There is going to be represented a translation of Hamlet:  who when his hair is cut, and he is curled and powdered, I suppose will be exactly Monsieur le Prime Oreste.  T’other night I was at M`erope.  The Dumenil was as divine as Mrs. Porter; they said her familiar tones were those of a poisonni`ere.  In the last act, when one expected the catastrophe, Narbas, more interested than any body to see the event, remained coolly on the stage to hear the story.  The Queen’s maid of honour entered without her handkerchief, and with her hair most artfully undressed, and reeling as if she was maudlin, sobbed Out a long narrative, that did not prove true; while Narbas, with all the good breeding in the world, was more attentive to her fright than to what had happened.  So much for propriety.  Now for probability.  Voltaire has published a tragedy, called “Les Gu`e,bres.”  Two Roman colonels open the piece:  they are brothers, and relate to one another, how they lately in company destroyed, by the Emperor’s mandate, a city of the Guebres, in which were their own wives and children:  and they recollect that they want prodigiously to know whether both their families did perish in the flames.  The son of the one and the daughter of the other are taken up for heretics, and, thinking themselves brother and sister, insist upon being married, and upon being executed for their religion.  The son stabs his father, who is half a Gu`ebre, too.  The high-priest rants and roars.  The Emperor arrives, blames the pontiff for being a persecutor, and forgives the son for assassinating his father (who does not die) because—­I don’t know why, but that he may marry his cousin.  The grave-diggers in Hamlet have no chance, when such a piece as the Guebres is written agreeably to all rules and unities.  Adieu, my dear Sir!  I hope to find you quite well at my return.  Yours ever.

(1086) Thomas Barret Lennard, seventeenth Baron Dacre.  His lordship married Ann Maria, daughter of Sir John Pratt, lord chief-justice of the court of King’s Bench.-E.

(1087) At that time the fashionable physician of Paris.  He was originally from Arles, and attained his celebrity by curing the ladies of fashion in the French metropolis of the vapours.-E.

(1088) Madame du Deffand.

\Letter 369 To George Montagu, Esq.

Paris, Sept. 7, 1769. (page 553)

Your two letters flew here together in a breath.  I shall answer the article of business first.  I could certainly buy many things for you here, that you would like, the reliques of the last age’s magnificence; but, since my Lady Holderness invaded the custom-house with a hundred and fourteen gowns, in the reign of that two-penny monarch George Grenville, the ports are so guarded, that not a soul but a smuggler can smuggle any thing into England; and I suppose you would not care to pay seventy-five per cent, on second-hand commodities.  All I transported three years ago, was conveyed under the canon of the Duke