ARLINGTON STREET, _April_ 2, 1750.
You will not wonder so much at our earthquakes as at the effects they
have had. All the women in town have taken them up upon the foot of
_Judgments_; and the clergy, who have had no windfalls of a long season,
have driven horse and foot into this opinion. There has been a shower of
sermons and exhortations: Seeker, the Jesuitical Bishop of Oxford, began
the mode. He heard the women were all going out of town to avoid the
next shock; and so, for fear of losing his Easter offerings, he set
himself to advise them to await God's good pleasure in fear and
trembling. But what is more astonishing, Sherlock, who has much better
sense, and much less of the Popish confessor, has been running a race
with him for the old ladies, and has written a pastoral letter, of which
ten thousand were sold in two days; and fifty thousand have been
subscribed for, since the two first editions.
I told you the women talked of going out of town: several families are
literally gone, and many more going to-day and to-morrow; for what adds
to the absurdity, is, that the second shock having happened exactly a
month after the former, it prevails that there will be a third on
Thursday next, another month, which is to swallow up London. I am almost
ready to burn my letter now I have begun it, lest you should think I am
laughing at you: but it is so true, that Arthur of White's told me last
night, that he should put off the last ridotto, which was to be on
Thursday, because he hears nobody would come to it. I have advised
several, who are going to keep their next earthquake in the country, to
take the bark for it, as it is so periodic.[1] Dick Leveson and Mr.
Rigby, who had supped and stayed late at Bedford House the other night,
knocked at several doors, and in a watchman's voice cried, "Past four
o'clock, and a dreadful earthquake!"...
[Footnote 1: "I remember," says Addison, in the 240th _Tatler_, "when
our whole island was shaken with an earthquake some years ago, that
there was an impudent mountebank who sold pills, which, as he told the
country people, were 'very good against an earthquake.'"]
This frantic terror prevails so much, that within these three days seven
hundred and thirty coaches have been counted passing Hyde Park corner,
with whole parties removing into the country. Here is a good
advertisement which I cut out of the papers to-day:--
"On Monday next will be published (price 6_d._) A true and exact
List of all the Nobility and Gentry who have left, or shall leave,
this place through fear of another Earthquake."
Several women have made earthquake gowns; that is, warm gowns to sit out
of doors all to-night. These are of the more courageous. One woman,
still more heroic, is come to town on purpose: she says, all her friends
are in London, and she will not survive them. But what will you think of
Lady Catherine Pelham, Lady Frances Arundel, and Lord and Lady Galway,
who go this evening to an inn ten miles out of town, where they are to
play at brag till five in the morning, and then come back--I suppose, to
look for the bones of their husbands and families under the rubbish. The
prophet of all this (next to the Bishop of London) is a trooper of Lord
Delawar's, who was yesterday sent to Bedlam. His _colonel_ sent to the
man's wife, and asked her if her husband had ever been disordered
before. She cried, "Oh dear! my lord, he is not mad now; if your
_lordship_ would but get any _sensible_ man to examine him, you would
find he is quite in his right mind."...
I shall now go and show you Mr. Chute in a different light from
heraldry, and in one in which I believe you never saw him. He will shine
as usual; but, as a little more severely than his good-nature is
accustomed to, I must tell you that he was provoked by the most
impertinent usage. It is an epigram on Lady Caroline Petersham, whose
present fame, by the way, is coupled with young Harry Vane.