ARLINGTON STREET, _Nov._ 8, 1759.
Your pictures will set out on Saturday; I give you notice, that you may
inquire for them. I did not intend to be here these three days, but my
Lord Bath taking the trouble to send a man and horse to ask me to dinner
yesterday, I did not know how to refuse; and besides, as Mr. Bentley
said to me, "you know he was an old friend of your father."
The town is empty, but is coming to dress itself for Saturday. My Lady
Coventry showed George Selwyn her clothes; they are blue, with spots of
silver, of the size of a shilling, and a silver trimming, and cost--my
lord will know what. She asked George how he liked them; he replied,
"Why, you will be change for a guinea."
I find nothing talked of but the French bankruptcy;[1] Sir Robert Brown,
I hear--and am glad to hear--will be a great sufferer. They put gravely
into the article of bankrupts in the newspaper, "Louis le Petit, of the
city of Paris, peace-breaker, dealer, and chapman;" it would have been
still better if they had said, "Louis Bourbon of petty France." We don't
know what is become of their Monsieur Thurot, of whom we had still a
little mind to be afraid. I should think he would do like Sir Thomas
Hanmer, make a faint effort, beg pardon of the Scotch for their
disappointment, and retire. Here are some pretty verses just arrived.
Pourquoi le baton à Soubise,
Puisque Chevert est le vainqueur?[2]
C'est de la cour une méprise,
Ou bien le but de la faveur.
Je ne vois rien là qui m'étonne,
Repond aussitot un railleur;
C'est à l'aveugle qu'on le donne,
Et non pas au conducteur.
[Footnote 1: In 1759 M. Bertin was Finance Minister--the fourth who had
held that office in four years; and among his expedients for raising
money he had been compelled to have recourse to the measure of stopping
the payment of the interest on a large portion of the National Debt.]
[Footnote 2: "_Chevert est le vainqueur._" He was one of the most
brilliant officers in the French army. It was he who, under the orders
of Saxe, surprised Prague in 1744, and it was to him that Maréchal
d'Estrées was principally indebted for his victory of Hastenbeck.]
Lady Meadows has left nine thousand pounds in reversion after her
husband to Lord Sandwich's daughter. _Apropos_ to my Lady Meadows's
maiden name, a name I believe you have sometimes heard; I was diverted
t'other day with a story of a lady of that name,[1] and a lord, whose
initial is no farther from hers than he himself is sometimes supposed to
be. Her postillion, a lad of sixteen, said, "I am not such a child but I
can guess something: whenever my Lord Lyttelton comes to my lady, she
orders the porter to let in nobody else, and then they call for a pen
and ink, and say they are going to write history." Is not this _finesse_
so like him? Do you know that I am persuaded, now he is parted, that he
will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to some woman or
other.
[Footnote 1: Mrs. Montagu was the foundress of "The Blue-stocking Club."
She was the authoress of three "Dialogues of the Dead," to which Walpole
is alluding here, and which she published with some others by Lord
Lyttelton.]
When do you come? if it is not soon, you will find a new town. I stared
to-day at Piccadilly like a country squire; there are twenty new stone
houses: at first I concluded that all the grooms, that used to live
there, had got estates, and built palaces. One young gentleman, who was
getting an estate, but was so indiscreet as to step out of his way to
rob a comrade, is convicted, and to be transported; in short, one of the
waiters at Arthur's. George Selwyn says, "What a horrid idea he will
give of us to the people in Newgate!"
I was still more surprised t'other day, than at seeing Piccadilly, by
receiving a letter from the north of Ireland from a clergyman, with
violent encomiums on my "Catalogue of Noble Authors"--and this when I
thought it quite forgot. It puts me in mind of the queen[1] that sunk at
Charing Cross and rose at Queenhithe.
[Footnote 1: Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., who erected the cross at
Charing, and others at the different places where her body had stopped
on the way from the North to Westminster.]
Mr. Chute has got his commission to inquire about your Cutts, but he
thinks the lady is not your grandmother. You are very ungenerous to
hoard tales from me of your ancestry: what relation have I spared? If
your grandfathers were knaves, will your bottling up their bad blood
mend it? Do you only take a cup of it now and then by yourself, and then
come down to your parson, and boast of it, as if it was pure old
metheglin? I sat last night with the Mater Gracchorum--oh! 'tis a Mater
Jagorum; if her descendants taste any of her black blood, they surely
will make as wry faces at it as the servant in Don John does when the
ghost decants a corpse. Good night! I am just returning to Strawberry,
to husband my two last days and to avoid all the pomp of the birthday.
Oh! I had forgot, there is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be
handsomer than my Lady Coventry; but I have known one threatened with
such every summer for these seven years, and they are always addled by
winter!
_HE LIVES AMONGST ROYALTY--COMMOTIONS IN IRELAND._