Pray stay where you are, and do some good to your country, or retire when you cannot-but don't put your finger in your eye and cry after the holidays and sugar-plums of Park-place. You have engaged and must go through, or be hindered. Could you tell the world the reason? Would not all men say you had found yourself incapable of what you had undertaken? I have no patience with your thinking so idly. It would be a reflection on your understanding and character, and a want of resolution unworthy of you.

My advice is, to ask for the first great government that falls, if you will not take your Regiment again; to continue acting vigorously and honestly where you are. Things are never stable enough in our country to give you a prospect of a long slavery. Your defect is irresolution. When you have taken your post, act up to it; and if you are driven from it, your retirement will then be as honourable, and more satisfactory than your administration. I speak frankly, as my friendship for you directs. My way of acting (though a private instance) is agreeable to my doctrine. I determined, whenever our opposition should be over, to have done with politics; and you see I have adhered to my resolution by coming hither; and therefore you may be convinced that I speak my thoughts. I don't ask your pardon, because I should be forced to ask my own, if I did not tell you what I think the best for you. You have life and Park-place enough to come, and you have not had five months of gout. Make yourself independent honourably, which you may do by a government; but if you will take my advice, don't accept a ministerial place when you cease to be a minister. The former is a reward due to your profession and services; the latter is a degradation. You know the haughtiness of my spirit; I give you no advice but what I would follow.

I sent Lady Ailesbury the Orpheline Leguée:' a poor performance; but the subject made me think she would like to sce it. I am over head and ears at Count Caylus's' auction, and have bought half of it for a song-but I am still in great felicity and luck, having discovered, by mere accident, a portrait of Count Grammont, after having been in search of one these fifteen years, and assured there was no such thing. Apropos, I promised you my

1 The Count de Caylus, member of the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Belles lettres, honorary member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and author of the Recueil d'Antiquités Egyptiennes, Etrusques, Grecques, Romaines, et Gauloises,' in seven volumes, 4to. died at Paris in September 1765, in the sixty-third year of his age.-WRIGHT.

own but besides that there is nobody here that excels in pain ting skeletons, seriously, their painters are bitter bad, and as much inferior to Reynolds and Ramsay, as Hudson to Vandyck. I had rather stay till my return. Adieu !

1027. TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Paris, Nov. 30, 1765.

ALLELUJAH! Monsieur l'Envoyé! I was going to direct to you by this title; but if your credentials are not arrived, as I hope they are not, that I may be the first to notify your new dignity to you, I did not know how your new court would take it, and therefore I postpone your surprise, till you have opened my letter-if it loiters on the road like its predecessors, I shall be out of all patience. In short, my last express tells me that the King will name you Envoy in your new credentials. You must judge of the pleasure it gives me to have obtained this for you, my dear Sir, by the vexation I expressed on thinking I could not effect it. All answer, I suppose, to my solicitations was deferred till I could be told they had succeeded.

You must forget or erase most of what I had said to you lately, for when I can serve my friends I am content. Your letters had been so many, and so earnest, and I so little expected any good from my intercession, that I was warmer than I wish I had been; and the more, as I see I was in part unjust. I doubted everybody but Mr. Conway, and did not think that he alone had power to do what I desired, and could not bear you should think I neglected what I wished so much, pleasing you. I have done it to my great satisfaction, since it is what you had so much at heart,-but remember, I don't retract my sermon. I think exactly as I did, that one is in the wrong to place one's peace of mind on courts and honours their joys are most momentary, violently overbalanced by disappointments, and empty in possession. I shall not excuse you if you have more of these solicitudes; but I will rejoice with you over this one triumph, of which I will do you the justice to believe I am more glad than you are. You must thank Mr. Conway, by whom I obtained it, as if you owed it all to him. You know I hate to be talked of for these things, and therefore insist that my name be not mentioned to him or anybody but your brother. It will be the last favour I shall ever ask; my constant plan has been to be

nobody, and for the rest of my days I shall be more nobody than ever. You must gratify me with this silence. I did not think it would be necessary, or I should have made it a condition, for I have declared so much that I would meddle with nothing, that it would contradict those declarations, and disoblige some, for whom I have refused to interest myself.

As I grow better, I am more reconciled to this country; yet I shall return home in the spring. Apprehensions of the gout make one as old as the gout itself, and cure one of all prospects. I must resign that pleasing one, so long entertained, of seeing you at Florence. Your new establishment forbids my expecting you in England. Had I consulted my own wishes I should have let you have been cross and come home. Happily I am not so selfish. I have learnt, too, not to build on pleasures; they are not of my age. I must go and grow old, and bear ennui; must try to make comforts a recompense for living in a country where I do not love the people. My great spirits think all this a difficult task; but spirits themselves are useless, when one has not the same people to laugh with one as formerly. I have no joy in new acquaintance, because I can have no confidence in them. Experience and time draw a line between older persons and younger, which is never to be passed with satisfaction; and though the whole bent of my mind was formed for youth, fortunately I know the ridicule of letting it last too long, and had rather act a part unnatural to me, than a foolish one. I don't love acting a part at all-if I grow very tired of it I will return hither, and vary the scene; this country is more favourable to latter age than England, and what a foreigner does is of no consequence anywhere. Adieu! my dear Envoy! My letters lately seem very grave, but analyse them, you will find them very foolish.

December 1st.

I received your letter of the 14th. Upon my word our correspondence marches sedately! What do they do with our letters ? They are not grown more important than they used to be. Good postmasters, secretaries of state, or whoever you are, seal this letter again quickly, and send it on. You shall detain my next as long as you please. If your curiosity is not satisfied with reading the trifles I have written to Sir Horace for four-and-twenty years, I have nothing to say you do me too much honour, and I hope you will be repaid by four-and-twenty years more (I mean if Sir Horace and I don't meet sooner), I promise you I will continue writing to him—

for your satisfaction. Well, my dear Sir, you are Envoy, and I hope will be delighted with all these Austrian etiquettes and ceremonies— I should be sick enough of them to send back my credentials. unopened. You have enjoyed all the benefits hitherto of a Court life, without a Court: sure the husk was preferable to the kernel.

DEAR GEORGE:

1028. TO GEORGE SELWYN.

Paris, Dec. 2, 1765.

In return for your kind line by Mr. Beauclerk' I send you a whole letter, but I was in your debt before, for making over Madame du Deffand to me, who is delicious; that is, as often as I can get her fifty years back; but she is as eager about what happens every day as I am about the last century. I sup there twice a week, and bear all her dull company for the sake of the Regent.' I might go to her much oftener, but my curiosity to see every body and every thing is insatiable, especially having lost so much time by my confinement. I have been very ill a long time, and mending much longer, for every two days undo the ground I get. The fogs and damps, which, with your leave, are greater and more frequent than in England, kill me. However, it is the country in the world to be sick and grow old in. The first step towards being in fashion is to lose an eye or a tooth. Young people I conclude there are, but where they exist I don't guess: not that I complain; it is charming to totter into vogue. If I could but run about all the morning, I should be content to limp into good company in the evening. They humour me and fondle me so, and are so good-natured, and make me keep my armed-chair, and rise for nobody, and hand out nobody, and don't stare at one's being a skeleton, that I grow to like them exceedingly, and to be pleased with living here, which was far from the case at first: but then there was no soul in Paris but philosophers, whom I wished in heaven, though they do not wish themselves so. They are so overbearing and so underbred!

Your old flame, the Queen, was exceedingly kind to me at my presentation. She has been ever since at Fontainbleau, watching her son, whose death is expected every day, though it is as much the fashion not to own it, as if he was of the immortal House of Brunswick. Madame Geoffrin is extremely what I had figured her, only

1 Topham Beauclerk, Johnson's Beauclerk, Boswell's Beauclerk.-CUNNINGHAM. 2 Madame du Deffand had been the mistress of the famous Regent-Duke of Orleans. [See p. 435].-Jesse.

with less wit and more sense than I expected. The Duchess d'Aiguillon is delightful, frank, and jolly, and handsome and goodhumoured, with dignity too. There is another set in which I live much, and to my taste, but very different from all I have named, Madame de Rochfort, and the set at the Luxembourg. My newest acquaintance is Monsieur de Maurepas, with whom I am much taken, though his countenance and person are so like the late Lord Hardwicke. From the little I have seen of him, we have reason, I believe, to thank Madame de Pompadour for his disgrace. At the Marquis de Brancas' I dined with the Duke de Brissac, in his red stockings: in short, I think my winter will be very well amused, whether Mr. Garrick and Mr. Pitt act or not.

Pray tell Lord Holland, that I have sent him the few new things that I thought would entertain him for a moment, though none of them have much merit. I would have written to him, had I had anything to tell him; which, you perceive by what I have said, I had not. The affair of the Parliament of Brétagne, and the intended trial of the famous Mons. de la Chalotais by commission, against which the Parliament of Paris strongly inveighs, is the great subject in agitation; but I know little of the matter, and was too sick of our own Parliaments to interest myself about these. The Hôtel de Carnavalet sends its blessings to you. I never pass it without saying an Ave Maria de Rabutin-Chantal, gratiâ plena! The Abbé de Malherbe has given orders that I should see Livry whenever I please. Pray tell me which convent was that of nos Sœurs de Sainte Marie, where our friend' used to go on the evening that Madame de Grignan set out for Provence ?

My best compliments to Mr. Williams: has Lord Rockingham done anything for him yet? or has the Duke of Newcastle his old power of dispensing with promises? I sent my Lady Townshend, as long ago as by Lady Hertford, two silver knives which she desired, but cannot hear by any way that she received them. I could ask twenty other questions; but some I had better not ask, and the rest I should not care whether they were answered or not. We have swarms of English; but most of them know not Joseph, and Joseph does not desire to know them. I live with none of them but Craw

1 Madame de Grignan was the daughter to whom Madame de Sévigne's charming letters were addressed. Livry, situated in the Fôret de Bondi, about three leagues from Paris, was frequently the residence of Madame de Sévigné, and the place from whence several of her letters were addressed. Livry is described by Walpole in a letter to Montagu of April 3, 1766.-CUNNINGHAM.