entrance to the rooms was the eager anxiety and
determined perseverance of the liveried Mercuries and Bath dromedaries,
alias chairmen, to procure for their respective masters and mistresses
a priority of admission; an officious zeal that was often productive of
the most ludicrous circumstances, and, in two or three instances, as far
as indispensable absence from the pleasures of the night could operate,
of the most fatal effects. A well-known city beau, who had been at
considerable expense in obtaining from London the splendid dress of a
Greek prince, was completely upset and rolled into the kennel by his
chairmen running foul of a sedan, in which Lord Molyneaux and his
friend Lord Ducie had both crammed themselves in the dress of Tyrolese
chieftains. The Countess of D--------, who personated Psyche, in
attempting to extricate herself from an unpleasant situation, in
which the obstinacy of her chairmen had placed her, actually had her
glittering wings torn away, unintentionally, from her shoulders by the
rude hand of a Bath rustic, whose humanity prompted him to attempt her
deliverance. Old Lady L--------, in the highest state of possible alarm,
from feeling her sedan inclining full twenty degrees too much to the
right, popped her head up, and raising the top part of the machine,
screamed out most piteously for assistance, and on drawing it back
~305~~again, tore off her new head-dress, and let her false front shut
in between the flap of the chair, by which accident, all the beautiful
Parisian curls of her ladyship were rendered quite flat and
uninteresting. An old gentleman of fortune, who was suffering under
hypochondriacal affection, and had resolved to attempt Sir John
Falstaff, received the end of a sedan pole plump in his chest, by which
powerful application he was driven through the back part of the machine,
and effectually cured of "_la maladie imaginaire_" by the acuteness of a
little real pain. The flambeau of a spruce livery servant setting fire
to the greasy tail of a Bath chairman's surtout produced a most awkward
_rencontre_, by which a husband and wife, who had not been associated
together for some years, but were proceeding to the ball in separate
chairs, were, by the accidental concussion of their sedans in a moment
of alarm, actually thrown into each other's arms; and such was the
gallantry of the gentleman, that he marched into the ball-room bearing
up the slender frame of his heretofore forsaken rib,