(820) Brother to Lady Diana Beauclerc.

(821) The family of the Hon. Edward Bouverie, brother to the Earl of Radnor.

(822) Of Berkeley.

(823) Lady Craven became a widow in the following month, and was married to the Margrave of Anspach in October.  See ante, p. 387, letter 305.

Letter 389 To The Miss Berrys.  Strawberry Hill, Sept. 11, 1791. (page 517)

Though I am delighted to know, that of thirteen doleful months but two remain, yet how full of anxiety will they be!  You set out in still hot weather, and will taste very cold before you arrive!  Accidents, inns, roads, mountains, and the sea, are all in my map!- but I hope no slopes to be run down, no f`etes for a new Grand Duke.  I should dread your meeting armies, if I had much faith in the counter-revolution said to be on the anvil.  The French ladies in my vicinage (a, word of the late Lord Chatham’s coin) are all hen-a-hoop on the expectation of a grand alliance formed for that purpose, and I believe think they shall be at Paris before you are in England; but I trust one is more certain than the other.  That folly and confusion increase in France every hour, I have no doubt, and absurdity and contradictions as rapidly.  Their constitution, which they had voted should be immortal and unchangeable,-though they deny that any thing antecedent to themselves ought to have been so,-they are now of opinion must be revised at the commencement of next century; and they are agitating a third constitution, before they have thought of a second, or finished the first!  Bravo!  In short, Louis Onze could not have laid deeper foundations for despotism than these levellers, who have rendered the name of liberty odious—­the surest way of destroying the dear essence!

I have no news for you, but a sudden match patched up for Lord Blandford, with a little more art than was employed by the fair Gunnilda.  It is with Lady Susan Stewart, Lord Galloway’s daughter, contrived by and at the house of her relation and Lord Blandford’s friend, Sir Henry Dashwood ; and it is to be so instantly, that her grace, his mother, will scarce have time to forbid the bans.(824)

We have got a codicil to summer, that is as delightful as, I believe, the seasons in the Fortunate Islands.  It is pity it lasts but till seven in the evening, and then one remains with a black chimney for five hours.  I wish the sun was not so fashionable as never to come into the country till autumn and the shooting season; as if Niobe’s children were not hatched and fledged before the first of September.  Apropos, Sir William Hamilton has actually married his Gallery of Statues, and they are set out on their return to Naples.  I am sorry I did not see her attitudes, which Lady Di. (a tolerable judge!) prefers to any thing she ever saw:  still I do not much care.  I have at this moment a commercial treaty with Italy, and hope in two months to be a greater gainer by the exchange; and I shall not be so generous as Sir William, and exhibit my wives in pantomime to the public.  ’Tis well I am to have the originals again; for that wicked swindler, Miss Foldson, has not yet given up their portraits.