Let quakers cut their clothes unto the quick, And with severities themselves afflict, But may the hoop adorn Edina's Street, Till the South Pole shall with the Northern meet." Thomson's countryman, Allan Ramsay, was equally zealous in behalf of hoops and tartans. He has even a good word to say for patches: I S “In your opinion, nothing matches, O horrid sin! the crime of patches ! Yea, run through every frame of nature, You'll find a patch for every creature ; E'en you yourselves, ye blackened wretches, Milton likens Dalila full dressed, to a ship in full sail : "With all her bravery on, and tackle trim, Sails fill'd, and streamers waving." But Dalila must have been dressed after Eastern fashion, which was rather draped than swelling; more turbaned or hooded, than topped with ribbons. What would he have said, had he seen his image of the ship enlarged and made out after true naval fashion, by the swelling hoop, the air-catching fan, the solid, mast-like stomacher, reascending in the pillar of the throat, and the "streamers waving in the wind," of ribbons à la Fontange? Imagine a squadron of them,-a dozen sail of the line (of beauty),-headed by Admiral the Lady Mary, or my Lady Hervey, supported by Captains Mrs. Hewet and Mrs. Murray, or Commanders the Demoiselles Bellenden and Lepell. They are all coming up the great high roadstead of Kensington Gardens, between Bayswater and the town; the gentlemen-beholders dying by hundreds in their swords and perriwigs, with their hats under their arms; and the ladies who have not been to court that day, feeling envious of the slaughter. Their sails are not mere white or brown: they are of all the colours of the rainbow, varied with gold and silver; and Pope, who is looking from one of the Palace windows with Dr. Mead, sees the spirits of his "Rape of the Lock" fillipping the jewels in their ears, to make them tremble in the sun. CHAPTER VII. PALACE CONTINUED-DOMESTICITIES OF GEORGE THE SECOND AND QUEEN CAROLINE-LORD HERVEY'S MEMOIRS QUESTION BETWEEN HIM AND POPE THE KING LISTENING IN A CLOSET HIS BRUSQUERIES IN THE FAMILY CIRCLE-HIS SON FREDERICK, PRINCE OF WALES. MEANTIME, alas! matters may not be going on so pleasantly in the interior of the palace. We take them, in ordinary, to have been like the matters in most houses; a mixture of sweet and sour, of insipidity and VOL. II. I vivacity, of love, and dispute, and gossiping, and a predominance of good or ill-according as the most amiable or unamiable person has the ascendancy of the hour. But in those days, and in the innermost rooms of that house, flourished a certain Lord of the Bed-chamber, called Hervey; who held the office of secret purveyor of news, gossip, and flattery, to the Queen and Princesses; and it pleased this purveyor, who was a gentleman of so ill a habit of body as to be forced to live on chicken and milk-and-water, to keep a record of what he saw daily going on round about him, in the house—especially of what was not flattering to anybody, foe or friend-and to "pot it up," with a secrecy beyond his office, for the benefit of posterity. Posterity has been in the habit of thinking, that a description which Pope wrote of this |