the mob, who chalked 45 on the sole of his shoe! He
complained in form of the insult. Walpole says, fairly enough, "it was
as difficult for the ministers to help laughing as to give him
redress."

Walpole frequently alludes to the two Gunnings as the two handsomest
sisters of their time. They were Irish-women, fresh-coloured, lively,
and well formed, but obviously more indebted to nature than to
education. Lady Coventry died young, and had the misfortune, even in
her grave, of being made the subject of an epitaph by Mason, one of
the most listless and languid poems of an unpoetic time. The Duchess
of Hamilton survived to a considerable age, and was loaded with
matrimonial honours. She first married the Duke of Hamilton. On his
death, she married the Marquis of Lorn, eldest son of the Duke of
Argyll, whom he succeeded in the title--thus becoming mother of the
heirs of the two great rival houses of Hamilton and Argyll. While in
her widowhood, she had been proposed for by the Duke of Bridgewater.
Lady Coventry seems to have realized Pope's verses of a dying belle--

"And, Betty, give this cheek a little red,
One would not, sure, look ugly when one's dead."

"Till within a few days of her death, she lay on a couch with a
looking-glass in her hand. When she found her beauty, which she
idolized, was quite gone, she took to her bed, and would be seen by
nobody, not even by her nurse, suffering only the light of a lamp in
her room."

Walpole's description of the ministry adds strikingly to the
contemptuous feeling, naturally generated by their singular ill
success. We must also observe, as much to the discredit of the past
age as to the honour of the present; that the leading men of the day
exhibited or affected a depravity of morals, which would be the ruin
of any public character at the present time. Many of the scenes in
high life would have been fitter for the court of Charles II., and
many of the actors in those scenes ought to have been cashiered from
public employment. Personal profligacy seems actually to have been
regarded as a species of ornamental appendage to public character;
and, except where its exposure sharpened the sting of an epigram, or
gave an additional flourish to the periods of a political writer, no
one seems to have conceived that the grossest offences against
morality were of the nature of crime. Another scandal seems to have
been frequent--intemperance in wine. Hard drinking was common in