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(733) and the Prince Royal of Denmark.  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, Horace Walpole.

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.

(726) Gray, in a letter to Dr. Wharton, written in July 1764, in giving an account of an illness, says, “Towards the end of my confinement, during which I lived on nothing, came, the gout in one foot, but so tame you might have stroked it.”  To this passage, the learned editor of the last edition of his works has sub-joined this note:—­“I have mentioned several coincidences of thought and expression of this kind in the letters of Gray and Walpole, which I conceived to be a kind of common property; the reader, indeed, will recognise much of that species of humour which distinguishes Gray’s correspondence in the letters of Walpole, inferior, I think, in its comic force; sometimes deviating too far from propriety in search of subjects for the display of its talent, and not altogether free from affectation.”  Vol. iv. p. 33.-E.

(727) Sir William Draper, K.B. best known by his controversy with Junius.  The letter here alluded to was entitled, “An Answer to the Spanish Arguments for Refusing the Payment of the Ransom Bills."-E.

(728) General Conway’s brother-in-law.-E.

(729) Afterwards Duke of Northumberland-E.

(730) Afterwards Lord Camelford.-E.

(731) ant`e, p. 299, letter 196.

(732) Second son of the first Earl of Ilchester-E.

(733) The unhappy Queen of Denmark, who was afterwards divorced and exiled.-E.

Letter 238 To The Earl Of Hertford.  Sunday, Jan. 20, 1765. (page 367)

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 in it 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