TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Arlington Street, May 19, 1750.

I DID not doubt but you would be diverted with the detail of absurdities that were committed after the earthquake: I could have filled more paper with such relations, If I had not feared tiring you. We have swarmed with sermons, essays, relations, poems, and exhortations on that subject. One Stukely, a parson, has accounted for it, and I think prettily, by electricity-but that is the fashionable cause, and every thing is resolved into electrical appearances, as formerly every thing was accounted for by Descartes's vortices, and Sir Isaac's gravitation. But they all take care, after accounting for the earthquake systematically, to assure you that still it was nothing less than a judgment. Dr. Barton, the rector of St. Andrews, was the only sensible, or at least honest divine, upon the occasion. When some women would have had him to pray to them in his parish church against the intended shock, he excused himself on having a great cold. "And besides," said he, "you may go to St. James's church; the Bishop of Oxford is to preach there all night about earthquakes." Turner, a great china-man, at the corner of next street, had a jar cracked by the shock: he originally asked ten guineas for the pair; he now asks twenty, "because it is the only jar in Europe that has been cracked by an earthquake." But I have quite done with this topic. The Princess of Wales is lowering the price of princes, as the earthquake has raised old china; she has produced a fifth boy. In a few years we shall have Dukes of York and Lancaster popping out of bagnios and taverns as frequently as Duke Hamilton. George Selwyn said a good thing the other day on another cheap dignity: he was asked who was playing at tennis? He replied, "Nobody but three markers and a Regent," your friend Lord Sandwich. While we are undervaluing all principalities and powers, you are making a rout with them, for which I shall scold you. We had been diverted with the pompous accounts of the reception of the Margrave of Baden Dourlach at Rome; and now you tell me he has been put upon the same foot at Florence! I never heard his name when he was here, but on his being mob'd as he was going to Wanstead, and the people's calling him the Prince of Bad-door-lock. He was still less noticed than he of Modena.

Lord Bath is as well received at Paris as a German Margrave in Italy. Every body goes to Paris: Lord Mountford was introduced to the King, who only said brutally enough, "Ma foi! il est bien nourri!" Lord Albemarle keeps an immense table there, with sixteen people in his kitchen; his aide-de-camps invite every body, but he seldom graces the banquet himself, living retired out of the town with his old Columbine. What an extraordinary man! with no fortune

a Jones, sixth Duke of Hamilton, the husband of the beautiful Miss Gunning. He died in 1758.-D.

b Mademoiselle Gauchet.

at all, and with slight parts, he has seventeen thousand a year from the government, which he squanders away, though he has great debts, and four or five numerous broods of children of one sort or other!

The famous Westminster election is at last determined, and Lord Trentham returned: the mob were outrageous, and pelted Colonel Waldegrave, whom they took for Mr. Leveson, from Covent-garden to the Park, and knocked down Mr. Offley, who was with him. Lord Harrington was scarce better treated when he went on board a ship from Dublin. There are great commotions there about one Lucas, an apothecary, and favourite of the mob. The Lord Lieutenant bought off a Sir Richard Cox, a patriot, by a place in the revenue, though with great opposition from that silly mock-virtuoso, Billy Bristow, and that sillier Frederick Frankland, two oafs, whom you have seen in Italy, and who are commissioners there. Here are great disputes in the Regency, where Lord Harrington finds there is not spirit enough to discard these puppet-show heroes!

We have got a second volume of Bower's History of the Popes, but it is tiresome and pert, and running into a warmth and partiality that he had much avoided in his first volume. He has taken such pains to disprove the Pope's supremacy being acknowledged pretty early, that he has convinced me it was acknowledged. Not that you and I care whether it were or not. He is much admired here; but I am not good Christian enough to rejoice over him, because turned Protestant; nor honour his confessorship, when he ran away with the materials that were trusted to him to write for the papacy, and makes use of them to write against it. You know how impartial I am; I can love him for being shocked at a system of cruelty supporting nonsense; I can be pleased with the truths he tells; I can and do admire his style, and his genius in recovering a language that he forgot by six years old, so well as to excel in writing it, and yet I wish that all this had happened without any breach of trust!

Stosch has grievously offended me; but that he will little regard, as I can be of no use to him: he has sold or given his charming intaglio of the Gladiator to Lord Duncannon. I must reprove you a little who sent it; you know how much I pressed you to buy it for me, and how

a William Stanhope, Earl of Harrington, Lord Lieutenant.

b Archibald Bower, a man of disreputable character, who was born in Scotland, of a Roman Catholic family, was educated at Douay and Rome, and became a Jesuit. Having been detected, as it is said, in an intrigue with a nun, he was forced to fly from Perugia, where he resided: and after a series of strange and not very creditable adventures, he arrived in England. Here he declared himself a Protestant; but, after some years, wishing to swindle the English Jesuits out of an annuity, he again returned to their order. Having got all he could from them, he again returned to Protestantism, and wrote his "History of the Popes," which was his principal literary work.-D. [Gibbon, speaking of Bower, in his Extraits de mon Journal for 1764, says, "He is a rogue unmasked, who enjoyed, for twenty years, the favour of the public, because he had quitted a sect to which he still secretly adhered; and because he had been a counsellor of the inquisition in the town of Macerata, where an inquisition never existed." Bower died in Bond Street, in September, 1766, in his eighty-first year, and was buried in Mary-le-bone churchyard, where there is a monument to his memory.]

much I offered. I still think it one of the finest rings* I ever saw, and am mortified at not having it.

Apropos to Bower; Miss Pelham had heard that he had foretold the return of the earthquake-fit: her father sent for him, to convince her that Bower was too sensible; but had the precaution to talk to him first: he replied gravely, that a fire was kindled under the earth, and he could not tell when it would blaze out. You may be sure he was not carried to the girl! Adieu !.

TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

Arlington Street, June 23, 1750.

DEAR GEORGE,

As I am not Vanneck'd, I have been in no hurry to thank you for your congratulation, and to assure you that I never knew what solid happiness was till I was married. Your Trevors and Rices dined with me last week at Strawberry Hill, and would have had me answer you upon the matrimonial tone, but I thought I should imitate cheerfulness in that style as ill as if I were really married. I have had another of your friends with me here some time, whom I adore, Mr. Bentley; he has more sense, judgment, and wit, more taste, and more misfortunes, than sure ever met in any man. I have heard that Dr. Bentley, regretting his want of taste for all such learning as his, which is the very want of taste, used to sigh and say, "Tully had his Marcus." If the sons resembled as much as the fathers did, at least in vanity, I would be the modest agreeable Marquis. Mr. Bentley tells me that you press him much to visit you at Hawkhurst. I advise him, and assure him he will make his fortune under you there; that you are an agent from the board of trade to the smugglers, and wallow in contraband wine, tea, and silk handkerchiefs. I found an old newspaper t'other day, with a list of outlawed smugglers; there were John Price, alias Miss Marjoram, Bob Plunder, Bricklayer Tom, and Robin Cursemother, all of Hawkhurst, in Kent. When Miss Harriet is thoroughly hardened at Buxton, as I hear she is by lying in a public room with the whole Wells, from drinking waters, I conclude she will come to sip nothing but new brandy.

As jolly and as abominable a life as she may have been leading, I defy all her enormities to equal a party of pleasure that I had t'other night. I shall relate it to you to show you the manners of the age, which are always as entertaining to a person fifty miles off, as to one born an hundred and fifty years after the time. I had a card from Lady Caroline Petersham to go with her to Vauxhall. I went

a It is engraved in Stosch's book: it is a Gladiator standing, with a vase by him on a table, on anexceedingly fine garnet.

b Alluding to the projected marriages, which soon after took place, between two of the sons of his uncle, Lord Walpole: who each of them married a daughter of Sir Joshua Vanneck.-E.

d

c

accordingly to her house, and found her and the little Ashe, or the Pollard Ashe, as they call her; they had just finished their last layer of red, and looked as handsome as crimson could make them. On the cabinet-door stood a pair of Dresden candlesticks, a present from the virgin hands of Sir John Bland: the branches of each formed a little bower over a cock and hen ***. We issued into the mall to assemble our company, which was all the town, if we could get it; for just so many had been summoned, except Harry Vane, whom we met by chance. We mustered the Duke of Kingston, whom Lady Caroline says she has been trying for these seven years; but alas! his beauty is at the fall of the leaf; Lord March, Mr. Whitehead, a pretty Miss Beauclerc, and a very foolish Miss Sparre. These two damsels were trusted by their mothers for the first time of their lives to the matronly care of Lady Caroline. As we sailed up the mall with all our colours flying, Lord Petersham, with his hose and legs twisted to every point of crossness, strode by us on the outside, and repassed again on the return. At the end of the mall she called to him; he would not answer: she gave a familiar spring, and, between laugh and confusion, ran up to him, "My lord! my lord! why, you don't see us!" We advanced at a little distance, not a little awkward in expectation how all this would end, for my lord never stirred his hat, or took the least notice of any body; she said, "Do you go with us, or are you going any where else?"-"I don't go with you, I am going somewhere else;" and away he stalked, as sulky as a ghost that nobody will speak to first. We got into the best order we could, and marched to our barge, with a boat of French horns attending, and little Ashe singing. We paraded some time up the river, and at last debarked at Vauxhall: there, if we had so pleased, we might have had the vivacity of our party increased by a quarrel; for a Mrs. Loyd, who is supposed to be married to Lord Haddington, seeing the two girls following Lady Petersham and Miss Ashe, said aloud, "Poor girls, I am sorry to see them in such bad company!" Miss Sparre, who desired nothing so much as the fun of seeing a duel,-a thing which, though she is fifteen, she has never been so lucky to see, took due pains to make Lord March resent this; but he, who is very lively and agreeable, laughed her out of this charming frolic with a great deal of humour. Here we picked up Lord Granby, arrived very drunk from Jenny's Whim; where, instead of going to old Strafford's catacombs to make honourable love, he had dined

* Miss Ashe was said to have been of very high parentage. She married Mr. Falconer, an officer in the navy.-E.

b Eldest son of Lord Barnard, created Earl of Darlington in 1754.-E.

< Upon the death of Charles, Duke of Queensbury and Dover, he succeeded, in 1778, to the title of Queensbury, and died unmarried in 1810.-E.

d Afterwards Earl of Harrington. His gait was so singular, that he was generally known by the nickname of Peter Shamble.-E.

She was afterwards married to Lord Haddington.-E.

f A tavern at the end of the wooden bridge at Chelsea, at that period much frequented by his lordship and other men of rank.-E.

Anne, daughter and heiress of Sir Henry Johnson, widow of Thomas Lord Raby, created Earl of Strafford in 1711.

with Lady Fanny, and left her and eight other women and four other men playing at brag. He would fain have made over his honourable love upon any terms to poor Miss Beauclerc, who is very modest, and did not know at all what to do with his whispers or his hands. He then addressed himself to the Sparre, who was very well disposed to receive both; but the tide of champagne turned, he hiccupped at the reflection of his marriage (of which he is wondrous sick), and only proposed to the girl to shut themselves up and rail at the world for three weeks. If all the adventures don't conclude as you expect in the beginning of a paragraph, you must not wonder, for I am not making a history, but relating one strictly as it happened, and I think with full entertainment enough to content you. At last, we assembled in our booth, Lady Caroline in the front, with the vizor of her hat erect, and looking gloriously jolly and handsome. She had fetched my brother Orford from the next box, where he was enjoying himself with his petite partie, to help us to mince chickens. We minced seven chickens into a china dish, which Lady Caroline stewed over a lamp with three pats of butter and a flagon of water, stirring and rattling, and laughing, and we every minute expecting to have the dish fly about our ears. She had brought Betty, the fruit-girl, with hampers of strawberries and cherries from Rogers's, and made her wait upon us, and then made her sup by us at a little table. The conversation was no less lively than the whole transaction. There was a Mr. O'Brien arrived from Ireland, who would get the Duchess of Manchester from Mr. Hussey, if she were still at liberty. I took up the biggest hautboy in the dish, and said to Lady Caroline, "Madam, Miss Ashe desires you would eat this O'Brien strawberry" she replied immediately, "I won't, you hussey." You may imagine the laugh this reply occasioned. After the tempest was a little calmed, the Pollard said, "Now, how any body would spoil this story that was to repeat it, and say, I won't, you jade!" In short, the whole air of our party was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to take up the whole attention of the garden; so much so, that from eleven o'clock till half an hour after one we had the whole concourse round our booth: at last, they came into the little gardens of each booth on the sides of ours, till Harry Vane took up a bumper, and drank their healths, and was proceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. It was three o'clock before we got home. I think I have told you the chief passages. Lord Granby's temper had been a little ruffled the night before; the Prince had invited him and Dick Lyttelton to Kew, where he won eleven hundred pounds of the latter, and eight of the former, then cut and told them he would play with them no longer, for he saw they played so idly, that they were capable of "losing more than they would like."

a

Adieu! I expect in return for this long tale that you will tell me

Lady Frances Seymour, eldest daughter of Charles, Duke of Somerset (known by the name of the Proud Duke), by his second Duchess, Lady Charlotte Finch. She was married in the following September to the Marquis of Granby.-E.