I feel excessively for you, my dear child, on the loss of Mr. Chute! so sensible and so good-natured a man would be a loss to anybody; but to you, who are so meek and helpless, it is irreparable! who will dry you when you are very wet brownpaper? Though I laugh, you know how much I pity you: you will want somebody to talk over English letters, and to conjecture with you; in short, I feel your distress in all its lights.

The citadel of Tournay is gone; our affairs go ill. Your brother Charles of Lorrain3 has lost a great battle grossly! He was constantly drunk, and had no kind of intelligence. Now he acts from his own head, his head turns out a very bad one. I don't know, indeed, what they can say in defence of the great general to whom we have just given the garter, the Duke of Saxe Weissenfels; he is not of so serene a house but that he might have known something of the motions of the Prussians. Last night we heard that the Hungarian insurgents had cut to pieces two Prussian regiments. The King of Prussia and Prince Charles are so near, that we every day expect news of another battle. We don't know yet what is to be the next step in Flanders. Lord Cobham has got Churchill's regiment, and Lord Dunmore his government of Plymouth. At the Prince's court there is a great revolution: he, or rather Lord Granville, or perhaps the Princess, (who, I firmly believe, by all her quiet sense, will turn out a Caroline,) have at last got rid of Lady Archibald,5 who was strongly attached to the coalition. They have civilly asked her, and grossly forced her to ask civilly to go away, which she has done, with a pension of twelve hundred a-year.

1 Mr. Mann was so thin and weak that Mr. Walpole used to compare him to wet brown-paper.

2 The treachery of the principal engineer, who deserted to the enemy, and the timidity of other officers in the garrison, produced a surrender of the city in a fortnight, and of the citadel in another week.-E.

3 He was brother of Francis, at this time Grand Duke of Tuscany. On the 3rd of June, the King of Prussia had gained a signal victory over him at Friedberg.-E.

General Churchill, or, as he was commonly called, “Old Charles Churchill," was just dead.-D.

Lady Archibald Hamilton, daughter of Lord Abercorn, and wife of Lord Archibald Hamilton.

Lady Middlesex1 is mistress of the robes: she lives with them perpetually, and sits up till five in the morning at their suppers. Don't mistake!-not for her person, which is wondrous plain and little: the town says it is for her friend Miss Granville, one of the maids of honour; but at least yet, that is only scandal. She is a fair, red-haired girl, scarce pretty; daughter of the poet, Lord Lansdown. Lady Berkeley is lady of the bedchamber, and a Miss Lawson maid of honour. Miss Neville, a charming beauty, and daughter of the pretty, unfortunate Lady Abergavenny,3 is named for the next vacancy.

I was scarce settled in my joy for the Spaniards having taken the opposite route to Tuscany, when I heard of Mr. Chute's leaving you. I long to have no reason to be uneasy about you. I am obliged to you for the gesse figures, and beg you will send me the bill in your first letter. Rysbrach has perfectly mended the Ganymede and the model, which to me seemed irrecoverably smashed.

I have just been giving a recommendatory letter for you to Mr. Hobart; he is no particular friend of mine, but is Norfolk, and in the world; so you will be civil to him. He is of the Damon-kind, and not one of whom you will make a Chute. Madame Suares may make something of him. Adieu!

1 Daughter of Lord Shannon, and wife of Charles, Earl of Middlesex, eldest son of Lionel, Duke of Dorset. Her favour grew to be thought more than platonic.

2 George Granville, Lord Lansdowne, one of Queen Anne's twelve Tory peers; styled by Pope, who addressed his Windsor Forest to him, "the polite." He died in 1735.-E.

3 Catherine Tatton, daughter of Lieutenant-General Tatton. She married, first, Edward Neville, thirteenth Lord Abergavenny, who died without issue in his nineteenth year, in 1724. She remarried with his cousin and successor, William, fourteenth Lord Abergavenny, by whom she had issue one son, George, afterwards fifteenth Lord Abergavenny, and one daughter, Catherina, who is mentioned above. Lady Abergavenny herself died in childbed, Dec. 4, 1729, in less than one month after the detection of an intrigue between her and Richard Lyddel, Esq. against whom Lord Abergavenny brought an action for damages, and recovered five thousand pounds. In a poem written on her death by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, she is praised for her gentleness, and pitied for her "cruel wrongs." Her husband is also called "that stern lord." All further details respecting her are, however, now unknown.-D.

TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

DEAR GEORGE,

Arlington Street, June 25, 1745.

I HAVE been near three weeks in Essex, at Mr. Rigby's,' and had left your direction behind me, and could not write to you. It is the charmingest place by nature, and the most trumpery by art, that ever I saw. The house stands on a high hill, on an arm of the sea, which winds itself before two sides of the house. On the right and left, at the very foot of this hill, lie two towns; the one of market quality, and the other with a wharf where ships come up. This last was to have a church, but by a lucky want of religion in the inhabitants, who would not contribute to building a steeple, it remains an absolute antique temple, with a portico on the very strand. Cross this arm of the sea, you see six churches and charming woody hills in Suffolk. All this parent Nature did for this place; but its godfathers and godmothers, I believe, promised it should renounce all the pomps and vanities of this world, for they have patched up a square house, full of windows, low rooms, and thin walls; piled up walls whereever there was a glimpse of prospect; planted avenues that go nowhere, and dug fishponds where there should be avenues. We had very bad weather the whole time I was there; but however I rode about and sailed, not having the same apprehensions of catching cold that Mrs. Kerwood had once at Chelsea, when I persuaded her not to go home by water, because it would be damp after rain.

3

The town is not quite empty yet. My Lady Fitzwalter, Lady Betty Germain, Lady Granville, and the dowager Strafford have their At-homes, and amass company. Lady Brown has done with her Sundays, for she is changing her house into Upper Brook Street. In the mean time, she goes to Knightsbridge, and Sir Robert to the woman he keeps at

Mistley Hall, near Manningtree.

2 Second daughter of the Earl of Berkeley, and married to Sir John Germain.

Daughter of Thomas, Earl of Pomfret. She was Lord Granville's second wife.

Scarborough: Winnington goes on with the Frasi; so my Lady Townshend is obliged only to lie of people. You have heard of the disgrace of the Archibald, and that in future. scandal she must only be ranked with the Lady Elizabeth Lucy and Madam Lucy Walters, instead of being historically noble among the Clevelands, Portsmouths, and Yarmouths. It is said Miss Granville has the reversion of her coronet; others say, she won't accept the patent.

Your friend Jemmy Lumley,'-I beg pardon, I mean your kin, is not he? I am sure he is not your friend;—well, he has had an assembly, and he would write all the cards himself, and every one of them was to desire he's company and she's company, with other pieces of curious orthography. Adieu, dear George! I wish you a merry farm, as the children say at Vauxhall. My compliments to your sisters.

TO THE HON. H. S. CONWAY.

MY DEAR HARRY,

Arlington Street, July 1, 1745.

If it were not for that one slight inconvenience, that I should probably be dead now, I should have liked much better to have lived in the last war than in this; I mean as to the pleasantness of writing letters. Two or three battles won, two or three towns taken, in a summer, were pretty objects to keep up the liveliness of a correspondence. But now it hurts one's dignity to be talking of English and French armies, at the first period of our history in which the tables are turned. After having learnt to spell out of the reigns of Edward the Third and Harry the Fifth, and begun lisping with Agincourt and Cressy, one uses one's self but awkwardly to the sounds of Tournay and Fontenoy. I don't like foreseeing the time so near, when all the young orators in Parliament will be haranguing out of Demosthenes upon the imminent danger we are in from the overgrown power of King Philip. As becoming as all that public spirit will be, which

1 Seventh son of the first Earl of Scarborough. He died in 1766, unmarried.-E.

to be sure will now come forth, I can't but think we were at least as happy and as great when all the young Pitts and Lytteltons were pelting oratory at my father for rolling out a twenty years' peace, and not envying the trophies which he passed by every day in Westminster Hall. But one must not repine; rather reflect on the glories which they have drove the nation headlong into. One must think all our distresses and dangers well laid out, when they have purchased us Glover's1 Oration for the merchants, the Admiralty for the Duke of Bedford, and the reversion of Secretary at war for Pitt, which he will certainly have, unless the French King should happen to have the nomination; and then I fear, as much obliged as that court is to my Lord Cobham and his nephews, they would be so partial as to prefer some illiterate nephew of Cardinal Tencin's, who never heard of Leonidas or the Hanover troops.

66

With all these reflections, as I love to make myself easy, especially politically, I comfort myself with what St. Evremond (a favourite philosopher of mine, for he thought what he liked, not liked what he thought) said in defence of Cardinal Mazarin, when he was reproached with neglecting the good of the kingdom that he might engross the riches of it: Well, let him get all the riches, and then he will think of the good of the kingdom, for it will all be his own." Let the French but have England, and they won't want to conquer it. We may possibly contract the French spirit of being supremely content with the glory of our monarch, and then -why then it will be the first time we ever were contented yet. We hear of nothing but your retiring, and of Dutch treachery in short, 'tis an ugly scene!

2

I know of no home news but the commencement of the gaming act,3 for which they are to put up a scutcheon at White's for the death of play; and the death of Winnington's wife, which may be an unlucky event for my Lady Townshend. As

The author of Leonidas.

2 Mr. Conway was still with the army in Flanders.

3 An act had recently passed to prevent excessive and deceitful gaming.-E.