sists of two very small rooms. Of Madame de Maintenon we did not see fewer than twenty pictures. The young one looking over her shoulder has a round face, without the least resemblance to those of her latter age. That in the royal mantle, of which you know I have a copy, is the most repeated; but there is another with a longer and leaner face, which has by far the most sensible look. She is in black, with a high point head and band, a long train, and is sitting in a chair of purple velvet. Before her knees stands her niece Madame de Noailles, a child; at a distance a view of Versailles or St. Cyr, I could not distinguish which. We were shown some rich reliquaires, and the corpo santo that was sent to her by the Pope. We were then carried into the public room of each class. In the first, the young ladies, who were playing at chess, were ordered to sing to us the choruses of Athaliah; in another, they danced minuets and countrydances, while a nun, not quite so able as St. Cecilia, played on a violin. In the others, they acted before us the proverbs or conversations written by Madame de Maintenon for their instruction; for she was not only their foundress but their saint, and their adoration of her memory has quite eclipsed the Virgin Mary. We saw their dormitory, and saw them at supper; and at last were carried to their archives, where they produced volumes of her letters, and where one of the nuns gave me a small piece of paper with three sentences in her handwriting. I forgot to tell you, that this kind dame, who took to me extremely, asked me if we had many convents and many relics in England. I was much embarrassed for fear of destroying her good opinion of me, and so said we had but few now. Oh! we went to the apothecarie, where they treated us with cordials, and where one of the ladies told me inoculation was a sin, as it was a voluntary detention from mass, and as voluntary a cause of eating gras. Our visit concluded in the garden, now grown very venerable, where the young ladies played at little games before us. After a stay of four hours we took our leave. I begged the abbess's blessing; she smiled, and said, she doubted I should not place much faith in it. She is a comely old gentlewoman, and very proud of having seen Madame de Maintenon. Well! was not I in the right to wish you with me? could you have passed a day more agreeably?

I will conclude my letter with a most charming trait of Madame de Mailly, which cannot be misplaced in such a chapter of royal concubines. Going to St. Sulpice, after she had lost the King's heart, a person present desired the crowd to make way for her. Some brutal young officers said, "Comment, pour cette catin-là !" She turned to them, and, with the most charming modesty said, "Messieurs, puisque vous me connoissez, priez Dieu pour moi." I am sure it will bring tears into your eyes. Was not she the Publican, and Maintenon the Pharisee? Good night! I hope I am going to dream of all I have been seeing. As my impressions and my fancy, when I am pleased, are apt to be strong, my night, perhaps, may still be more productive of ideas than the day has been. It will be charming, indeed, if Madame de Cambis is the ruling tint. Adieu! Yours ever.

TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

Arlington Street, Oct. 13, 1769.

I ARRIVED last night at eleven o'clock, and found a letter from you, which gave me so much pleasure, that I must write you a line, though I am hurried to death. You cannot imagine how rejoiced I am that Lord North drags you to light again; it is a satisfaction 1 little expected. When do you come? I am impatient. I long to know your projects.

I had a dreadful passage of eight hours, was drowned, though not shipwrecked, and was sick to death. I have been six times at sea before, and never suffered the least, which makes the mortification. the greater: but as Hercules was not more robust than I, though with an air so little Herculean, I have not so much as caught cold, though I was wet to the skin with the rain, had my lap full of waves, was washed from head to foot in the boat at ten o'clock at night, and stepped into the sea up to my knees. Q'avois-je à faire dans cette galère? In truth, it is a little late to be seeking adventures. Adieu! I must finish, but I am excessively happy with what you have told Yours ever.

me.

TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

Strawberry Hill, Oct. 16, 1769.

I

I ARRIVED at my own Louvre last Wednesday night, and am now at my Versailles. Your last letter reached me but two days before I left Paris, for I have been an age at Calais and the sea. upon could execute no commission for you, and, in truth, you gave me no explicit one; but I have brought you a bit of china, and beg you will be content with a little present, instead of a bargain. Said china is, or will be soon, in the custom-house; but I shall have it, I fear, long before you come to London.

I am sorry those boys got at my tragedy. I beg you would keep it under lock and key; it is not at all food for the public; at least not till I am "food for worms, good Percy." Nay, it is not an age to encourage any body, that has the least vanity, to step forth. There is a total extinction of all taste: our authors are vulgar, gross, illiberal: the theatre swarms with wretched translations, and ballad operas, and we have nothing new but improving abuse. I have blushed at Paris, when the papers came over crammed with ribaldry,

• Lord North had appointed Mr. Montagu his private secretary.

b Walpole left Paris on the 5th of October. Early on the morning of the 6th, Madame du Deffand thus wrote to him:-"N'exigez point de gaieté, contentez-vous de ne pas trouver de tristesse: je n'envoyai point chez vous hier matin; j'ignore à quelle heure vous partites; tout ce que je sais c'est que vous n'ètes plus ici." And again, on the 9th: Je ne respirerai à mon aise qu'après une lettre de Douvres. Ah! je me hais bien de tout le mal que je vous cause; trois journées de route, autant de nuits détestables, une embarquement, un passage, le risque de mille accidens, voilà le bien que je vous procure. Ah! c'est bien vous qui pouvez dire en pensant à moi, Qu'allais-je faire dans cette galère ?"—E.

or with Garrick's insufferable nonsense about Shakspeare. As that man's writings will be preserved by his name, who will believe that he was a tolerable actor? Cibber wrote as bad odes, but then Cibber wrote the Careless Husband and his own Life, which both deserve immortality. Garrick's prologues and epilogues are as bad as his Pindarics and pantomimes.*

I feel myself here like a swan, that, after living six weeks in a nasty pool upon a common, is got back into its own Thames. I do nothing but plume and clean myself, and enjoy the verdure and silent waves. Neatness and greenth are so essential in my opinion to the country, that in France, where I see nothing but chalk and dirty peasants, I seem in a terrestrial purgatory that is neither town nor country. The face of England is so beautiful, that I do not believe Tempe or Arcadia were half so rural; for both lying in hot climates, must have wanted the turf of our lawns. It is unfortunate to have so pastoral a taste, when I want a cane more than a crook. absurd creatures; at twenty, I loved nothing but London.

We are

Tell me when you shall be in town. I think of passing most of my time here till after Christmas. Adieu!

TO THE HON. H. S. CONWAY.

Strawberry Hill, Tuesday, Nov. 14, 1769.

I AM here quite alone, and did not think of going to town till Friday for the opera, which I have not yet seen. In compliment to you and your Countess, I will make an effort, and be there on Thursday; and will either dine with you at your own house, or at your brother's; which you choose. This is a great favour, and beyond my Lord Temple's journey to dine with my Lord Mayor. I am so sick of the follies of all sides, that I am happy to be at quiet here, and to know no more of them than what I am forced to see in the newspapers; and those I skip over as fast as I can.

The account you give me of Lady * * * was just the same as I received from Paris. I will show you a very particular letter I received by a private hand from thence; which convinces me that I guessed right, contrary to all the wise, that the journey to Fontainbleau would overset Monsieur de Choiseul. I think he holds but by a thread, which will snap soon. I am labouring hard with the Duchess to procure the Duke of Richmond satisfaction in the favour he has asked about his duchy; but he shall not know it till it is com

Mr. J. Sharp, in a letter to Garrick, of the 29th of March in this year, says " I met Mr. Gray at dinner last Sunday: he spoke handsomely of your happy knack of epilogues; but he calls the Stratford Jubilee, Vanity Fair." See Garrick Correspondence, vol. i. p. 337.-E.

At Guildhall, on the 9th of November, in the second mayoralty of Alderman Beckford.-E.

Walpole had received a letter, of the 2d, from Madame du Deffand, describing the growing influence of Madame du Barry, and her increasing enmity to the Duc de Choiseul.-E.

a The Duchess of Choiseul.

• Of Aubigné.

pleted, if I can be so lucky as to succeed. I think I shall, if they do not fall immediately.

You perceive how barren I am, and why I have not written to you. I pass my time in clipping and pasting prints; and do not think I have read forty pages since I came to England. I bought a poem called Trinculo's Trip to the Jubilee; having been struck with two lines in an extract in the papers,

"There the ear-piercing fife,

And the ear-piercing wife-"

Alas! all the rest, and it is very long, is a heap of unintelligible nonsense, about Shakspeare, politics, and the Lord knows what. I am grieved that, with our admiration of Shakspeare, we can do nothing but write worse than ever he did. One would think the age studied nothing but his Love's Labour Lost, and Titus Andronicus. Politics and abuse have totally corrupted our taste. Nobody thinks of writing a line that is to last beyond the next fortnight. We might as well be given up to a controversial divinity. The times put me in mind of the Constantinopolitan empire; where, in an age of learning, the subtlest wits of Greece contrived to leave nothing behind them, but the memory of their follies and acrimony. Milton did not write his Paradise Lost till he had outlived his politics. With all his parts, and noble sentiments of liberty, who would remember him for his barbarous prose? Nothing is more true than that extremes meet. The licentiousness of the press makes us as savage as our Saxon ancestors, who could only set their marks; and an outrageous pursuit of individual independence, grounded on selfish views, extinguishes genius as much as despotism does. The public good of our country is never thought of by men that hate half their country. Heroes confine their ambition to be leaders of the mob. Orators seek applause from their faction, not from posterity; and ministers forget foreign enemies, to defend themselves against a majority in Parlia ment. When any Cæsar has conquered Gaul, I will excuse him for aiming at the perpetual dictature. If he has only jockeyed somebody out of the borough of Veii or Falernum, it is too impudent to call himself a patriot or a statesman. Adieu!

TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

Arlington Street, Dec. 14, 1769.

I CANNOT be silent, when I feel for you. I doubt not but the loss of Mrs. Trevor is very sensible to you, and I am heartily sorry for you. One cannot live any time, and not perceive the world slip away, as it were, from under one's feet: one's friends, one's connexions drop off, and indeed reconcile one to the same passage; but why repeat these things? I do not mean to write a fine consolation; all I intended was to tell you, that I cannot be indifferent to what concerns you.

I know as little how to amuse you: news there are none but politics, and politics there will be as long as we have a shilling left.

They are no amusement to me, except in seeing two or three sets of people worry one another, for none of whom I care a straw.

Mr. Cumberland has produced a comedy called The Brothers. It acts well, but reads ill; though I can distinguish strokes of Mr. Bentley in it. Very few of the characters are marked, and the serious ones have little nature, and the comic ones are rather too much marked; however, the three middle acts diverted me very well.*

I saw the Bishop of Durham at Carlton House, who told me he had given you a complete suit of armour. I hope you will have no occasion to lock yourself in it, though, between the fools and the knaves of the present time, I don't know but we may be reduced to defend our castles. If you retain any connexions with Northampton, I should be much obliged to you if you could procure from thence a print of an Alderman Backwell. It is valuable for nothing but its rarity, and it is not to be met with but there. I would give eight or ten shillings rather than not have it. When shall you look towards us? how does your brother John? make my compliments to him. I need not say how much I am yours ever.

DEAR SIR,

TO THE REV. MR. COLE.a

Arlington Street, Dec. 21, 1769.

I AM very grateful for all your communications, and for the trouble you are so good as to take for me. I am glad you have paid Jackson, though he is not only dear, (for the prints he has got for me are very common,) but they are not what I wanted, and I do not believe were mentioned in my list. However, as paying him dear for what I do not want, may encourage him to hunt for what I do want, I am very well content he should cheat me a little. I take the liberty of trou

"The Brothers," Cumberland's first comedy, came out at Covent-Garden theatre on the 2d of December, and met with no inconsiderable success.-E.

b The Hon. Dr. Richard Trevor, consecrated Bishop of St. David's in 1744, and translated to the see of Durham in 1762. He died in June 1771.—E.

< Edward Backwell, alderman of London, of whom Granger gives the following character:-"He was a banker of great ability, industry, integrity, and very extensive credit. With such qualifications, he, in a trading nation, would, in the natural event of things, have made a fortune, except in such an age as that of Charles the Second, when the laws were overborne by perfidy, violence, and rapacity; or in an age when bankers become gamesters, instead of merchant-adventurers; when they affect to live like princes, and are, with their miserable creditors, drawn into the prevailing vortex of luxury. Backwell carried on his business in the same shop which was afterwards occupied by Child. He, to avoid a prison, retired into Holland, where he died. His body was brought for sepulture to Tyringham church, near Newport Pagnel." Frequent mention of the Alderman is made by Pepys, in whose Diary is the following entry:-"April 12, 1669. This evening, coming home, we overtook Alderman Backwell's coach and his lady, and followed them to their house, and there made them the first visit, where they received us with extraordinary civility, and owning the obligation. But I do, contrary to my expectation, find her something a proud and vainglorious woman, in telling the number of her servants and family, and expenses. He is also so, but he was ever of that strain. But here he showed me the model of his houses that he is going to build in Cornhill and Lombard-street; but he hath purchased so much there that it looks like a little town, and must have cost him a great deal of money."-E.

d Now first printed, from the original in the British Museum.-E.