NOTABLE IRISHWOMEN
The Beautiful Gunnings.
I.
Maria Gunning (Countess of Coventry), 1733‑1760.
Elizabeth Gunning (Duchess of Hamilton and afterwards Duchess of Argyll), 1734‑1790.
AT the Bal Poudré, given at Dublin Castle in the spring of 1903, two figures were prominent, the Countess of Chesterfield and her sister, Miss Gladys Wilson, who represented the beautiful Gunning sisters—the two Irish beauties who set the fashionable world of London in a blaze, and ended by being, to use Horace Walpole's words, "Countessed and double Duchessed." The luck of the Gunnings has passed into a proverb. Their story is, indeed, far stranger than fiction. The fairy tale of Cinderella and the glass slipper is the only thing that can be compared to it. Their father, John Gunning, of Castle Coote, Co. Roscommon,
