another attack like the last Rebellion should be made on the Royal Family, they would all stand by them. No reply was made to this. Then Sir Watkyn Williams spoke, Sir Francis Dashwood, and Tom Pitt, and the meeting broke up. I don't know what this coalition may produce it will require time with no better heads than compose it at present, though the great Mr. Dodington had carried to the conference the assistance of his. In France a very favourable event has happened for us, the disgrace of Maurepas,' one of our bitterest enemies, and the greatest promoter of their marine. Just at the beginning of the war, in a very critical period, he had obtained a very large sum for that service, but which one of the other factions, lest he should gain glory and credit by it, got to be suddenly given away to the King of Prussia.

Sir Charles Williams is appointed envoy to this last King: here is an epigram which he has just sent over on Lord Egmont's opposition to the Mutiny-bill:

66 Why has Lord Egmont 'gainst this bill

So much declamatory skill

So tediously exerted?

The reason's plain: but t'other day
He mutinied himself for pay,

And he has twice deserted."

I must tell you a bon-mot that was made the other night at the serenata of "Peace in Europe" by Wall,' who is much in fashion, and a kind of Gondomar. Grossatesta, the Modenese minister, a very low fellow, with all the jackpuddinghood of an Italian, asked, Mais qui est ce qui représente mon maître ?" Wall replied, Mais, mon Dieu! L'abbé, ne sçavez vous pas que ce n'est opéra boufon?" and here is another bon-mot of my Lady Townshend we were talking of the Methodists; somebody said, "Pray, Madam, is it true that Whitfield has recanted?" "No, Sir, he has only canted."

pas un

If you ever think of returning to England, as I hope it will be long first, you must prepare yourself with Methodism. I really believe that by that time it will be necessary: this sect increases as fast as almost ever any religious nonsense did. Lady Fanny Shirley has

3

1 Phelypeaux, Count de Maurepas, son of the Chancellor de Pontchartrain. He was disgraced in consequence of some quarrel with the King's mistress. He returned to office, unhappily for France, in the commencement of the reign of Louis the Sixteenth.-DOVER.

2 General Wall, the Spanish ambassador. Gondomar was the able Spanish ambassador in England in the reign of James the First.--DOVER.

3 Lady Frances Shirley, "the Fanny, blooming fair," of Chesterfield and Sir Charles

chosen this way of bestowing the dregs of her beauty; and Mr. Lyttelton is very near making the same sacrifice of the dregs of all those various characters that he has worn. The Methodists love your big sinners, as proper subjects to work upon-and indeed they have a plentiful harvest-I think what you call flagrancy was never more in fashion. Drinking is at the highest wine-mark; and gaming joined with it so violent, that at the last Newmarket meeting, in the rapidity of both, a bank-bill was thrown down, and nobody immediately claiming it, they agreed to give it to a man that was standing by.

I must tell you of Stosch's letter, which he had the impertinence to give you without telling the contents. It was to solicit the arrears of his pension, which I beg you will tell him I have no manner of interest to procure: and to tell me of a Galla Placidia, a gold medal lately found. It is not for myself, but I wish you would ask him the price for a friend of mine who would like to buy it.

Adieu! my dear child; I have been long in arrears to you, but I trust you will take this huge letter as an acquittal. You see my villa makes me a good correspondent; how happy I should be to show it you, if I could, with no mixture of disagreeable circumstances to you. I have made a vast plantation! Lord Leicester told me the other day that he heard I would not buy some old china, because I was laying out all my money in trees: "Yes," said I, "my lord, I used to love blue trees, but now I like green ones."

287. TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Arlington Street, May 17, 1749.

We have not yet done diverting ourselves: the night before last the Duke of Richmond gave a firework; a codicil to the Peace. He bought the rockets and wheels that remained in the pavilion which miscarried, and took the pretence of the Duke of Modena being here to give a charming entertainment. The garden' lies with a slope down to the Thames, on which were lighters, from whence were

Williams, and the Lady Frances Shirley, to whom Pope addressed a copy of verses on receiving from her a standish and two pens. She died unmarried on the 15th July, 1778, aged seventy-two, and was buried in Lady Huntingdon's chapel at Bath. See Walpole's account of her death, in a letter to Mason of July 16, 1778.— CUNNINGHAM.

1 At Whitehall.-WALPOLE. On the site of what is now (1857) Richmond Terrace. -CUNNINGHAM,

thrown up, after a concert of water-music, a great number of rockets. Then from boats on every side were discharged water-rockets and fires of that kind; and then the wheels which were ranged along the rails of the terrace were played off; and the whole concluded with the illumination of a pavilion on the top of the slope, of two pyramids on each side, and of the whole length of the balustrade to the water. You can't conceive a prettier sight; the garden filled with everybody of fashion, the Duke, the Duke of Modena, and the two black Princes. The King and Princess Emily were in their barge under the terrace; the river was covered with boats, and the shores and adjacent houses with crowds. The Duke of Modena played afterwards at brag, and there was a fine supper for him and the foreigners, of whom there are numbers here; it is grown as much the fashion to travel hither as to France or Italy. Last week there was a vast assembly and music at Bedford House' for this Modenese; and to-day he is set out to receive his doctor's degree at the two Universities. His appearance is rather better than it used to be, for, instead of wearing his wig down to his nose to hide the humour in his face, he has taken to paint his forehead white, which, however, with the large quantity of red that he always wears on the rest of his face, makes him ridiculous enough. I cannot say his manner is more polished : Princess Emily asked him if he did not find the Duke much fatter than when he was here before? He replied “En vérité il n'est pas si effroiable qu'on m'avoit dit." She commended his diamonds; he said, "Les vôtres sont bien petits." As I had been so graciously received at his court, I went into his box the first night at the Opera: the first thing he did was to fall asleep; but as I did not choose to sit waiting his reveil in the face of the whole theatre, I waked him, and would discourse him: but here I was very unlucky, for of the only two persons I could recollect at his court to inquire after, one has been dead these four years, and the other, he could not remember any such man. However, Sabbatini, his secretary of state, flattered me extremely; told me he found me beaucoup mieux, and that I was grown very fat—I fear, I fear it was flattery! Eight years don't improve one, and for my corpulence, if I am grown fat, what must I have been in my Modenese days!

I told you we were to have another jubilee masquerade: there was one by the King's command for Miss Chudleigh, the maid of

On the north side of Bloomsbury Square, pulled down in 1800.-CUNNINGHAM.

honour, with whom our gracious monarch has a mind to believe himself in love,-so much in love, that at one of the booths he gave her a fairing for her watch, which cost him five-and-thirty guineas, -actually disbursed out of his privy purse, and not charged on the civil list. Whatever you may think of it, this is a more magnificent present than the cabinet which the late King of Poland sent to the fair Countess Konigsmark, replete with an kinds of baubles and ornaments, and ten thousand ducats in one of the drawers. I hope some future Holinshed or Stow will acquaint posterity "that five-andthirty guineas were an immense sum in those days!"

You are going to see one of our court-beauties in Italy, my Lady Rochford: they are setting out on their embassy to Turin. She is large, but very handsome, with great delicacy and address. All the Royals have been in love with her; but the Duke [of Cumberland] was so in all the forms, till she was a little too much pleased with her conquest of his brother-in-law the Prince of Hesse. You will not find much in the correspondence of her husband: his person is good, and he will figure well enough as an ambassador; better as a husband where cicisbés don't expect to be molested. The Duke is not likely to be so happy with his new passion, Mrs. Pitt, who, besides being in love with her husband, whom you remember (Lady Mary Wortley's George Pitt), is going to Italy with him. I think you will find her one of the most glorious beauties you ever saw. You are to have another pair of our beauties, the Princess Borghese's Mr. Greville and his wife, who was the pretty Fanny M'Cartney.

2

Now I am talking scandal to you, and court-scandal, I must tell you that Lord Conway's sister, Miss Jenny, is dead suddenly with eating lemonade at the last subscription masquerade. It is not quite unlucky for her: she had outlived the Prince's love and her

1 Daughter of Edward Young, Esq. [of Dunford, in Wilts], and wife [1740] of William, Earl of Rochford. She had been maid of honour to the Princess of Wales. -WALPOLE. She died January 9, 1773, in the fiftieth year of her age, and was buried at St. Osyth's in Essex.-CUNNINGHAM,

2 Penelope, sister of Sir Richard Atkins.--WALPOLE. See note, p. 153.—CUN

NINGHAM.

3 See vol. i., p. 179.-CUNNINGHAM.

4 Fulke Greville, Esq., son of the Hon. Algernon Greville, second son of Fulke, fifth Lord Brooke. His wife [Frances, daughter of James Macartney, Esq., see vol. ii. p. 36.] was the authoress of the pretty poem, entitled a Prayer for Indifference.'-DOVER. 5 This event was commemorated in the following doggrel lines :

"Poor Jenny Conway,

She drank lemonade

At a masquerade;

So now she's dead and gone away."-DOVER.

See vol. i., p. 53.-CUNNINGHAM.

own face, and nothing remained but her love and her person, which was exceedingly bad.

The graver part of the world, who have not been quite so much given up to rockets and masquing, are amused with a book of Lord Bolingbroke's, just published, but written long ago. It is composed of three letters, the first to Lord Cornbury on the Spirit of Patriotism; and two others to Mr. Lyttelton, (but with neither of their names,) on the Idea of a patriot King, and the State of Parties on the late King's accession. Mr. Lyttelton had sent him word that he begged nothing might be inscribed to him that was to reflect on Lord Orford, for that he was now leagued with all Lord Orford's friends: a message as abandoned as the book itself: but indeed there is no describing the impudence with which that set of people unsay what they have been saying all their lives,-I beg their pardons, I mean the honesty with which they recant! Pitt told me coolly, that he had read this book formerly, when he admired Lord Bolingbroke more than he does now. The book by no means answered my expectation : the style, which is his forte, is very fine: the deduction and impossibility of drawing a consequence from what he is saying, as bad and obscure as in his famous Dissertation on Parties: you must know the man, to guess his meaning. Not to mention the absurdity and impracticability of this kind of system, there is a long speculative dissertation on the origin of government, and even that greatly stolen from other writers, and that all on a sudden dropped, while he hurries into his own times, and then preaches (he, of all men!) on the duty of preserving decency! The last treatise would not impose upon an historian of five years old: he tells Mr. Lyttelton, that he may take it from him, that there was no settled scheme at the end of the Queen's reign to introduce the Pretender; and he gives this excellent reason; because, if there had been, he must have known it; and another reason as ridiculous, that no traces of such a scheme have since come to light. What, no traces in all the cases of himself, Atterbury, the Duke of Ormond, Sir William Windham, and others! and is it not known that the moment the Queen was expired, Atterbury proposed to go in his lawn sleeves and proclaim the Pretender at Charing-cross, but Bolingbroke's heart failing him, Atterbury swore, "There was the best cause in Europe lost for want of spirit!" He imputes Jacobitism singly to Lord Oxford, whom he exceedingly abuses; and who, so far from being suspected, was thought to have fallen into disgrace with that faction for refusing to concur with them. On my father he is much less severe than I