tion ever held. Perhaps, from a meticulously
constitutional point of view, the scene of a hotly
contested election was not quite the place for Princes
of the Blood. But, however that might be, when the duke
saw two electors pommelling a third, who happened to be
a friend of his, he dashed in to the rescue and floored
both of them with a neatly planted right and left. One
of these men, who lived to see King Edward VII arrive in
1860, as Prince of Wales, always took the greatest pride
in telling successive generations of voters how Queen
Victoria's father had knocked him down.

Like his brother before him the duke was very fond of
dancing, and kept many a reluctant senior and many a
tired-out chaperone up till all hours at the grand ball
given in honour of his twenty-fourth birthday. Also like
his brother he was inclined to reduce his duty dances to
a minimum, much to Lady Dorchester's dismay. She had gone
home with her husband for two years shortly after the
duke's arrival. But she had seen enough of him, and was
to see enough again on her return, to make her regret
the good old times of more exacting ceremony. To her
dying day, half a century later, she kept up a prodigious
stateliness of manner. Before meals she expected the
whole company to assemble and remain standing till she
had made her royal progress through the room. She was a
living anachronism for many years before her death, with
her high-heeled, gold-buttoned, scarlet-coloured shoes,
her Marie-Antoinette _coiffure_ raised high above her
head and interlaced with ribbons, her elaborately gorgeous
dress, her intricate array of ornaments, and her long,
jet-black, official-looking cane. But she was no anachronism
to herself; for she still lived in the light of other
days, in the fondly remembered times when, as the vice-reine
of the Chateau St Louis, she helped her consort to settle
nice points of etiquette and maintain a dignity befitting
His Majesty's chosen representative. How did the seigneurs
rank among themselves and with the leading English-speaking
people? Who were to dance in the state minuet? Should
dancing cease when the bishops came in, and for how long?
Was that curtsy dropped quite low enough to her viceregal
self, and did that _debutante_ offer her blushing cheek
in quite the proper way to Carleton when he graciously
gave her the presentation kiss? How immeasurably far away
it all seems now, that stately little court where the
echoes of a d