-books
at White's and Brooks's.

Then the luxury of the life was something to startle a provincial, even
tho' he came, as did I, from one of the two most luxurious colonies of
the thirteen. Annapolis might be said to be London on a small scale,
--but on a very small scale. The historian of the future need look no
farther than our houses (if any remain), to be satisfied that we had more
than the necessities of existence. The Maryland aristocrat with his town
place and his country place was indeed a parallel of the patrician at
home. He wore his English clothes, drove and rode his English horses,
and his coaches were built in Long Acre. His heavy silver service came
from Fleet Street, and his claret and Champagne and Lisbon and Madeira
were the best that could be bought or smuggled. His sons were often
educated at home, at Eton or Westminster and Oxford or Cambridge. So
would I have been if circumstances had permitted. So was James
Fotheringay, the eldest of the family, and later the Dulany boys, and
half a dozen others I might mention. And then our ladies! 'Tis but
necessary to cite my Aunt Caroline as an extreme dame of fashion, who had
her French hairdresser, Piton.

As was my aunt to the Duchess of Kingston, so was Annapolis to London.
To depict the life of Mayfair and of St. James's Street during a season
about the year of grace 1770 demands a mightier pen than wields the
writer of these simple memoirs.

And who was responsible for all this luxury and laxity? Who but the
great Mr. Pitt, then the Earl of Chatham, whose wise policy had made
Britain the ruler of the world, and rich beyond compare. From all
corners of the earth her wealth poured i