on many, things. His stories and conspicuous scandals are no doubt often unfounded; but there is a gentle undercurrent of daily unremarkable life and manners which he evidently assumed as a datum for his historical imagination."
We may be quite sure, for example, on his testimony, that people of fashion went to Ranelagh two hours after the music was over, because it was thought vulgar to go earlier; that Lord Derby's cook gave him warning, rather than dress suppers at three o'clock in the morning; that when a masked ball was given by eighteen young noblemen at Soho, the mob in the street stopped the fine coaches, held up torches to the windows, and demanded to have the masks pulled off and put on at their pleasure, "but all with extreme good-humor and civility;" that he, Horace Walpole, one night at Vauxhall, helped Lady Caroline Petersham to mince seven chickens in a china dish, which chickens "Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp, with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattling and laughing, and we every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears;"
