e were interrupted in the formation of this plan by a visit
from Lady Melbury, the acknowledged queen of beauty and of ton. I had
long been acquainted with her character, for her charms and her
accomplishments were the theme of every man of fashion, and the envy of
every modish woman.

She is one of those admired but pitiable characters, who, sent by
Providence as an example to their sex, degrade themselves into a
warning. Warm-hearted, feeling, liberal on the one hand; on the other
vain, sentimental, romantic, extravagantly addicted to dissipation and
expense, and with that union of contrarieties which distinguishes her,
equally devoted to poetry and gaming, to liberality and injustice. She
is too handsome to be envious, and too generous to have any relish for
detraction, but she gives to excess into the opposite fault. As Lady
Denham can detect blemishes in the most perfect, Lady Melbury finds
perfections in the most depraved. From a judgment which can not
discriminate, a temper which will not censure, and a hunger for
popularity, which can feed on the coarsest applause, she flatters
egregiously and universally, on the principle of being paid back
usuriously in the same coin. Prodigal of her beauty, she exists but on
the homage paid to it from the drawing-room at St. James's, to the mob
at an election. Candor in her is as mischievous as calumny in others,
for it buoys up characters which ought to sink. Not content with being
blind to the bad qualities of her favorites, she invents good ones for
them, and you would suppose her corrupt "little senate" was a choir of
seraphims.

A recent circumstance related by Sir John was quite characteristical.
Her favorite maid was dangerously ill, and earnestly begged to see her
lady, who always had loaded her with favors. To all company she talked
of the virtues of the poor Toinette, for whom she not only expressed,
but felt real compassion. Instead of one apothecary who would have
sufficed, two physicians were sent for; and she herself resolved to go
up and visit her, as soon as she had finished setting to music an elegy
on the death of her Java sparrow. Just as she had completed it, she
received a fresh entreaty to see her maid, and was actually got to the
door in order to go up stairs, when the milliner came in with such a
distracting variety of beautiful new things, that there was no
possibility of letting them go till she had tried every thing on, one
after the other. This t