great English society of those days.
Its dissoluteness was awful: it had swarmed over Europe after the Peace;
it had danced, and raced, and gambled in all the Courts. It had made its
bow at Versailles; it had run its horses on the plain of Sablons, near
Paris, and created the Anglomania there: it had exported vast quantities
of pictures and marbles from Rome and Florence: it had ruined itself by
building great galleries and palaces for the reception of the statues and
pictures: it had brought over singing-women and dancing-women from all the
operas of Europe, on whom my lords lavished their thousands, whilst they
left their honest wives and honest children languishing in the lonely,
deserted splendours of the castle and park at home.

Besides the great London society of those days, there was another
unacknowledged world, extravagant beyond measure, tearing about in the
pursuit of pleasure; dancing, gambling, drinking, singing; meeting the
real society in the public places (at Ranelaghs, Vauxhalls, and Ridottos,
about which our old novelists talk so constantly), and outvying the real
leaders of fashion, in luxury, and splendour, and beauty. For instance,
when the famous Miss Gunning visited Paris as Lady Coventry, where she
expected that her beauty would meet with the applause which had followed
her and her sister through England, it appears she was put to flight by an
English lady still more lovely in the eyes of the Parisians. A certain
Mrs. Pitt took a box at the opera opposite the countess; and was so much
handsomer than her ladyship, that the parterre cried out that this was the
real English angel, whereupon Lady Coventry quitted Paris in a huff. The
poor thing died presently of consumption, accelerated, it was said, by the
red and white paint with which she plastered those luckless charms of
hers. (We must represent to ourselves all fashionable female Europe, at
that time, as plastered with white, and raddled with red.) She left two
daughters behind her, whom George Selwyn loved (he was curiously fond of
little children), and who are described very drolly and pathetically in
these letters, in their little nursery, where passionate little Lady
Fanny, if she had not good cards, flung hers into Lady Mary's face; and
where they sat conspiring how they should receive a new mother-in-law whom
their papa presently brought home. They got on very well with their
mother-in-law, who was very kind to them; and they grew up, and