"Not Cleopatra on her galley's deck
Display'd so much of leg or more of neck."

For myself, I had the special honour of being engaged to the Honourable
Mrs. J-- C******y, otherwise Padden, who, whatever may have been her
origin,{2} has certainly acquired the ease and elegance of

2 Mrs. Padden is said to have been originally a servant-maid
at Plymouth, and the victim of early seduction. When very
young,

coming to London with her infant in search of a Captain D----- in the
D--------e Militia, her first but inconstant swain, chance threw her
in her abandoned condition into the way of Colonel C-----, who was much
interested by her tale of sorrow, and more perhaps by her then lovely
person, to obtain possession of which, he took a house for her,
furnished it, and (as the phrase is) _set her up_. How long the duke's
_aide-de-camp_ continued the favourite lover is not of any consequence;
but both parties are known to have been capricious in _affaires de
cour_. Her next acknowledged protector was the light-hearted George
D-----d, then a great gun in the fashionable world: to him succeeded
an _amorous thane_, the Irish Earl of F-----e; and when his lordship,
satiated by possession, withdrew his eccentric countenance, Lord
Mo--f--d succeeded to the vacant couch. The Venetian masquerade is said
to have produced a long carnival to this _belle brunette_, who seldom
kept _Lent_; and who hero met, for the first time, a now noble Marquess,
then Lord Y--------, to whose liberality she was for some time indebted
for a very splendid establishment; but the precarious existence of such
connexions is proverbial, and Mrs. Padden has certainly had her share
of fatal experience. Her next paramour was a diamond of the first water,
but no star, a certain dashing jeweller, Mr. C-----, whose charmer she
continued only until kind fortune threw in her way her present constant
Jack. With the hoy-day of the blood, the fickleness of the heart ceases;
and Mrs. Padden is now in the "sear o' the leaf," and somewhat _passee_
with the town. It does therefore display good judgment in the lady
to endeavour, by every attention and correct conduct, to preserve an
attachment that has now existed for some considerable time. ~42~~Indeed
it is hardly possible to find a more conversational or attractive woman,
or one less free from the vulgarity which usually accompanies ladies of
her caste. With this fair I danced a waltz, and th