from Richmond.  Your friend Mr. Dundas was robbed this morning at eleven o’clock at Cranford-bridge.  He happened to tell them he is a surgeon; on which they insisted on his giving them his case of instruments.  I suspect they are French surgeons, and will poison the instruments for the first wound they dress.  You see how I labour in your service, though my crops are small.  An old Duchess of Rutland, mother of the late Duchess of Montrose, whenever a visiter told her some news or scandal, cried to her daughter, “Lucy, do step into next room, and make a memorandum of what Lady Greenwich, or Lady M.M. or N.N. has been telling us.”  “Lord!  Madam, to be sure it cannot be true.”  “No matter, child; it will do for news in the country.”  It is for want of such prudent provision pour le couvent, that so many people are forced to invent off-hand.  You cannot say I am so thoughtless:  you receive every morsel piping-hot as it comes from the bakers.  One word about our glorious weather, and I have done.  It even improves every day.  I kept the window open till dinner-time to-day, and could do nothing but gaze at the brilliant beauty of the verdure.  It is so equal to ordinary Julys, that one is surprised to see the sun set before six o’clock.  Good night!

(859) Sir George Yonge.

Letter 407 To Miss Hannah More.(860) Strawberry Hill, Oct. 1793. page 546)

Though it would make me happy, my dear Madam, if you were more corresponding, yet I must not reproach your silence, nor wish it were less; for all your moments are so dedicated to goodness, and to unwearied acts of benevolence, that you must steal from charity, or purloin from the repose you want, any that you bestow on me.  Do not I know, too, alas! how indifferent your health is!  You sacrifice that to your duties:  but can a friend, who esteems you so highly as I do, be so selfish as to desire to cost you half an hour’s headache!  No, never send me a line that you can employ better; that would trespass on your ease.

Of the trash written against you I had never even heard.(861) Nor do I believe that they gave you any other disquiet than what arose from seeing that the worthiest and most humane intentions are poison to some human beings.  Oh! have not the last five years brought to light such infernal malevolence, such monstrous crimes, as mankind had grown civilized enough to disbelieve when they read any thing similar in former ages; if, indeed, any thing similar has been recorded.  But I must not enter into what I dare not fathom.  Catherine Slay-Czar triumphs over the good honest Poles; and Louis Seize perishes on a scaffold, the best of men:  while whole assemblies of fiends, calling themselves men, are from day to day meditating torment and torture for his heroic widow; On whom, with all their power and malice, and with every page, footman, and chambermaid of hers In their reach, and with the rack in their hands, they have not been able to fix a speck.  Nay, do they not talk of the inutility of evidence?  What other virtue ever sustained such an ordeal?  But who can wonder, when the Almighty himself is called by one of those wretches, the soi-disant God.