The Old Buccaneer has written:  Friends may laugh; I am not roused.  My enemy’s laugh is a bugle blown in the night.

Our enemy’s laugh at us rouses to wariness, he would say.  He can barely mean, that a condition of drowsihead is other than providently warned by laughter of friends.  An old warrior’s tough fibre would, perhaps, be insensible to that small crackle.  In civil life, however, the friend’s laugh at us is the loudest of the danger signals to stop our course:  and the very wealthy nobleman, who is known for not a fool, is kept from hearing it.  Unless he does hear it, he can have no suspicion of its being about him:  he cannot imagine such ‘lese-majeste’ in the subservient courtiers too prudent to betray a sign.  So Fleetwood was unwarned; and his child-like unconsciousness of the boiling sentiments around, seasoned, pricked, and maddened his parasites under compression to invent, for a faint relief.  He had his title for them, they their tales of him.

Dame Gossip would recount the tales.  She is of the order of persons inclining to suspect the tittle of truth in prodigies of scandal.  She is rustling and bustling to us of ’Carinthia Jane’s run up to London to see Sarah Winch’s grand new shop,’ an eclipse of all existing grand London western shops; and of Rose Mackrell’s account of her dance of proud delight in the shop, ending with a ‘lovely cheese’ just as my lord enters; and then a scene, wild beyond any conceivable ’for pathos and humour’—­her pet pair of the dissimilar twins, both banging at us for tear-drops by different roads, through a common aperture:—­and the earl has the Whitechapel baby boy plumped into his arms; and the countess fetches him a splendid bob-dip and rises out of a second cheese to twirl and fandango it; and, all serious on a sudden, request, whimperingly beseech, his thanks to her for the crowing successor she has presented him with:  my lord ultimately, but carefully, depositing the infant on a basket of the last oranges of the season, fresh from the Azores, by delivery off my lord’s own schooner-yacht in Southampton water; and escaping, leaving his gold-headed stick behind him—­a trophy for the countess? a weapon, it may be.

Quick she tucks up her skirts, she is after him.  Dame Gossip speaks amusingly enough of the chase, and many eye-witnesses to the earl’s flight at top speed down the right side of the way along by the Green Park; and of a Prince of the Blood, a portly Royal Duke on foot, bumped by one or the other of them, she cannot precisely say which, but ’thinks it to have been Carinthia Jane,’ because the exalted personage, his shock of surprise abating, turned and watched the chase, in much merriment.  And it was called, we are informed, ‘The Piccadilly Hare and Hound’ from that day.

Some tradition of an extenuated nobleman pursued by a light-footed lady amid great excitement, there is; the Dame attaches importance also to verses of one of the ballads beginning to gain currency at the time (issuing ostensibly from London’s poetic centre, the Seven Dials, which had, we are to conjecture, got the story by discolouring filtration through footmen retailing in public-houses the stock of anecdotes they gathered when stationed behind Rose Mackrell’s chair, or Captain Abrane’s, or Chumley ’Potts’s), and would have the whole of it quoted:—­