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, 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 poet, 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 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 pleasure; and, if four wars cannot awaken us, we
shall die in a dream!
_NAVAL MOVEMENTS--SIEGE OF GIBRALTAR--FEMALE FASHIONS._