please, without being responsible to any one; no, not even to a friend.

We have so many enemies, and subdue them so rapidly, that I did not think it was worth while to notify to your Ladyship the new war with Holland. Lord Cornwallis, I suppose, will step over and despatch it in a parenthesis of six weeks, and still be as likely as ever to conquer America. Who is to burn Amsterdam I have not yet heard.

Lord Warwick has already sent me John Thorpe's book, Madam, and a most obliging letter. The Ampthill is not Houghton-Ampthill, but the individual palace that stood in your paddock where the Cross is, and in which Queen Catherine lay, as royal folk did then, though now they and everybody else only sleep; and a spacious and goodly mansion it was. There is not the elevation, nor of Kirby Hatton, built by the dancing Chancellor in 1570; but there is the ground-plan. I remember wanting to make the last Chancellor, Bathurst, dance at one of Mons. de Guines' balls. He came thither very drunk, and, as somebody wished to see the Scotch reel, I proposed that my Lord Chancellor should dance it.

Coxe' is destined

I am uncommonly glad, Madam, that Mr. for Mentor to your Telemachus. His 'Travels' are by far the most sensible of all those late publications, and his principles of the old rock.

Your heroine at Bath, Madam, is from the same quarry in another light, and the counterpart to Cato himself, who accommodated a friend with his own wife, for the sake of virtue, and took her again. with as much decorum as possible. Pray read the description in Lucan, or, if you affect not understanding Latin, in Rowe; you will see with what staid gravity those matters were transacted, when good patriots desponded about the Commonwealth. I have not a Lucan in town, or would refer you to the spot.

My nieces are indubitably not going abroad, nor do the Duke and Duchess think of it. They will be in town at the end of next month.

Lord Macartney, I hear, is to sail before that time; Lady Macartney does not go with him. I remember what a quarto my last letter was, and restrain this within bounds.

P.S. I shall not attempt to see Vestris till the weather is milder, though it is the universal voice that he is the only perfect being

1 Afterwards Archdeacon Coxe, whose historical labours are of so much importance in illustration of the reigns of George the First and his successor.-CUNNINGHAM.

that has dropped from the clouds within the memory of man or woman; but then, indeed, nobody allows memory much retrospect, lest they should seem old themselves. When the Parliament meets, he is to be thanked by the Speaker.

1988. TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Berkeley Square, Dec. 31, 1780

I HAVE received, and thank you much for the curious history' of the Count and Countess of Albany; what a wretched conclusion of a wretched family! Surely no royal race was ever so drawn to the dregs! The other Countess [Orford] you mention seems to approach still nearer to dissolution. Her death a year or two ago might have prevented the sale of the pictures,-not that I know it would. Who can say what madness in the hands of villany would or would not have done? Now, I think, her dying would only put more into the reach of rascals. But I am indifferent what they do; nor, but thus occasionally, shall I throw away a thought on that chapter.

All chance of accommodation with Holland is vanished. Count Welderen and his wife departed this morning. All they who are to gain by privateers and captures are delighted with a new field of plunder. Piracy is more practicable than victory. Not being an admirer of wars, I shall reserve my feux de joie for peace.

My letters, I think, are rather eras than journals. Three days ago commenced another date-the establishment of a family for the Prince of Wales. I do not know all the names, and fewer of the faces that compose it; nor intend. I, who kissed the hand of George I., have no colt's tooth for the Court of George IV. Nothing is so ridiculous as an antique face in a juvenile drawing-room. I believe that they who have spirits enough to be absurd in their decrepitude, are happy, for they certainly are not sensible of their folly; but I, who have never forgotten what I thought in my youth of such superannuated idiots, dread nothing more than misplacing myself in my old age. In truth, I feel no such appetite; and, excepting the young of my own family, about whom I am interested,

The Pretender's wife complaining to the Great Duke of her husband's beastly behaviour to her, that prince contrived her escape into a convent, and thence sent her to Rome, where she was protected by the Cardinal of York, her husband's brother.-WALPOLE,

VOL. VII.

I I

I have mighty small satisfaction in the company of posterity; for so the present generation seem to me. I would contribute anything to their pleasure, but what cannot contribute to it-my own presence. Alas! how many of this age are swept away before me: six thousand have been mowed down at once by the late hurricane at Barbadoes alone! How Europe is paying the debts it owes to America! Were I a poct, I would paint hosts of Mexicans and Peruvians crowding the shores of Styx, and insulting the multitudes of the usurpers of their continent that have been sending themselves thither for these five or six years. The poor Africans, too, have no call to be merciful to European ghosts. Those miserable slaves have just now seen whole crews of men-of-war swallowed by the late hurricane.

We do not yet know the extent of our loss. You would think it very slight, if you saw how little impression it makes on a luxurious capital. An overgrown metropolis has less sensibility than marble; nor can it be conceived by those not conversant in one. I remember hearing what diverted me then; a young gentlewoman, a native of our rock, St. Helena, and who had never stirred beyond it, being struck with the emotion occasioned there by the arrival of one or two of our China ships, said to the captain, "There must be a great solitude in London as often as the China ships come away!" Her imagination could not have compassed the idea, if she had been told that six years of war, the absence of an army of fifty or sixty thousand men and of all our squadrons, and a new debt of many, many millions, would not make an alteration in the receipts at the door of a single theatre in London. I do not boast of, or applaud, this profligate apathy. When pleasure is our business, our business is never our pleasure; and, if four wars cannot awaken us, we shall die in a dream!

1989. TO SIR DAVID DALRYMPLE.

Berkeley Square, Jan. 1, 1781. YOUR favourable opinion of my father, Sir, is too flattering to me not to thank you for the satisfaction it gave me. Wit, I think, he had not naturally, though I am sure he had none from affectation, as simplicity was a predominant feature in his amiable composition; but he possessed that, perhaps, most true species of wit, which flows from experience and deep knowledge of mankind, and consequently had more in his later than in his earlier years; which is not common

to a talent that generally flashes from spirits, though they alone cannot bestow it. When you was once before so good, Sir, as to suggest to me an attempt at writing my father's life, I probably made you one answer that I must repeat now, which is, that a son's encomiums would be attributed to partiality; and, with my deep devotion to his memory, I should ever suspect it in myself.

But I will set my repugnance in a stronger light, by relating an anecdote not incurious. In the new edition of the 'Biographia Britannica,' Dr. Kippis, the tinker of it, reflecting on my having called the former Vindicatio Britannica, or a Defence of Everybody,' threatened that when he should come to my father's life he would convince me that the new edition did not deserve that censure. I confess I thought this but an odd sort of historian equity, to reverse Scripture and punish the sins of children upon their fathers! However, I said nothing. Soon after Dr. Kippis himself called on me, and in very gracious terms desired I would favour him with anecdotes of my father's life. This was descending a little from his censorial throne, but I took no notice; and only told him, that I was so persuaded of the fairness of my father's character, that I choose to trust it to the most unprejudiced hands; and that all I could consent to was, that when he shall have written it, if he would communicate it to me, I would point out to him any material facts, if I should find any, that were not truly noted. This was all I could contribute.

Since that time I have seen in the second volume a very gross accusation of Sir Robert, at second or third hand, and to which the smallest attention must give a negative. Sir Robert is accused of having, out of spite, influenced the House of Commons to expel the late Lord Barrington for the notorious job of the Harburg lottery. Spite was not the ingredient most domineering in my father's character; but whatever has been said of the corruption or servility of Houses of Commons, when was there one so prostitute, that it would have expelled one of their own members for a fraud not proved, to gratify the vengeance of the Minister? and a Minister must have been implacable indeed, and a House of Commons profligate indeed, to inflict such a stigma on an innocent man, because he had been attached to a rival predecessor of the Minister. It is not less strange that the Harburgher's son should not have vindicated his parent's memory at the opportunity of the

See Letter to Cole of 5th Feb., 1780.-CUNNINGHAM.

secret committee on Sir Robert, but should wait for a manuscript memorandum of Serjeant Skinner after the death of this last. I hope Sir Robert will have no such apologist!

I do not agree less with you, Sir, in your high opinion of King William. I think, and a far better judge, Sir Robert, thought that Prince one of the wisest men that ever lived. Your bon-mot of his was quite new to me. There are two or three passages in the Diary of the second Earl of Clarendon that always struck me as instances of wisdom and humour at once; particularly his Majesty's reply to the Lords who advised him (I think at Salisbury) to send away King James; and his few words, after long patience, to that foolish Lord himself, who harangued him on the observance of his declaration. Such traits, and several of Queen Anne (not equally deep) in the same Journal, paint those Princes as characteristically as Lord Clarendon's able father would have drawn them. There are two letters in the Nuga Antiquæ' that exhibit as faithful pictures of Queen Elizabeth and James the First, by delineating them in their private life and unguarded hours.

You are much in the right, Sir, in laughing at those wise personages, who not only dug up the corpse of Edward the First,' but restored Christian burial to his crown and robes. Methinks, had they deposited those regalia in the treasury of the church, they would have committed no sacrilege. I confess I have not quite so heinous an idea of sacrilege as Dr. Johnson. Of all kinds of robbery, that appears to me the lightest species which injures nobody. Dr. Johnson is so pious, that in his journey to your country, he flatters himself that all his readers will join him in enjoying the destruction of two Dutch crews, who were swallowed up by the ocean after they had robbed a church. I doubt that uncharitable anathema is more in the spirit of the Old Testament than of the New.

1990. TO THE COUNTESS OF OSSORY.

Berkeley Square, Jan. 2, 1781. MERCY on the poor men that are to be in love with Lady Anne when she comes to maturity of tyranny! If she begins already

See vol. vi. pp. 84, 291.-CUNNINGHAM.

2 The following are Johnson's words :—“ The two churches of Elgin were stripped, and the lead was shipped to be sold in Holland: I hope every reader will rejoice that this cargo of sacrilege was lost at sea."-WRIGHT.