according to their consciences; and he spoke of your brother with many encomiums. Sir W. Meredith then notified his intention of taking up the affair of the Warrants on Monday se'nnight. Mr. Pitt was not there, nor Lord Temple in the House of Lords; but the latter is ill. I should have told you that Lord Warkworth [Northumberland] and Thomas Pitt [Camelford] moved our addresses; as Lord Townshend and Lord Botetourt did those of the Lords. Lord Townshend said, though it was grown unpopular to praise the King, yet he should, and he was violent against libels; forgetting that the most ill-natured branch of them, caricaturas, his own invention, are left off. Nobody thought it worth while to answer him, at which he was much offended.

So much for the opening of the Parliament, which does not promise serenity. Your brother is likely to make a very great figure : they have given him the warmth he wanted, and may thank themselves for it. Had Mr. Grenville taken my advice, he had avoided an opponent that he will find a tough one, and must already repent having drawn upon him.

With regard to yourself, my dear lord, you may be sure I did not intend to ask you any impertinent question. You requested me to tell you whatever I heard said about you; you was talked of for Ireland, and are still; and Lord Holland within this week told me, that you had solicited it warmly. Don't think yourself under any obligation to reply to me on these occasions. It is to comply with your desires that I repeat anything I hear of you, not to make use of them to draw any explanation from you, to which I have no title; nor have I, you know, any troublesome curiosity. I mentioned Ireland with the same indifference that I tell you that the town here has bestowed Lady Anne, first on Lord March, and now on Stephen Fox-tattle not worth your answering.

You have lost another of your Lords Justices, Lord Shannon, of whose death an account came yesterday.

Lady Harrington's porter [John Wisket] was executed yesterday, and went to Tyburn with a white cockade in his hat, as an emblem of his innocence.

All the rest of my news I exhausted in my letter to Lady Hertford three days ago. The King's Speech, as I told her it was to do, announced the contract between Princess Caroline' and the Prince Royal of Denmark.

The unhappy Queen of Denmark, who was afterwards divorced and exiled.CROKER.

I don't think the tone the session has taken will expedite my visit to you; however, I shall be able to judge when a few of the great questions are over. The American affairs are expected to occasion much discussion; but as I understand them no more than Hebrew, they will throw no impediment in my way. Adieu! my dear lord; you will probably hear no more politics these ten days. Yours ever.

Friday.

The debate on the Warrants is put off to the Tuesday; therefore, as it will probably be so long a day, I shall not be able to give you an account of it till this day fortnight.

962. TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Arlington Street, Jan. 13, 1765.

ARE not you growing impatient for news, now the Parliament is opened? Here is a new year begun, the twenty-fourth of our correspondence! Orestes and Pylades are not to be named with us; their friendship would have cooled in a quarter of the time. Well, what do you expect? that, having lost all our chiefs, we have laid down our arms, and been fined in the Starchamber, or what would come to much the same thing for the people, that we have sold our remnant of Opposition for half-a-dozen pensions? You are mistaken; there are a few drops of Mercian and Cambrian blood still left in our veins. The Address on Thursday went unanimously, in answer to a very tame speech; but not till after a very spirited dialogue between Mr. Conway and Mr. Grenville, in which the former shone greatly, painting in strong colours the scandalous treatment he had received from a profligate administration; the epithet was his, but I believe will remain theirs. Lord Granby declared warmly against dismissions of officers for their conduct in Parliament.' This prologue was brief, but smart. We shall probably have nothing particular till Tuesday se'nnight, which is fixed for a renewal of the great question on the Warrants, the subject of which has been revived by a large pamphlet, that is in the highest vogue, called An Inquiry into the Doctrine of Libels.' Though bulky, it is already at its

1 Did Walpole remember that his father had dismissed Lord Cobham from his regiment, and Mr. Pitt from a cornetcy, "for their conduct in Parliament ? "CUNNINGHAM.

third edition; nor can all the court-lawyers, court-scribblers, or court-liars, hitherto frame an answer to it. They nibble at its heels, but cannot fix a tooth in it.

The King's Speech acquainted us with a future marriage between his youngest sister' and the Prince Royal of Denmark. Princess Louisa, who is older, and has a very pretty face, is of uncommonly small stature, and unhealthy.

There is another approaching wedding notified, between Lord Shelburne and Lady Sophia Carteret, the only child of our old friend Lady Sophia Fermor, by Lord Granville. Her face has the beauty of neither, and is like her half-sisters; but her air and person would strike you from the strong resemblance to her mother. She has above thirty thousand pounds, and he two and twenty thousand a-year. Their children will have the seeds in them of some extraordinary qualities, look whither you will.

There has been a bustle in the Cabinet, more remarkable for its symptoms than its effects. That busy ambitious prelate, Stone, is dead, as I told you I think in my last. Mr. Grenville, believing himself possessed of power, because he runs all the risk of it, offered the Archiepiscopal mitre about the Town, without remembering to ask if it was in his disposal. Two English Bishops declined it. Lord Granby then solicited it for his tutor, Ewer of Llandaff, and was supported by the imaginary minister; but the Lord Lieutenant (the most acute commentators read Lord Bute) carried off the primacy for Robinson, Bishop of Kildare. The Duke of Bedford, still more a phantom than Grenville, imagined he could obtain the nomination, and demanded it for a Scoto-Hibernian, Bishop Carmichael; but the Scotch are too wise for many of them to embark in that channel.

Well, well! all this is paltry, and not in the great style of our country; these are such little cabals as happen in every nation. 'Tis the marvellous, the eccentric, that characterises Englishmen. Come, you shall have an event in the genuine taste, and before it has been pawed and vulgarised. It is fresh this very day. There is somebody dead somewhere-strong marks of novelty you see-in Somersetshire or Wiltshire, I think, who has left two hundred

1 The Princess Matilda, born after the death of her father, Frederick Prince of Wales, married, 1st of October 1766, Christian, King of Denmark; died 10th March, 1775.-CUNNINGHAM.

The Countess of Cowper and the Marchioness of Tweeddale younger daughters of Lord Granville by his first wife.-WALPOLE.

thousand pounds' to Mr. Pitt, to Mr. William Pitt, to the Pitt, the man who frightened the great Mogul so three years ago, and who had liked to have tossed the Kings of France and Spain in a blanket, if somebody had not cut a hole in it and let them slip through. Somebody the first, was called Pinsent or Vincent-the town and I are not sure of the name yet; but it is certain he never saw the said Mr. Pitt—I hope that was not the best reason for the legacy. The parson of the parish, who made the Will, has sent word to Hayes' that it is lodged in the housekeeper's hands, who has command from the defunct not to deliver it but to the legatee, or order. Unluckily, Mr. Pitt is in bed with the gout in his hand, and cannot even sign the order; however, Lady Chatham has sent for the Will, and it is supposed her order will suffice. You may depend on all this latter part; I had it but two hours ago from Lady Temple, whose lord has been to Hayes this morning on this affair. The deceased, it seems, had voted against the first Treaty of Utrecht, and had lived to see a second. I do believe now that this country will be saved at last, for we shall have real Patriots, when the Opposition pays better than the Court. Don't you think that Mr. Pitt would give half his legacy that he had never accepted a pension? It is very singular; ten thousand pounds from old Marlborough, a reversion of a great estate from Jack Spencer,' and this fortune out of the clouds! Lord Bath indeed-but I never heard it was for his virtues or services-was in so many testaments, that they used to call him emphatically, Will Pulteney-it is more pleasant to be called Will Pitt from such tributes to his merit. Adieu till the next big event.

'Sir William Pynsent's legacy to Mr. Pitt was worth about forty thousand pounds. The "two hundred thousand," asserted by popular report, was in the usual style of exaggeration.-Ed., 1843.

2 Villa of Mr. Pitt, near Bromley, in Kent.-WALPOLE

3 The treaty of Paris.-WALPOLE.

The Duchess Dowager of Marlborough left Mr. Pitt ten thousand pounds, and her grandson, John Spencer, entailed the Sunderland estate upon him after his own son; but that son, afterwards Earl Spencer, cut off that entail as soon as he came of age.-WALPOLE.

See vol. i. p. 191, and vol. ii. p. 30.-CUNNINGHAM.

963. TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.

Sunday, Jan. 20, 1765.

Do you forgive me, if I write to you two or three days sooner than I said I would. Our important day on the Warrants is put off for a week, in compliment to Mr. Pitt's gout-can it resist such attention? I shall expect it in a prodigious quantity of black ribands. You have heard, to be sure, of the great fortune that is bequeathed to him by a Sir William Pynsent, an old man of near ninety, who quitted the world on the peace of Utrecht; and, luckily for Mr. Pitt, lived to be as angry with its pendant, the treaty of Paris. I did not send you the first report, which mounted it to an enormous sum: I think the medium account is two thousand pounds a-year, and thirty thousand pounds in money. This Sir William Pynsent, whose fame, like an aloe, did not blow till near an hundred, was a singularity. The scandalous chronicle of Somersetshire talks terribly of his morals' ***. Lady North was nearly related to Lady Pynsent, which encouraged Lord North to flatter himself that Sir William's extreme propensity to him would recommend even his wife's parentage for heirs; but the uncomeliness of Lady North, and a vote my lord gave against the Cider-bill, offended the old gentleman so much, that he burnt his would-be heir in effigy. How will all these strange histories sound at Paris!

This post, I suppose, will rain letters to my Lady Hertford, on her death and revival. I was dreadfully alarmed at it for a moment; my servant was so absurd as to wake me, and bid me not be frightened —an excellent precaution! Of all moments, that between sleeping and waking is the most subject to terror. I started up, and my first thought was to send for Dr. Hunter; but, in two minutes, I recollected that it was impossible to be true, as your porter had the very day before been with me to tell me a courier was arrived from you, and was to return that evening. Your poor son Henry, whom you will doat upon for it, was not tranquillised so soon. He instantly sent away a courier to your brother, who arrived in the middle of the night. Lady Milton,' Lady George Sackville,' and I, agreed

The original contains an imputation against Sir W. Pynsent, which, if true, would induce us to suspect him of a disordered mind.-CROKER.

2 Lady Caroline Sackville, daughter of the Duke of Dorset, married, in 1742, to the first Lord Milton.-CROKER.

3 Diana, second daughter of J. Sambrook, Esq.-CROKER.