Mr. Müntz is at the Vine, and has been some time. I want to know more of this history of the German: I do assure you, that I like both his painting and behaviour; but if any history of any kind is to accompany him, I shall be most willing to part with him. However I may divert myself as a spectator of broils, believe me I am thoroughly sick of having any thing to do in any. Those in a neighbouring island are likely to subside-and, contrary to custom, the priest himself is to be the sacrifice. I have contracted a sort of intimacy with Garrick, who is my neighbour. He affects to study my taste: I lay it all upon you-he admires you. He is building a grateful temple to Shakspeare: I offered him this motto: "Quod spiro et placeo, si placeo tuum est!" Don't be surprised if you should hear of me as a gentleman coming upon the stage next winter for my diversion. The truth is, I make the most of this acquaintance to protect my poor neighbour at Clivden -you understand the conundrum, Clive's den. Adieu, my dear Sir! Need I repeat assurances? If I need, believe that nothing that can tend to your recovery has been or shall be neglected by me. You may trust me to the utmost of my power— beyond that, what can I do? Once more, adieu ! MY DEAR SIR, TO RICHARD BENTLEY, ESQ. ̧ Strawberry Hill, August 15, 1755. THOUGH I wrote to you so lately, and have certainly nothing new to tell you, I can't help scribbling a line to you to-night, as I am going to Mr. Rigby's for a week or ten days, and must thank you first for the three pictures. One of them charms me, the Mount Orgueil, which is absolutely fine; the sea, and shadow upon it, are masterly. The other two I don't, at least won't, take for finished. If you please, Elizabeth Castle shall be Mr. Müntz's performance: indeed I see nothing of you in it. I do reconnoitre you in the Hercules and Nessus; but in both your colours are dirty, carelessly dirty in your distant hills you are improved, and not hard. The figures are too largeI don't mean in the Elizabeth Castle, for there they are neat; but the centaur, though he dies as well as Garrick can, is outrageous. Hercules and Deianira are by no means so: he is sentimental, and she most improperly sorrowful. However, I am pleased enough to beg you would continue. As soon as Mr. Müntz returns from the Vine, you shall have a supply of colours. In the mean time why give up the good old trade of drawing? Have you no Indian ink, no sootwater, no snuff, no coat of onion, no juice of any thing? If you love me, draw you would if you knew the real pleasure you can give me. a The Primate of Ireland. I have been studying all your drawings; and next to architecture and trees, I determine that you succeed in nothing better than animals. Now (as the newspapers say) the late ingenious Mr. Seymour is dead, I would recommend horses and greyhounds to you. I should think you capable of a landscape or two with delicious bits of architecture. I have known you execute the light of a torch or lanthorn so well, that if it was called Schalken, a housekeeper at Hampton-court or Windsor, or a Catherine at Strawberry Hill, would show it, and say it cost ten thousand pounds. Nay, if I could believe that you would ever execute any more designs I proposed to you, I would give you a hint for a picture that struck me t'other day in Péréfixe's Life of Henry IV. He says, the king was often seen lying upon a common straw-bed among the soldiers, with a piece of brown bread in one hand, and a bit of charcoal in t'other, to draw an encampment, or town that he was besieging. If this is not a character and a picture, I don't know what is. I dined to-day at Garrick's: there were the Duke of Grafton, Lord and Lady Rochford, Lady Holderness, the crooked Mostyn, and Dabreu the Spanish minister; two regents, of which one is lord chamberlain, the other groom of the stole; and the wife of a secretary of state. This is the being sur un assez bon ton for a player! Don't you want to ask me how I like him? Do want, and I will tell you. I like her exceedingly; her behaviour is all sense, and all sweetness too. I don't know how, he does not improve so fast upon me: there is a great deal of parts, and vivacity, and variety, but there is a great deal too of mimicry and burlesque. I am very ungrateful, for he flatters me abundantly; but unluckily I know it. I was accustomed to it enough when my father was first minister: on his fall I lost it all at once: and since that, I have lived with Mr. Chute, who is all vehemence; with Mr. Fox, who is all disputation; with Sir Charles Williams, who has no time from flattering himself; with Gray, who does not hate to find fault with me; with Mr. Conway, who is all sincerity; and with you and Mr. Rigby, who have always laughed at me in a good-natured way. I don't know how, but I think I like all this as well-I beg his pardon, Mr. Raftor does flatter me; but I should be a cormorant for praise, if I could swallow it whole as he gives it me. Sir William Yonge, who has been extinct so long, is at last dead; and the war, which began with such a flirt of vivacity, is I think gone to sleep. General Braddock has not yet sent over to claim the surname of Americanus. But why should I take pains to show you in how many ways I know nothing?-Why; I can tell it you in one word--why, Mr. Cambridge knows nothing!-I wish you good-night! Yours ever. • Hardouin de Péréfixe's Histoire du Roi Henri le Grand appeared in 1661. He is stated, by the editors of the Biog. Univ. to be the best historian of that monarch, and the work has been translated into many languages. He was appointed preceptor to Louis XIV. in 1644, and Archbishop of Paris in 1622. He died in 1670.-E. TO SIR HORACE MANN. Mistley, August 21, 1755. I SHALL laugh at you for taking so seriously what I said to you about my Lady Orford. Do you think, my dear Sir, that at this time I can want to learn your zeal for us? or can you imagine that I did not approve for your own sake your keeping fair terms with the Countess? If I do not much forget, I even recommended it to you-but let us talk no more of her; she has engrossed more paragraphs in our letters than she deserves. I promised you a brisk war: we have done our part, but can I help it, if the French will not declare it?-if they are backward, and cautious, and timorous; if they are afraid of provoking too far so great a power as England, who threatens the liberties of Europe ?I laugh, but how not to laugh at such a world as this? Do you remember the language of the last war? What were our apprehensions? Nay, at the conclusion of the peace, nothing was laid down for a maxim but the impossibility of our engaging in another war: that our national debt was at its ne plus ultra; and that on the very next discussion France must swallow us up! Now we are all insolent, alert, and triumphant: nay the French talk of nothing but guarding against our piracies, and travel Europe to give the alarm against such an overbearing power as we are. On their coasts they are alarmed-I mean the common people; I scarce believe that they who know any thing, are in real dread of invasion from us! Whatever be the reason, they don't declare war: some think they wait for the arrival of their Martinico fleet. You will ask why we should not attack that too? They tell one, that if we began hostilities in Europe, Spain would join the French. Some believe that the latter are not ready certain it is, Mirepoix gave them no notice nor suspicion of our flippancy; and he is rather under a cloud-indeed this has much undeceived me in one point: I took him for the ostensible minister; but little thought that they had not some secret agent of better head, some priest, some Scotch or Irish Papist-or perhaps some English Protestant, to give them better intelligence. But don't you begin to be impatient for the events of all our West Indian expeditions? The Duke, who is now the soul of the Regency, and who on all hands is allowed to make a great figure there, is much dissatisfied at the slowness of General Braddock, who does not march as if he was at all impatient to be scalped. It is said for him, that he has had bad guides, that the roads are exceedingly difficult, and that it was necessary to drag as much artillery as he does. This is not the first time, as witness in Hawley, that the Duke has found that brutality did not necessarily consummate a general. I love to The Duke of Cumberland. b General Hawley, who behaved with great cruelty and brutality in the Scotch rebellion, which did not however prevent his being beaten by the rebels.-D. (See vol. ii. p. 95.) give you an idea of our characters as they rise upon the stage of history. Braddock is a very Iroquois in disposition. He had a sister, who having gamed away all her little fortune at Bath, hanged herself with a truly English deliberation, leaving only a note upon the table with those lines "To die is landing on some silent shore," &c. When Braddock was told of it, he only said, "Poor Fanny! I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up!" But a more ridiculous story of him, and which is recorded in heroics by Fielding in his Covent-Garden tragedy, was an amorous discussion he had formerly with a Mrs. Upton, who had kept him. He had gone the greatest lengths with her pin-money, and was still craving. One day that he was very pressing, she pulled out her purse and showed him that she had but twelve or fourteen shillings left; he twitched it from her, "Let me see that." Tied up at the other end he found five guineas; he took them, tossed the empty purse in her face, saying, "Did you mean to cheat me?" and never went near her more:now you are acquainted with General Braddock. We have some royal negotiations proceeding in Germany, which are not likely to give quite so much satisfaction to the Parliament of next winter, as our French triumphs give to the City, where nothing is so popular as the Duke of Newcastle. There is a certain Hessian treaty, said to be eighteen years long, which is arrived-at the Treasury, Legge refused peremptorily to sign it-you did not expect patriotism from thence? It will not make him popular; there is not a mob in England now capable of being the dupe of patriotism; the late body of that denomination have really so discredited it, that a minister must go great lengths indeed before the people would dread him half so much as a patriot! On the contrary, I believe nothing would make any man so popular, or conciliate so much affection to his ministry, as to assure the people that he never had nor ever would pretend to love his country. Legge has been frowned upon by the Duke of Newcastle ever since he was made chancellor of the exchequer by him, and would have been turned out long ago if Sir George Lee would have accepted the post. I am sorry that just when Tuscany is at war with Algiers, your countrymen should lie under the odour of piracy too; it will give Richcourt opportunities of saying very severe things to you!-Barbarossa our Dey is not returned yet-we fear he is going to set his grandson' up in a seraglio; and as we have not, among other Ma The story of this unfortunate young lady is told by Goldsmith, in his amusing Life of Beau Nash, introduced into the new and greatly enlarged edition of his "Miscellaneous Works," published by Mr. Murray, in 1837, in four volumes octavo. See vol. iií. p. 294. According to the poet, the lines, which were written on one of the panes of the window, were these: "O Death! thou pleasing end of human wo! The King had a mind to marry the Prince of Wales to a Princess of Brunswick. hometan customs, copied the use of the bowstring for repressing the luxuriancy of the royal branches, we shall be quite overrun with young Sultans! Adieu! TO SIR HORACE MANN. Arlington Street, August 28, 1755. My last letter to you could not be got out of England, before I might have added a melancholy supplement. Accounts of a total defeat of Braddock, and his forces are arrived from America; the purport is, that the General having arrived within a few miles of Fort du Quesne, (I hope you are perfect in your American geography?) sent an advanced party, under Lord Gage's brother: they were fired upon, invisibly, as they entered a wood; Braddock heard guns, and sent another party to support the former; but the first fell back in confusion on the second, and the second on the main body. The whole was in disorder, and it is said, the General himself, though exceedingly brave, did not retain all the sang froid that was necessary. The common soldiers in general fled; the officers stood heroically and were massacred: our Indians were not surprised, and behaved gallantly. The General had five horses shot under him, no bad symptoms of his spirit, and at last was brought off by two Americans, no English daring, though Captain Orme, his aid-de-camp, who is wounded too, and has made some noise here by an affair of gallantry, offered sixty guineas to have him conveyed away. We have lost twenty-six officers, besides many wounded, and ten pieces of artillery. Braddock lived four days, in great torment. What makes the rout more shameful is, that instead of a great pursuit, and a barbarous massacre by the Indians, which is always to be feared in these rencontres, not a black or white soul followed our troops, but we had leisure two days afterwards to fetch off our dead. In short, our American laurels are strangely blighted! We intended to be in great alarms for Carolina and Virginia, but the small number of our enemies had reduced this affair to a panic. We pretend to be comforted on the French deserting Fort St. John, and on the hopes we have from two other expeditions which are on foot in that part of the world-but it is a great drawback on English heroism! I pity you who represent the very flower of British courage ingrafted on a Brunswick stock! I have already given you some account of Braddock; I may complete the poor man's history in a few more words: he once had a duel with Colonel Gumley, Lady Bath's brother, who had been his great friend: as they were going to engage, Gumley, who had good He married the sister of George Lord Townshend, without the consent of her family. b Walpole, in his Memoires, says, that "he dictated an encomium on his officers, and expired."-D. Elizabeth Gumley, wife of William Pulteny, Earl of Bath. |