unassailable, as long as life lasted. Her _salon_ was a second Royal
Court to which flocked all the greatest in the land, proud to pay homage
to the "Empress of Fashion." She entertained kings with a regal
splendour. Their Majesties of Prussia and Belgium, Holland and Hanover,
and the Tsar Nicholas I. were all delighted to do honour to a hostess so
captivating and so queenly.

At Middleton Park, her lord's Oxfordshire seat, she dispensed a
hospitality which was the despair of her rivals. Her retinue of servants
seldom numbered less than a hundred, and many a week her guests, with
their attendants, far exceeded a thousand. Money was squandered with a
prodigal hand. The very servants, it is said, drank champagne and hock
like water; her housemaids had their riding horses, and dressed in silks
and satins. Among her thousands of guests were such men as Wellington
and Peel, Castlereagh and Canning, all humble worshippers at her shrine;
and Lord Byron who, in his gloomy moods, would shut himself in his
bedroom for days, living on biscuits and water, and stealing out at dead
of night to wander ghost-like through the neighbouring woods. These
moods of black despondency he varied by turbulent spirits, when he would
be the gayest of the gay, and would challenge his fellow-guests to
drinking bouts, in which he always came off the victor.

Lady Jersey had no more ardent admirer than Byron, whose muse was
inspired to many a flight in honour of

"The grace of mien,
The eye that gladdens and the brow serene;
The glossy darkness of that clustering hair,
Which shades, yet shows that forehead more than fair."