the loathsome name
of "courtesan," because, yielding to the confidence of her
woman's heart, she had been the adored of two previous
lovers? Never did Lord Petersham, afterwards the Earl of
Harrington, take a more sensible course than when he
elevated in a holy and irreproachable love--a love that
strangled scandal in its bloated fullness--the fascinating
Maria Foote to the position she was made to adorn, being
twin sister in beauty as well as in law to the charming Miss
Green, whose ripe red lips and long dark-lashed blue and
laughing eyes were, before her marriage with Colonel
Stanhope, the admiration and subject of homage of all
London. Should her eye ever rest on this page, she will
perceive that we have not forgotten its power and
expression.

To descend still lower in the scale of social life, has the
Marquis Auguste Papon ever heard of the celebrated Madame
Vestris, now Mrs. Mathews? Is he ignorant that her
theatre--the Olympic--was ever a resort of the most
fashionable and aristocratic people of London? Did her moral
life in any way detract from her popularity as a woman of
talent and of beauty, and an artiste of exceeding
fascination and merit? And yet she had more lovers than the
Marquis Auguste Papon can, with all his ingenuity, raise up
in evidence against the remarkable woman he, in his not very
creditable spirit of vengeance, has sworn to destroy.

Let us enumerate those we know to have been the lovers of
Madame Vestris, who, after having passed her youth in all
the variety of enjoyment, at length became the wife of a
man, not without talent himself, and whose father stood
first among the names celebrated in the comic art.

First was a personal friend of the writer of this reply to
the unmanly attack of the Marquis Auguste Papon. And we have
reason to remember it, for the connection of Henry Cole with
the most fascinating woman of her day led to a duel in Hyde
Park, of which that lady was the immediate cause, between
the writer and a British officer who was so ungallant as to
seek to check the enthusiasm created by her scarcely
paralleled acting. To him succeeded Sir John Anstruther, and
after Sir John the celebrated Horace Claggett. In what order
their successors came we do not recollect, but of those w