monds, pearls, red, green, and
yellow stones, that it certainly requires as much art and experience to
carry the load upright, as to dance upon May-day with the garland. Their
whalebone petticoats outdo ours by several yards circumference, and
cover some acres of ground.

"You may easily suppose how much this extraordinary dress sets off and
improves the natural ugliness with which God Almighty has been pleased
to endow them all generally. Even the lovely Empress herself is obliged
to comply, in some degree, with these absurd fashions, which they would
not quit for all the world."

The above passage is the more interesting because it has so often been
asserted that Lady Mary took no interest in dress. As a matter of fact,
however, there are several indications in her letters that she thought a
good deal about clothes.

"My little commission is hardly worth speaking of; if you have not
already laid out that small sum in St. Cloud ware, I had rather have it
in plain lutestring of any colour," she wrote in June, 1721, to her
sister, Lady Mar, at Paris.

"I would have no black silk, having bought here," she said on another
occasion; and again, "My paper is done, and I will only put you in mind
of my lutestring, which I beg you will send me plain, of what colour you
please." "Dear Sister, adieu," she wrote in 1723. "I have been very free
in this letter, because I think I am sure of its going safe. I wish my
nightgown may do the same: I only choose that as most convenient to you;
but if it was equally so, I had rather the money was laid out in plain
lutestring, if you could send me eight yards at a time of different
colours, designing it for linings; but if this scheme is impracticable,
send me a nightgown _a la mode_."

Apparently Lady Mar was careless or forgetful of the commission, for a
little later Lady Mary was writing pathetically: "I wish you would think
of my lutestring, for I am in terrible want of linings."

The account of the Austrian Court of the day, as given by Lady Mary, is
invaluable, for there is no other available written by an English person
accustomed to another Court.

Lady Mary's descriptions of Viennese society are also delightful, and if
she wrote of the royal circle with respect, she bubbled over with
merriment when writing of folk less highly placed. A letter of hers to
Lady Rich is too delicious to be omitted.

"I have compassion for the mortifications that you tell me befall our
litt