on at the time, and people who came for pleasure
liked to be at ease. Thus ladies lounged into the balls in their
riding-hoods or morning dresses, gentlemen in boots, with their pipes in
their mouths. Such atrocities were intolerable to the late frequenter of
London society, and in his imperious arrogance, the new monarch used
actually to pull off the white aprons of ladies who entered the
assembly-rooms with that _degage_ article, and throw them upon the back
seats. Like the French emperor, again, he treated high and low in the
same manner, and when the Duchess of Queensberry appeared in an apron,
coolly pulled it off, and told her it was only fit for a maid-servant.
Her grace made no resistance.

The men were not so submissive; but the M.C. turned them into ridicule,
and whenever a gentleman appeared at the assembly-rooms in boots, would
walk up to him, and in a loud voice remark, 'Sir, I think you have
forgot your horse.' To complete his triumph, he put the offenders into a
song called 'Trentinella's Invitation to the Assembly.'

'Come, one and all,
To Hoyden Hall,
For there's the assembly this night:
None but proud fools,
Mind manners and rules;
We Hoydens do decency slight.

'Come trollops and slatterns,
Cockt hats and white aprons;
This best our modesty suits:
For why should not we
In a dress be as free
As Hogs-Norton squires in boots?'

and as this was not enough, got up a puppet-show of a sufficient
coarseness to suit the taste of the time, in which the practice of
wearing boots was satirized.

His next onslaught was upon that of carrying swords; and in this respect
Nash became a public benefactor, for in those days, though Chesterfield
was the writer on etiquette, people were not well-bred enough to keep
their tempers, and rivals for a lady's hand at a minuet, or gamblers who
disputed over their cards, invariably settled the matter by an option
between suicide or murder under the polite name of duel. The M.C. wisely
saw that these affairs would bring Bath in bad repute, and determined to
supplant the rapier by the less dangerous cane. In this he was for a
long time opposed, until a notorious torchlight duel between two
gamblers, of whom one was run through the body, and the other, to show
his contrition, turned Quaker, brought his opponents to a sense of the
danger of a weapon always at hand; and henceforth the sword was
abolished.