he Court,
where the beautiful maid of honour was the light about which a thousand
beaux came and fluttered; where she was sure to have a ring of admirers
round her, crowding to listen to her repartees as much as to admire her
beauty; and where she spoke and listened to much free talk, such as one
never would have thought the lips or ears of Rachel Castlewood's daughter
would have uttered or heard. When in waiting at Windsor or Hampton, the
Court ladies and gentlemen would be making riding parties together; Mrs.
Beatrix in a horseman's coat and hat, the foremost after the staghounds
and over the park fences, a crowd of young fellows at her heels. If the
English country ladies at this time were the most pure and modest of any
ladies in the world--the English town and Court ladies permitted themselves
words and behaviour that were neither modest nor pure; and claimed, some
of them, a freedom which those who love that sex most would never wish to
grant them. The gentlemen of my family that follow after me (for I don't
encourage the ladies to pursue any such studies), may read in the works of
Mr. Congreve, and Dr. Swift, and others, what was the conversation and
what the habits of our time.

The most beautiful woman in England in 1712, when Esmond returned to this
country, a lady of high birth, and though of no fortune to be sure, with a
thousand fascinations of wit and manners--Beatrix Esmond--was now
six-and-twenty years old, and Beatrix Esmond still. Of her hundred adorers
she had not chosen one for a husband; and those who had asked had been
jilted by her; and more still had left her. A succession of near ten
years' crops of beauties had come up since her time, and had been reaped
by proper _husband_men, if we may make an agricultural simile, and had
been housed comfortably long ago. Her own contemporaries were sober
mothers by this time; girls with not a tithe of her charms, or her wit,
having made good matches, and now claiming precedence over the spinster
who but lately had derided and outshone them. The young beauties were
beginning to look down on Beatrix as an old maid, and sneer, and call her
one of Charles the Second's ladies, and ask whether her portrait was not
in the Hampton Court Gallery? But still she reigned, at least in one man's
opinion, superior over all the little misses that were the toasts of the
young lads; and in Esmond's eyes was ever perfectly lovely and young.

Who knows how many were nearly made