You will hardly believe that I intend to send you this for a letter, but I do. Mr. Chute said he would write to you today, so mine goes as page to his. Adieu!

TO THE HON. H. S. CONWAY.

Twickenham, June 8, 1747.

You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my tub at Windsor. It is a little play-thinghouse that I got out of Mrs. Chenevix's shop, and is the prettiest bauble you ever saw. It is set in enamelled meadows, with filigree hedges:

A small Euphrates through the piece is roll'd,
And little finches wave their wings in gold.

Two delightful roads, that you would call dusty, supply me continually with coaches and chaises: barges as solemn as barons of the exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry. Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope's ghost is just now skimming under my window by a most poetical moonlight. I have about land enough to keep such a farm as Noah's, when he set up in the ark with a pair of each kind; but my cottage is rather cleaner than I believe his was after they had been cooped up together forty days. The Chenevixes had tricked it out for themselves up two pair of stairs is what they call Mr. Chenevix's library, furnished with three maps, one shelf, a bust of Sir Isaac Newton, and a lame telescope without any glasses. Lord John Sackville predecessed me here, and instituted certain games called cricketalia, which have been celebrated this very evening in honour of him in a neighbouring meadow.

You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all this tranquillity, while a Parliament is bursting about my ears.

You know it is going to be dissolved: I am told, you are taken care of, though I don't know where, nor whether any body that chooses you will quarrel with me because he does choose you, as that little bug the Marquis of Rockingham did; one of the calamities of my life which I have bore as abominably well as I do most about which I don't care. They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections which he won't carry :- he had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen. A new set of peers are in embryo, to add more dignity to the silence of the House of Lords.

I make no remarks on your campaign,1 because, as you say, you do nothing at all; which, though very proper nutriment for a thinking head, does not do quite so well to write upon. If any one of you can but contrive to be shot upon your post, it is all we desire, shall look upon it as a great curiosity, and will take care to set up a monument to the person so slain; as we are doing by vote to Captain Cornwall, who was killed at the beginning of the action in the Mediterranean four years ago. In the present dearth of glory, he is canonized; though, poor man! he had been tried twice the year before for cowardice.3

I could tell you much election news, none else; though not being thoroughly attentive to so important a subject, as to be sure one ought to be, I might now and then mistake, and give you a candidate for Durham in place of one for Southampton, or name the returning-officer instead of the candidate. In general, I believe, it is much as usual-those sold in detail that afterwards will be sold in the representation—the ministers bribing Jacobites to choose friends of their ownthe name of well-wishers to the present establishment, and patriots outbidding ministers that they may make the better

Mr. Conway was in Flanders with the Duke of Cumberland.

The House of Commons, on the 28th of May, had agreed to erect a monument in Westminster Abbey to the memory of Captain Cornwall, of the Marlborough; who was slain while bravely defending his ship. The monument, designed and executed by Taylor, was completed in

1755.-E.

3 And honourably acquitted on both occasions.-E.

market of their own patriotism:-in short, all England, under some name or other, is just now to be bought and sold; though, whenever we become posterity and forefathers, we shall be in high repute for wisdom and virtue. My greatgreat-grandchildren will figure me with a white beard down to my girdle; and Mr. Pitt's will believe him unspotted enough to have walked over nine hundred hot ploughshares, without hurting the sole of his foot. How merry my ghost will be, and shake its ears to hear itself quoted as a person of consummate prudence! Adieu, dear Harry! Yours ever.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Arlington Street, June 26, 1747.

You can have no idea of the emptiness of London, and of the tumult everywhere else. To-day many elections begin. The sums of money disbursed within this month would give any body a very faint idea of the poverty of this undone country! I think the expense and contest is greater now we are said to be all of a mind, than when parties ran highest. Indeed, I ascribe part of the solitude in town to privilege being at an end; though many of us can afford to bribe so high, it is not so easy to pay debts. Here am I, as Lord Cornbury1 says, sitting for a borough, while every body else stands for one. He diverted me extremely the other day with the application of a story to the King's speech. It says, the reason for dissolving the Parliament is its being so near dissolution: Lord Cornbury said it put him in mind of a gaoler in Oxfordshire who was remarkably humane to his prisoners; one day he said to one of them, "My good friend, you know you are to be hanged on Friday se'nnight; I want extremely to go to London; would you be so kind as to be hanged next Friday?"

Henry Hyde, only son of the last Earl of Clarendon. He died before his father.

2 The King's words are, "As this Parliament would necessarily determine in a short time, I have judged it expedient speedily to call a new one."-E.

Pigwiggin is come over, more Pigwiggin than ever! He entertained me with the horrid ugly figures that he saw at the Prince of Orange's court; think of his saying ugly figures! He is to be chosen for Lynn, whither I would not go, because I must have gone; I go to Callington again, whither I don't go. My brother chooses Lord Luxborough1 for Castlerising. Would you know the connexion? This Lord keeps Mrs. Horton the player; we keep Miss Norsa the player: Rich the harlequin is an intimate of all; and to cement the harlequinity, somebody's brother (excuse me if I am not perfect in such genealogy) is to marry the Jewess's sister. This coup de théatre procured Knight his Irish coronet, and has now stuffed him into Castlerising, about which my brother had quarrelled with me, for not looking upon it, as, what he called, a family-borough. Excuse this ridiculous detail; it serves to introduce the account of the new peers, for Sir Jacob Bouverie, a considerable Jacobite, who is made Viscount Folkestone, bought his ermine at twelve thousand pounds a-yard of the Duchess of Kendal d'aujourd'hui. Sir Harry Liddel is Baron Ravensworth, and Duncombe Baron Feversham; Archer and Rolle have only changed their Mr.ships for Lordships. Lord Middlesex has lost one of his Lordships, that of the Treasury; is succeeded by the second Grenville, and he by Ellis at the admiralty. Lord Ashburnham had made a magnificent summer suit to wait, but Lord Cowper at last does not resign the bedchamber. I intend to laugh over this disgrazia with the Chuteheds, when they return triumphant from Hampshire, where Whithed has no enemy. Apropos to enemies! I believe the battle in Flanders is compromised, for one never hears of it.

3

The Duchess of Queensberry has at last been at court, a point she has been intriguing these two years. Nobody gave

1 Robert Knight, eldest son of the famous cashier of the South Sea Company. (Created Lord Luxborough in Ireland 1746, and Earl of Catherlough in 1763. He died in 1772.-D.)

2 Lady Yarmouth, the mistress of George II.-D.

3 Right Honourable Welbore Ellis.-D.

She had quarrelled with the court, in consequence of the refusal to permit Gay's sequel to the Beggar's Opera, called "Polly," to be acted. -D. [See vol. i. p. 251.]

in to it. At last she snatched at the opportunity of her son being obliged to the King for a regiment in the Dutch service, and would not let him go to thank, till they sent for her too. Niccolini, who is next to her in absurdity and importance, is gone electioneering with Doddington.

I expect Pucci every day to finish my trouble with Riccardi; I shall take any ring, though he has taken care I should not take another tolerable one. If you will pay him, which I fancy will be the shortest way to prevent any fripponnerie, I will put the money into your brother's hands.

My eagle is arrived-my eagle tout court, for I hear nothing of the pedestal: the bird itself was sent home in a store-ship; I was happy that they did not reserve the sta tue, and send its footstool. It is a glorious fowl! I admire it, and every body admires it as much as it deserves. There never was so much spirit and fire preserved, with so much labour and finishing. It stands fronting the Vespasian: there are no two such morsels in England!

Have you a mind for an example of English bizarrerie? there is a Fleming here, who carves exquisitely in ivory, one Verskovis; he has done much for me, and where I have recommended him; but he is starving, and returning to Rome, to carve for the English, for whom, when he was there before, he could not work fast enough.

I know nothing, nor ever heard of the Mills's and Davisons; and know less than nothing of whether they are employed from hence. There is nobody in town of whom to inquire; if there were, they would ask me for what borough these men were to stand, and wonder that I could name people from any other motive. Adieu!

The eagle found in the gardens of Boccapadugli within the precincts of Caracalla's baths, at Rome, in the year 1742; one of the finest pieces of Greek sculpture in the world. See Walpole's Works, vol. ii. p. 463, and Gray's Ode on the Progress of Poesy.-E.

2 Verskovis is also mentioned by Walpole in his Anecdotes of Painting. He had a son, who to the art of carving in ivory added painting, but died young, in 1749, before his father. The latter did not survive above a year.-E.