Like his brother before him the duke was very fond of dancing, and kept many a reluctant senior and many a tired-out chaperone up till all hours at the grand ball given in honour of his twenty-fourth birthday.  Also like his brother he was inclined to reduce his duty dances to a minimum, much to Lady Dorchester’s dismay.  She had gone home with her husband for two years shortly after the duke’s arrival.  But she had seen enough of him, and was to see enough again on her return, to make her regret the good old times of more exacting ceremony.  To her dying day, half a century later, she kept up a prodigious stateliness of manner.  Before meals she expected the whole company to assemble and remain standing till she had made her royal progress through the room.  She was a living anachronism for many years before her death, with her high-heeled, gold-buttoned, scarlet-coloured shoes, her Marie-Antoinette coiffure raised high above her head and interlaced with ribbons, her elaborately gorgeous dress, her intricate array of ornaments, and her long, jet-black, official-looking cane.  But she was no anachronism to herself; for she still lived in the light of other days, in the fondly remembered times when, as the vice-reine of the Chateau St Louis, she helped her consort to settle nice points of etiquette and maintain a dignity befitting His Majesty’s chosen representative.  How did the seigneurs rank among themselves and with the leading English-speaking people?  Who were to dance in the state minuet?  Should dancing cease when the bishops came in, and for how long?  Was that curtsy dropped quite low enough to her viceregal self, and did that debutante offer her blushing cheek in quite the proper way to Carleton when he graciously gave her the presentation kiss?  How immeasurably far away it all seems now, that stately little court where the echoes of a dead Versailles lived on for seven years after the fall of the Bastille!  And yet there is still one citizen o Quebec whose early partners were chaperoned by ladies who had danced the minuet with Lord and Lady Dorchester.

The two royal visits were not without their political significance—­using the word political in its larger meaning.  But the three years between them—­that is, 1788-89-90—­formed the really pregnant time of constitutional development, when the Canada Act of 1791 was taking shape in the minds of its chief authors —­Carleton and Smith in Canada, Grenville and Pitt in England.  The Loyalists and the English-speaking merchants of Quebec and Montreal took good care to make themselves heard at every stage of the proceedings.  Most French Canadians would have preferred to be left without the suspected blessings of a parliament.  The clergy and seigneurs wished for a continuance of the Quebec Act, and the habitants wanted they knew not what, provided it would enable them to get more and give less.  The English-speaking people, on the other hand, were all for a parliament.  But they