quently shut up here with my Lady M * *

as rich and as tipsy as Cacafogo in the comedy. jumble of avarice, lewdness, dignity,-and claret !

h, who is

What a

You will be pleased with a story of Lord Bury, that is come from Scotland: he is quartered at Inverness: the magistrates invited him to an entertainment with fire-works, which they intended to give on the morrow for the Duke's birth-day. He thanked them, assured them he would represent their zeal to his Royal Highness; but he did not doubt but it would be more agreeable to him, if they postponed it to the day following, the anniversary of the battle of Culloden. They stared, said they could not promise on their own authority, but would go and consult their body. They returned, told him it was unprecedented, and could not be complied with. Lord Bury replied, he was sorry they had not given a negative at once, for he had mentioned it to his soldiers, who would not bear a disappointment, and was afraid it would provoke them to some outrage upon the town. This did; they celebrated Cullo

den. Adieu !

TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

Twickenham, Thursday.

DEAR GEORGE,

SINCE you give me leave to speak the truth, I must own it is not quite agreeable to me to undertake the commission you give me; nor do I say this to assume any merit in having obeyed you, but to prepare you against my solicitation miscarrying, for I cannot flatter myself with having so much interest with Mr. Fox as you think. However, I have wrote to him as pressingly as I could, and wish most heartily it may have any effect. Your brother I imagine will call upon him again; and Mr. Fox will naturally tell him whether he can do it or not at my request.

I should have been very glad of your company, if it had been convenient. You would have found me an absolute country gentleman: I am in the garden, planting as long as it

is light, and shall not have finished, to be in London, before the middle of next week.

My compliments to your sisters and to the Colonel; and what so poor a man as Hamlet is, may do to express his love and friending to him, God willing, shall not lack. Adieu!

TO THE HON. H. S. CONWAY.1

Strawberry Hill, June 23, 1752.

By a letter that I received from my Lady Ailesbury two days ago, I flatter myself I shall not have occasion to write to you any more; yet I shall certainly see you with less pleasure than ever, as our meeting is to be attended with a resignation of my little charge. She is vastly well, and I think you will find her grown fat. I am husband enough to mind her beauty no longer, and perhaps you will say husband enough too, in pretending that my love is converted into friendship; but I shall tell you some stories at Park-place of her understanding, that will please you, I trust, as much as they have done me.

My Lady Ailesbury says I must send her news, and the whole history of Mr. Seymour and Lady Di. Egerton, and their quarrel, and all that is said on both sides. I can easily tell her all that is said on one side, Mr. Seymour's, who says, the only answer he has ever been able to get from the Duchess or Mr. Lyttelton was, that Di. has her caprices. The reasons she gives, and gave him, were, the badness of his temper and imperiousness of his letters; that he scolded her for the overfondness of her epistles, and was even so unsentimental as to talk of desiring to make her happy, instead of being made so by her. He is gone abroad, in despair, and with an additional circumstance, which would be very uncomfortable to anything but a true lover; his father refuses to resettle the estate on him, the entail of which was cut off by mutual consent, to make way for the settlements on the marriage.

Now first published. 2 Their daughter, Ann Seymour Conway.

The Speaker told me t'other day, that he had received a letter from Lord Hyde, which confirms what Mr. Churchill writes me, the distress and poverty of France and the greatness of their divisions. Yet the King's expenses are incredible; Madame de Pompadour is continually busied in finding out new journeys and diversions, to keep him from falling into the hands of the clergy. The last party of pleasure she made for him, was a stag-hunting; the stag was a man in a skin and horns, worried by twelve men dressed like bloodhounds! I have read of Basilowitz, a Czar of Muscovy, who improved on such a hunt, and had a man in a bearskin worried by real dogs; a more kingly entertainment!

I shall make out a sad journal of other news; yet I will be like any gazette, and scrape together all the births, deaths, and marriages in the parish. Lady Hartington and Lady Rachel Walpole are brought to bed of sons; Lord Burlington and Lord Gower have had new attacks of palsies: Lord Falkland is to marry the Southwark Lady Suffolk;1 and Mr. Watson, Miss Grace Pelham. Lady Coventry has miscarried of one or two children, and is going on with one or two more, and is gone to France to-day. Lady Townshend and Lady Caroline Petersham have had their anniversary quarrel, and the Duchess of Devonshire has had her secular assembly, which she keeps once in fifty years: she was more delightfully vulgar at it than you can imagine; complained of the wet night, and how the men would dirty the rooms with their shoes; called out at supper to the Duke, "Good God! my lord, don't cut the ham, nobody will eat any!" and relating her private ménage to Mr. Obnir, she said, “When there's only my lord and I, besides a pudding, we have always a dish of roast!" I am ashamed to send you such nonsense, or to tell you how the good women at Hampton Court are scandalized at Princess Emily's coming to chapel last Sunday in riding-clothes, with a dog under her arm; but I am bid to send news: what can we do at such a dead time of year? I must conclude, as my Lady Gower did very well

Sarah, Duchess-dowager of Suffolk, daughter of Thomas Inwen, Esq. of Southwark.-E.

2

t'other day in a letter into the country, "Since the two Misses1 were hanged, and the two Misses were married, there is nothing at all talked of." Adieu! My best compliments and my wife's to your two ladies.

TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

Strawberry Hill, July 20, 1752.

You have threatened me with a messenger from the secretary's office to seize my papers; who would ever have taken you for a prophet? If Goody Compton,3 your colleague, had taken upon her to foretell, there was enough of the witch and prophetess in her person and mysteriousness to have made a superstitious person believe she might be a cousin of Nostradamus, and heiress of some of her visions; but how came you by second sight? Which of the Cues matched in the Highlands? In short, not to keep you in suspense, for I believe you are so far inspired as to be ignorant how your prophecy was to be accomplished, as we were sitting at dinner t'other day, word was brought that one of the King's messengers was at the door. Every drop of ink in my pen ran cold; Algernon Sidney danced before my eyes, and methought I heard my Lord Chief Justice Lee, in a voice as dreadful as Jefferies', mumble out, Scribere est agere. How comfortable it was to find that Mr. Amyand, who was at table, had ordered this appanage of his dignity to attend him here for orders! However, I have buried the Memoires under the oak in my garden, where they are to be found a thousand years hence, and taken perhaps for a Runic history in rhyme. I have part of another valuable MS. to dispose of, which I shall beg leave to commit to your care, and desire it may be concealed behind the wainscot in Mr. Bentley's gothic house, whenever you build it. As the great person is living to whom it belonged, it would be highly dangerous to make it public; as soon as

Miss Blandy and Miss Jefferies.

2 The Gunnings.

3 The Hon. George Compton, son of Lord Northampton, Mr. Montagu's colleague for Northampton.-E.

she is in disgrace, I don't know whether it will not be a good way of making court to her successor, to communicate it to the world, as I propose doing, under the following title: "The Treasury of Art and Nature, or a Collection of inestimable Receipts, stolen out of the Cabinet of Madame de Pompadour, and now first published for the use of his fair Countrywomen, by a true born Englishman and philomystic."

So the pretty Miss Bishop,1 instead of being my niece, is to be Mrs. Bob Brudenel. What foolish birds are turtles, when they have scarce a hole to roost in! Adieu!

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Arlington Street, July 27, 1752.

WHAT Will you say to me after a silence of two months? I should be ashamed, if I were answerable for the whole world, who will do nothing worth repeating. Newspapers have horse-races, and can invent casualties, but I can't have the confidence to stuff a letter with either. The only casualty that is of dignity enough to send you, is a great fire at Lincoln's Inn, which is likely to afford new work for the lawyers, in consequence of the number of deeds and writings it has consumed. The Duke of Kingston has lost many of his he is unlucky with fires: Thoresby, his seat, was burnt a few years ago, and in it a whole room of valuable letters and manuscripts. There has been a very considerable loss of that kind at this fire: Mr. Yorke, the Chancellor's son, had a great collection of Lord Somers's papers, many relating to the assassination plot; and by which, I am told, it appeared that the Duke of Marlborough was deep in the schemes of St. Germain's.

There are great civil wars in the neighbourhood of Strawberry Hill: Princess Emily, who succeeded my brother in the rangership of Richmond Park, has imitated her brother Wil

'Daughter of Sir Cecil Bishop.