Excerpt from Noble Dames and Notable Men of the Georgian Era The reader will be in little danger of supposing me to imply that the Georgian era did not produce nobler dames and more notable men than any I have included in the present volume. Nevertheless, it may perhaps be advisable for me to point out that the subjects of the six character sketches here brought together have been selected because, in addition to the interest of their several life histories, they all exhibit some peculiarity, or quaintness, or eccentricity, of mind and behaviour, such as would have caused our forebears to dub them emphatically "characters." So far as was possible, I have let Horace Walpole tell the story of Lady Mary Coke, supplementing him, where necessary, from other sources, and especially from Lady Louisa Stuart's brief but brilliant sketch of the family of John, Duke of Argyll and Greenwich, which was prefixed to the portion of Lady Mary's "Journal" privately printed for Lord Home in 1889. It was not permissible for me to quote (as I should have been very glad to do pretty extensively) from Lady Louisa's delightful little memoir; but I am especially fortunate in being able to enrich and enliven my narrative by the inclusion of eighteen scarcely known letters of Horace Walpole. When Cunningham issued his great edition of Walpole's "Letters," and for a good many years afterwards, it was thought that only one letter of his to Lady Mary Coke had survived; but some eighteen or twenty years ago a packet was found amongst the papers of the late Mr. Drummond-Moray which contained no less than twenty-six hitherto unknown letters from Walpole to the lady, of various dates ranging from 1759 to 1772. These letters were included in the third volume of Lady Mary's "Journal," which was privately printed in 1892. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.