, and his picture hung between the busts of Newton
and Pope:

This picture, placed these busts between,
Gives satire all its strength:
Wisdom and Wit are little seen,
But Folly at full length.

I should like to have seen the Folly. It was a splendid, embroidered,
be-ruffled, snuff-boxed, red-heeled, impertinent Folly, and knew how to
make itself respected. I should like to have seen that noble old madcap
Peterborough in his boots (he actually had the audacity to walk about Bath
in boots!), with his blue ribbon and stars, and a cabbage under each arm,
and a chicken in his hand, which he had been cheapening for his dinner.
Chesterfield came there many a time and gambled for hundreds, and grinned
through his gout. Mary Wortley was there, young and beautiful; and Mary
Wortley, old, hideous, and snuffy. Miss Chudleigh came there, slipping
away from one husband, and on the look-out for another. Walpole passed
many a day there; sickly, supercilious, absurdly dandified, and affected;
with a brilliant wit, a delightful sensibility; and for his friends, a
most tender, generous, and faithful heart. And if you and I had been alive
then, and strolling down Milsom Street--hush! we should have taken our hats
off, as an awful, long, lean, gaunt figure, swathed in flannels, passed by
in its chair, and a livid face looked out from the window--great fierce
eyes staring from under a bushy, powdered wig, a terrible frown, a
terrible Roman nose--and we whisper to one another, "There he is! There's
the great commoner! There is Mr. Pitt!" As we walk away, the abbey bells
are set a-ringing; and we meet our testy friend Toby Smollett, on the arm
of James Quin the actor, who tells us that the bells ring for Mr. Bullock,
an eminent cowkeeper from Tottenham, who has just arrived to drink the
waters; and Toby shakes his cane at the door of Colonel Ringworm--the
Creole gentleman's lodgings next his own--where the colonel's two negroes
are practising on the French horn.

When we try to recall social England, we must fancy it playing at cards
for many hours every day. The custom is wellnigh gone out among us now,
but fifty years ago was general, fifty years before that almost universal,
in the country. "Gaming has become so much the fashion," writes Seymour,
the author of the _Court Gamester_, "that he who in company should be
ignorant of the games in vogue, would be reckoned low-bred, and hardly fit
for conversation." There