PROCLIVITIES 11 



have since become. It is therefore not surprising to 

 find his lordship much sought after by match-making 

 mammas of the Scottish capital. That a love for the 

 Turf should beget a desire for cards, perhaps, was 

 in those times a less singular sequence than at 

 present. Then everybody who was anybody at all 

 in Society played : from the ' trick-track ' of the ladies 

 after a 'dish' of tea, to faro of the sterner sex 

 at the public gambling-hell or the less vicious but 

 more expensive club. 



I think it beyond dispute that the young Earl of 

 March bought his experience in the playthings of 

 Charles the ' Fool ' — cards — at Edinburgh, especially 

 as a noble relation of his lordship, Lady Cassillis, was 

 or had been co-partner with another aristocratic 

 dame in a public gaming-house in London,^ so it is 



^ On April 29th, 1745, the House of Lords was informed that 

 * privileges ' of peeresses were made and insisted on by the Ladies 

 Mordington and Cassillis, as a means to intimidate the officers of 

 justice from doing their duty in suppressing public gaming-houses 

 kept by the said ladies in London and Westminster. As only the 

 claim of Lady Mordington appears on the journals of the House of 

 Lords, it would seem that this lady was a peeress in her own right, 

 while her partner was the wife or relict of a peer (possibly she was 

 the Dowager Countess of Cassillis). Lady Mordington's claim is set 

 forth as follows : — 



' I, Dame Mary, Baroness of Mordington, do hold a house in the 

 great piazzi, Covent Garden . . . where all persons of credit are at 

 liberty to frequent, and play at such diversions as are used at other 



