Lady Mary Wortley is arrived;(212) I have seen her; I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity, are all increased.  Her dress, like her languages, is a gralimatias of several countries; the groundwork rags, and the embroidery nastiness.  She needs no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes.  An old black-laced hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman’s coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last.  When I was at Florence, and she was expected there, we were drawing Sortes Virgili-anas for her; we literally drew

Insanam vatem aspicies.

It would have been a stronger prophecy now, even than it was then.

You told me not a word of Mr. Macnaughton,(213) and I have a great mind to be as coolly indolent about our famous ghost in Cock-lane.  Why should one steal half an hour from one’s amusements to tell a story to a friend in another island?  I could send you volumes on the ghost, and I believe if I were to stay a little, I might send its life, dedicated to my Lord Dartmouth, by the ordinary of Newgate, its two great patrons.  A drunken parish clerk set it on foot out of revenge, the Methodists have adopted it, and the whole town of london think of nothing else.  Elizabeth Canning and the Rabbit-woman were modest impostors in comparison of this, which goes on Without saving the least appearances.  The Archbishop, who would not suffer the Minor to be acted in ridicule of the Methodists, permits this farce to be played every night, and I shall not be surprised if they perform in the great hall at Lambeth.  I went to hear it, for it is not an apparition, but an audition.  We set out from the Opera, changed our clothes at Northumberland-house, the Duke of York, Lady Northumberland, Lady Mary Coke, Lord Hertford, and I, all in one hackney coach, and drove to the spot:  it rained torrents; yet the lane was full of mob, and the house so full we could not get in; at last they discovered it was the Duke of York, and the company squeezed themselves into one another’s pockets to make room for us.  The house, which is borrowed, and to which the ghost has adjourned, is wretchedly small and miserable; when we opened the chamber, in which were fifty people, with no light but one tallow candle at the end, we tumbled over the bed of the child to whom the ghost comes, and whom they are murdering by inches in such insufferable heat and stench.  At the top of the room are ropes to dry clothes.  I asked, if we were to have rope-dancing between the acts?  We had nothing; they told us, as they would at a puppet-show, that it would not come that night till seven in the morning, that is, when there are only ’prentices and old women.  We stayed however till half an hour after one.  The Methodists have promised them contributions; provisions are sent in like forage, and all the taverns and alehouses in the neighbourhood