about the Fine Arts than a ploughboy, and that he must be mistaken; and we sent him home assured that the piece was an excellent likeness.  As for my Lord Bolingbroke, who honored her ladyship with a visit occasionally, when Colonel Esmond showed him the picture he burst out laughing, and asked what devilry he was engaged on?  Esmond owned simply that the portrait was not that of Viscount Castlewood; besought the Secretary on his honor to keep the secret; said that the ladies of the house were enthusiastic Jacobites, as was well known; and confessed that the picture was that of the Chevalier St. George.

The truth is, that Mr. Simon, waiting upon Lord Castlewood one day at Monsieur Rigaud’s whilst his lordship was sitting for his picture, affected to be much struck with a piece representing the Chevalier, whereof the head only was finished, and purchased it of the painter for a hundred crowns.  It had been intended, the artist said, for Miss Oglethorpe, the Prince’s mistress, but that young lady quitting Paris, had left the work on the artist’s hands; and taking this piece home, when my lord’s portrait arrived, Colonel Esmond, alias Monsieur Simon, had copied the uniform and other accessories from my lord’s picture to fill up Rigaud’s incomplete canvas:  the Colonel all his life having been a practitioner of painting, and especially followed it during his long residence in the cities of Flanders, among the masterpieces of Van Dyck and Rubens.  My grandson hath the piece, such as it is, in Virginia now.

At the commencement of the month of June, Miss Beatrix Esmond, and my Lady Viscountess, her mother, arrived from Castlewood; the former to resume her services at Court, which had been interrupted by the fatal catastrophe of Duke Hamilton’s death.  She once more took her place, then, in her Majesty’s suite and at the Maids’ table, being always a favorite with Mrs. Masham, the Queen’s chief woman, partly perhaps on account of their bitterness against the Duchess of Marlborough, whom Miss Beatrix loved no better than her rival did.  The gentlemen about the Court, my Lord Bolingbroke amongst others, owned that the young lady had come back handsomer than ever, and that the serious and tragic air which her face now involuntarily wore became her better than her former smiles and archness.

All the old domestics at the little house of Kensington Square were changed; the old steward that had served the family any time these five-and-twenty years, since the birth of the children of the house, was despatched into the kingdom of Ireland to see my lord’s estate there:  the housekeeper, who had been my lady’s woman time out of mind, and the attendant of the young children, was sent away grumbling to Walcote, to see to the new painting and preparing of that house, which my Lady Dowager intended to occupy for the future, giving up Castlewood to her daughter-in-law that might be expected daily from France.  Another servant the Viscountess had was dismissed too—­with a gratuity—­on the pretext that her ladyship’s train of domestics must be diminished; so, finally, there was not left in the household a single person who had belonged to it during the time my young Lord Castlewood was yet at home.