THE LIVES OF THE OBSCURE
hate and vituperation. “Had I said that your F——r died Blaspheming the Almighty”, one of her accusations begins, but the end is unprintable. Great ladies were accused of every depravity, and the clergy, unless their taste in poetry was above reproach, suffered an incessant castigation. Mr. Pilkington, she never forgot, was a clergyman.
Slowly but surely the Earl of Killmallock’s great-granddaughter descended in the social scale. From St. James’s Street and its noble benefactors she migrated to Green Street to lodge with Lord Stair’s valet de chambre and his wife, who washed for persons of distinction. She, who had dallied with dukes, was glad for company’s sake to take a hand at quadrille with footmen and laundresses and Grub Street writers, who, as they drank porter, sipped green tea, and smoked tobacco, told stories of the utmost scurrility about their masters and mistresses. The spiciness of their conversation made amends for the vulgarity of their manners. From them Laetitia picked up those anecdotes of the great which sprinkled her pages with dashes and served her purpose when subscribers failed and landladies grew insolent. Indeed, it was a hard life—to trudge to Chelsea in the snow wearing nothing but a chintz gown and be put off with a beggarly half-crown by Sir Hans Sloane; next to tramp to Ormond Street and extract two guineas from the odious Dr. Meade, which, in her glee, she tossed in the air and lost in a crack of the floor; to be insulted by footmen; to sit down to a dish of boiling water because her land-
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