Prithee comfort us as often as you can with a letter, which we will retail at proper times as our own wit, to retrieve as much of our character as we can. None of our Cambridge verses are worth sending you; a great many of them are egregiously silly; mine are some of the prettiest in the book; the Bonny made them for me; we are now burlesquing them as fast as ever we can. I rejoice much that your nut brown girl afforded you such good sport; I should be glad to be with you to partake of those innocent amusements to which you dedicate your horas subsecivas; but pray set one or two of them apart sometimes, to oblige with a letter, my dear George,

Thy most sincere friend,

P. STANHOPE.

6 A collection of verses on the Treaty of Utrecht. We see that Lord Chesterfield lent his name, if not his talents, to celebrate the peace of Utrecht; yet when, within three little years, he obtained a seat in parliament, we find him pursuing, with a ferocity (which even in those violent days was remarkable) the authors of that peace. "He never wished," he said, "to spill the blood of any of his countrymen, much less of any nobleman, but he was persuaded the safety of the country required that examples should be made of those who had betrayed it in so infamous a manner !"

LORD STANHOPE TO THE HON. GEORGE

BERKELEY.

MY DEAR GEORGE,

1 Hague, May 29th, [1714.]

I HOPE you will pardon me for not having thanked you for the favour of your letter (which I received at Antwerp) till now; I hope you will not impute it to indifference or forgetfulness in one that always loves and remembers you. But the truth is, that at

'Lord Chesterfield tells us, that he spent the summer of 1714 at the Hague, among friends who quickly laughed him out of his scholastic habits, but gave him in return a taste for gaming. He honestly confesses that, hating both wine and tobacco, he drank and smoked at Cambridge to be in the fashion; and that, under the same delusion, he gamed at the Hague, and that this error became afterwards a habit, and at last a vice. (Letters to his Son, vol. ii. p. 352.) It ought, however, to be told, to Lord Chesterfield's credit, that his sense of duty and decorum was still stronger than his passion for play. While he was lord lieutenant of Ireland or secretary of state, he never played, nor permitted play in his house; but on the very night of the day that he resigned his office, he went to White's. On his return to England in 1715 he was appointed gentleman of the prince's bedchamber, which led him into an intimate friendship with Mrs. Howard, Lady Hervey, and the rest of that court.

Antwerp the duke and duchess were so civil to me that I had not time to be so to any body else, for I was with them from morning to night all the while I stayed there. The duke and the duchess inquired extremely after their friend, as they called you, and commanded me the first time I writ to you to assure you of their good wishes.

This place is now extremely pleasant and entertaining; I wish I could describe it so to you as to tempt you to take a little journey, and make it more so I have power to tell you that there is a large room in a certain house very much at your service, where I am sure you might pass two or three months this summer much cheaper, and I believe more agreeably, than at London. Pray send me some news from London, and whatever I can pick up here I shall inform you of, though it is but a poor return. I am,

Yours,

STANHOPE.

The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, on the accession of Queen Anne's tory administration, thought it prudent to go abroad, and had, at this time, fixed their residence at Antwerp, a convenient position for observing the political movements of both England and Hanover. Lord Stanhope's sudden zeal against the treaty of Utrecht may perhaps be, in some degree, attributed to this visit to Antwerp, and to the flattering attentions which he received from the greatest man, and one of the cleverest women of the age.

LADY MOHUN TO THE HON. MRS. HOWARD.

['Elizabeth Lawrence, widow of Charles Lord Mohun killed in the doubly fatal duel with the Duke of Hamilton in 1711. She remarried (in 1717) Charles Mordaunt, nephew of the celebrated Lord Peterborough; and through her, commenced Lady Suffolk's acquaintance with this lord, of which we shall see more presently. The disproportionate youth of Mr. Mordaunt, and some other circumstances of the match, do not seem to have added to Lady Mohun's respectability. She died in the spring of 1725.]

Cashiobury, [1716.]

Он, my dear deputy guardian, why should politics and moral reflections have the ascend

1 There is great confusion and inaccuracy in all the peerages as to the last wife of Lord Mohun. They sometimes confound her with Lady Phil. Annesley, his mother, and with Charlotte Mainwaring, his first wife. Elizabeth Lawrence, however, was the lady who survived him ; and he bequeathed to her the estate at Gawsworth Hall, near Congleton, in Cheshire, which he had obtained on his former marriage with Charlotte Mainwaring. The fate of this seat is remarkable. It belonged to Gerard, Lord Macclesfield; his niece, Miss Mainwaring, married Lord Mohun, and the old lord left Gawsworth to him; this preference offended the Duke of Hamilton (who had married another niece), and produced dissensions, which ended in the famous duel. Lord Mohun remarried, and left Gawsworth to his widow Elizabeth Lawrence, and she left it to her own

ant of pleasure? The weather sympathises with my mind; the sky is troubled, and the clouds weep. I am now in the most uneasy disposition of pain, fear, and uncertainty; I am impatient to know the conclusion of that unhappy affair relating to my dear and best friend, princely Argyle2, and yet dread to be informed.

Why is nature cramped by fortune? why may I not tell the ministry, that barbarity, oppression, and injustice to their fellow-subject, are no virtues; and that insolence and opposition to their prince can never be forgot, and may one day be punished? But you know I am very discreet upon such occasions. I am now in the country, and the trees can tell no tales.

3

Tell dear Molly I love her like any thing; and do not forget I am to have an epistle of consolation, clubbed or signed by the wits of St. James's: let honest Paget set his name, and

daughter by Colonel Griffith, a former husband; Miss Griffith married the first Earl of Harrington, and thus carried into his family an estate with which they had no connexion either in blood or alliance.

2 In June, 1716, the Duke of Argyll, who was suspected by the king of fomenting the differences between his majesty and the Prince of Wales, was dismissed from all his employments, and went into direct opposition.

3 Probably Miss Mary Lepel, one of the maids of honour, afterwards Lady Hervey.

4 Where the prince held his court.

5 Thomas Paget, Lord Paget, was one of the gentlemen of