arms, grey stockings and slippers.  Her face less changed in twenty years than I could have imagined; I told her so, and she was not so tolerable twenty years ago that she needed have taken it for flattery, but she did, and literally gave me a box on the ear.  She is very lively, all her senses perfect, her languages as imperfect as ever, her avarice greater.  She entertained me at first with nothing but the dearness of provisions at Helvoet.  With nothing but an Italian, a French, and a Prussian, all men servants, and something she calls an old secretary, but whose age till he appears will be doubtful; she receives all the world, who go to homage her as Queen Mother,[3] and crams them into this kennel.  The Duchess of Hamilton, who came in just after me, was so astonished and diverted, that she could not speak to her for laughing.  She says that she has left all her clothes at Venice.  I really pity Lady Bute; what will the progress be of such a commencement!

[Footnote 1:  It was known as the Cock-lane Ghost.  A girl in that lane asserted that she was nightly visited by a ghost, who could reveal a murder, and who gave her tokens of his (or its) presence by knocks and scratches, which were audible to others in the room besides herself; and at last she went so far as to declare that the ghost had promised to attend a witness, who might be selected, into the vault under the Church of St. John’s, Clerkenwell, where the body of the supposed victim was buried.  Her story caused such excitement, that at last Dr. Johnson, Dr. Douglas (afterwards Bishop of Salisbury), and one or two other gentlemen, undertook an investigation of the affair, which proved beyond all doubt that it was a trick, though they could not discover how it was performed, nor could they make the girl confess; and Johnson wrote an account of their investigations and verdict, which was published in The Gentleman’s Magazine and the newspapers of the day (Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” ann. 1763).]

[Footnote 2:  Lady Mary Wortley was a daughter of the Duke of Kingston and wife of Mr. Wortley, our ambassador at Constantinople.  She was the most accomplished lady of the eighteenth century.  Christian Europe is indebted to her for the introduction of the practice of inoculation for the smallpox, of which she heard during her residence in Turkey, and of the efficacy of which she was so convinced that she caused her own children to be inoculated; and, by publishing its success in their case, she led to its general adoption.  It saved innumerable lives in the eighteenth century, and was, in fact, the parent of the vaccination which has superseded it, and which is merely inoculation with matter derived from another source, the cow.  She was also an authoress of considerable repute for lyric odes and vers de societe, &c., and, above all, for her letters, most of which are to her daughter, Lady Bute (as Mme. de Sevigne’s are to her daughter, Mme. de Grignan), and which are