[Footnote 1:  Mrs. Montagu was the foundress of “The Blue-stocking Club.”  She was the authoress of three “Dialogues of the Dead,” to which Walpole is alluding here, and which she published with some others by Lord Lyttelton.]

When do you come? if it is not soon, you will find a new town.  I stared to-day at Piccadilly like a country squire; there are twenty new stone houses:  at first I concluded that all the grooms, that used to live there, had got estates, and built palaces.  One young gentleman, who was getting an estate, but was so indiscreet as to step out of his way to rob a comrade, is convicted, and to be transported; in short, one of the waiters at Arthur’s.  George Selwyn says, “What a horrid idea he will give of us to the people in Newgate!”

I was still more surprised t’other day, than at seeing Piccadilly, by receiving a letter from the north of Ireland from a clergyman, with violent encomiums on my “Catalogue of Noble Authors”—­and this when I thought it quite forgot.  It puts me in mind of the queen[1] that sunk at Charing Cross and rose at Queenhithe.

[Footnote 1:  Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., who erected the cross at Charing, and others at the different places where her body had stopped on the way from the North to Westminster.]

Mr. Chute has got his commission to inquire about your Cutts, but he thinks the lady is not your grandmother.  You are very ungenerous to hoard tales from me of your ancestry:  what relation have I spared?  If your grandfathers were knaves, will your bottling up their bad blood mend it?  Do you only take a cup of it now and then by yourself, and then come down to your parson, and boast of it, as if it was pure old metheglin?  I sat last night with the Mater Gracchorum—­oh! ’tis a Mater Jagorum; if her descendants taste any of her black blood, they surely will make as wry faces at it as the servant in Don John does when the ghost decants a corpse.  Good night!  I am just returning to Strawberry, to husband my two last days and to avoid all the pomp of the birthday.  Oh!  I had forgot, there is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be handsomer than my Lady Coventry; but I have known one threatened with such every summer for these seven years, and they are always addled by winter!

HE LIVES AMONGST ROYALTY—­COMMOTIONS IN IRELAND.

TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

ARLINGTON STREET, Jan. 7, 1760.

You must not wonder I have not written to you a long time; a person of my consequence!  I am now almost ready to say, We, instead of I.  In short, I live amongst royalty—­considering the plenty, that is no great wonder.  All the world lives with them, and they with all the world.  Princes and Princesses open shops, in every corner of the town, and the whole town deals with them.  As I have gone to one, I chose to frequent all, that I might not be particular, and seem to have views; and yet it went so much against me, that I came to