Lord Lincoln, the Duke of Marlborough, Duke of Leeds, and the Duke of Rutland, are talked of for Master of the Horse. The first is likeliest to succeed; the Pelhams wish most to have the last; you know he is Lady Catherine's brother, and at present attached to the Prince. His son Lord Granby's match, which is at last to be finished to-morrow, has been a mighty topic of conversation lately. The bride is one of the great heiresses of old proud Somerset. Lord Winchilsea, who is her uncle, and who has married the other sister very loosely to his own relation, Lord Guernsey, has tied up Lord Granby so rigorously, that the Duke of Rutland has endeavoured to break the match. She has four thousand pounds a-year he is said to have the same in present, but not to touch her's. He is in debt ten thousand pounds. She was to give him ten, which now Lord Winchilsea refuses. Upon the strength of her fortune, Lord Granby proposed to treat her with presents of twelve thousand pounds; but desired her to buy them. She, who never saw nor knew the value of ten shillings, while her father lived, and has had no time to learn it, bespoke away so roundly, that for one article of the plate she ordered ten sauceboats; besides this, she and her sister have squandered seven thousand pounds a-piece in all kind of baubles and frippery; so her four thousand pounds a-year is to be set apart for two years to pay her debts. Don't you like this English management? two of the greatest fortunes meeting and setting out with poverty and want! Sir Thomas Bootle, the Prince's Chancellor, who is one of the guardians, wanted to have her tradesmen's bills taxed; but in the mean time he has wanted to marry her Duchess-mother : his love-letter has been copied and dispersed everywhere. To give you a sufficient instance of his absurdity, the first time he went with the Prince of Wales to Cliefden, he made a night-gown, cap, and slippers of gold brocade, in which he came down to breakfast the next morning.

My friend M'Lean is still the fashion: have not I reason to call him my friend? He says, if the pistol had shot me, he had another for himself. Can I do less than say I will be hanged if he is? They have made a print, a very dull one,

of what I think I said to Lady Caroline Petersham about him,

"Thus I stand like the Turk with his doxies around!"

You have seen in the papers a Hanoverian duel, but may be you don't know that it was an affair of jealousy. Swiegel, the slain, was here two years ago, and paid his court so assiduously to the Countess,* that it was intimated to him to return and the summer we went thither afterwards, he was advised to stay at his villa. Since that, he has grown more discreet, and a favourite. Freychappel came hither lately, was proclaimed a beauty by the monarch, and to return the compliment, made a tender of all his charms where Swiegel had. The latter recollected his own passion, jostled Freychappel, fought, and was killed. I am glad he never heard what poor Gibberne was intended for.

They have put in the papers a good story made on White's: a man dropped down dead at the door, was carried in; the club immediately made bets whether he was dead or not, and when they were going to bleed him, the wagerers for his death interposed, and said it would affect the fairness of the bet.

Mr. Whithed has been so unlucky to have a large part of his seat, which he had just repaired, burnt down; it is a great disappointment to me too, who was going thither gothicizing. I want an act of Parliament to make master-builders liable to pay for any damage occasioned by fire before their workmen have quitted it. Adieu ! This I call a very

gossiping letter; I wish you don't call it worse.

LETTER CCXVIII.

Arlington-Street, Sept. 20, 1750.

I ONLY write you a line or two to answer some of your questions, and to tell you that I can't answer others. I have inquired much about Dr, Meade, but can't tell you any thing determinately: his family positively deny the foundation of the

*Lady Yarmouth.

Southwick, in Hampshire.

reports, but everybody does not believe their evidence. Your brother is positive that there is much of truth in his being undone, and even that there will be a sale of his collection* when the town comes to town. I wish for Dr. Cocchi's sake it may be false. I have given your brother Middleton's last piece to send you. Another fellow of Eton† has popped out a sermon against the Doctor since his death, with a note to one of the pages, that is the true sublime of ecclesiastic absurdity. He is speaking against the custom of dividing the Bible into chapters and verses, and says it often encumbers the sense. This note, though long, I must transcribe, for it would wrong the author to paraphrase his nonsense. "It is to be wished, therefore, I think, that a fair edition were set forth of the original scriptures, for the use of learned men in their closets, in which there should be no notice, either in the text or margin, of chapter, or verse, or paragraph, or any such arbitrary distinctions, (now mind,) and I might go so far as to say even any pointings or stops. It could not but be matter of much satisfaction, and much use to have it in our power to recur occasionally to such an edition, where the understanding might have full range, free from any external influence from the eye, and the continual danger of being either confined or misguided by it." Well, Dr. Cocchi, do English divines yield to the Romish for refinements in absurdity! did one ever hear of a better way of making sense of any writing than by reading it without stops! Most of the parsons that read the first and second lessons, practise Mr. Cooke's method of making them intelligible, for they seldom observe any stops. George Selwyn proposes to send the man his own sermon, and desire him to scratch out the stops, in order to help it to some sense.

For the questions in Florentine politics, and who are to be your governors, I am totally ignorant: you must ask Sir Charles Williams; he is the present ruling star of our negociations. His letters are as much admired as ever his verses were. He has met the ministers of the two angry Em

* His collection was not sold till after his death in the years 1754 and 1755. † William Cooke.

presses, and pacified Russian savageness and Austrian haughtiness. He is to teach the Monarch of Prussia to fetch and carry, unless they happen to treat in iambics, or begin to settle the limits of Parnassus instead of those of Silesia. As he is so good a pacificator, I don't know but we may want his assistance at home before the end of the winter:

With secretaries, secretaries jar,

And rival bureaus threat approaching war.

Those that deal in elections, look still higher, and snuff a new Parliament, but I don't believe the King ill, for the Prince is building baby-houses at Kew; and the Bishop of Oxford* has laid aside his post-obit views on Canterbury, and is come roundly back to St. James's for the Deanery of St. Paul's. I could not help being diverted the other day with the life of another Bishop of Oxford, one Parker, who, like Secker, set out a Presbyterian, and died King James the Second's arbitrary master of Maudlin College.

M'Lean is condemned, and will hang; I am honourably mentioned in a grub-street ballad, for not having contributed to his sentence. There are as many prints and pamphlets about him as about the earthquake. His profession grows no joke: I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday night, the clock had not struck eleven, when I heard a loud cry of "Stop thief!" a highwayman had attacked a postchaise in Piccadily, within fifty yards of this house: the fellow was pursued, rode over the watchman, almost killed him, and escaped. I expect to be robbed some night in my own garden at Strawberry; I have a pond of gold fish, that to be sure they will steal to burn like old lace, and they may very easily, for the springs are so much sunk with this hot summer, that I am forced to water my pond once a-week! season is still so fine, that I yesterday in Kensington town saw a horse-chestnut tree in second bloom.

I

The

As I am in town, and not within the circle of Pope's walks, may tell you a story without fearing he should haunt me

* Dr. Secker.

with the ghost of a satire. I went the other day to see little Spence, who fondles an old mother in imitation of Pope. The good old woman was mighty civil to me, and among other chat, said, she supposed I had a good neighbour in Mr. Pope. "Lord! Madam, he has been dead these seven years !”—“ Alas! ay, Sir, I had forgot." When the poor old soul dies, how Pope will set his mother's spectre upon her, for daring to be ignorant "if Dennis be alive or dead!" Adieu !

66

LETTER CCXIX.

Arlington-Street, Oct. 18, 1750.

I HAD determined so seriously to write Dr. Cocchi a letter myself to thank him for his baths of Pisa, that it was impossible not to break my resolution. It was to be in Italian, because I thought their superlative issimos would most easily express how much I like it, and I had already gathered a tolerable quantity together, of entertaining, charming, useful, agreeable, and had cut and turned them into the best sounding Tuscan adjectives I could find in my memory or my Crusca: but, alack! when I came to range them, they did not fadge at all; they neither expressed what I would say, nor half what I would say, and so I gave it all up, and am reduced to beg you would say it all for me; and make as many excuses and as many thanks for me as you can, between your receiving this, and your next going to bully Richcourt, or whisper Count Lorenzi. I laughed vastly at your idea of the latter's hopping into matrimony; and I like as much Stainville's jumping into Richcourt's place. If your pedigree, which is on its journey, arrives before his fall, he will not dare to exclude you from the libro d'oro-why, child, you will find yourself as sumptuously descended as

All the blood of all the Howards,

or as the best-bred Arabian mare that ever neighed beneath Abou-âl-eb-saba-bedin-lolo-ab-alnin! But pray now, how

* Joseph Spence, author of an Essay on Pope's Odyssey, Polymetis, &c.