HIGH WAISTS AND LOW MORALS
Regency Ladies. By Lewis Melville. (Hutchinson. 21s.) THERE never was such a nightmare as the Regency period. Amid the errors of King George III's coronation the Earl Marshal promised that the next should be regulated "in the exactest manner possible." In his court Mrs. Siddons stood, ready to drop, and read Shakespeare to the dull Royal Family. The Prince of Wales was very fat, was drunk on his wedding-day, and "passed the greatest part of his bridal night io the grate where he fell," and where the Princess left him.
No wonder that the Princess Caroline found her own friends in Byron, "Monk " Lewis, Sydney Smith, Charles James Fox, and Samuel Rogers instead of her Prince's companions who were brought on the honeymoon, and slept, filthy and snoring, in boots on the sofas. The Duke of York was caught helping a kitchen maid to shell peas, while his mistress was illegally selling commissions in the army. The Duke of Clarence took Mrs. Jordan the actress for his mistress, and when, on the King's advice he tried to reduce her allowance from 1,000. to 1500, received a playbill with the words underlined, "No money returned after the rising of the curtain." The Prince, who was, according to Sheridan, "Too much a lady's man ever to be the man of any lady," went his rake's progress, surrounded by his kaleidoscope of friends, Beau Brurnmel, Mrs. Fitzherbert, and Perdit,a. The Prince of Macaronis made Brighton fashionable.
While the men lost their tens of thousands at White's and Brooks's, the ladies founded Almack's Assembly, where only six of the three hundred Guards-officers were considered worthy of admission, and whence the Duke of Wellington himself was sent away to change into knee breeches.
In the background was Harriette Wilson whose virtue
was something like the nine lives of a cat," whose advances Byron refused, and who auctioned the disreputable incidents in her threatened diary among those who might , be com- promised. There, too, come the agonies of Fanny Burney as lady-in-waiting to the Queen', and the Indian summer of Horace Walpole with Mary, and Agnes Berry ; and peeping shyly round the edge of the curtain are the not really demure
Bluestockings. This is a book full of bright anecdotes, but one can hardly expect consecutiveness from a nightmare However it is occasionally amusing and rather shocking.
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