hopes, and views, and expectations, on this acquisition.  Well, if we can steer wisely between insolence from success and impatience for peace, we may secure our safety and tranquillity for many years.  But they are not yet arrived, nor hear I anything that tells me the peace will certainly be made.  France wants peace; I question if she wishes it.  How his Catholic royalty will take this, one cannot guess.  My good friend, we are not at table with Monsieur de Nivernois, so we may smile at this consequence of the family-compact.  Twelve ships-of-the-line and the Havannah!—­it becomes people who cannot keep their own, to divide the world between them!

Your nephew Foote has made a charming figure; the King and Queen went from Windsor to see Eton; he is captain of the Oppidans, and made a speech to them with great applause.  It was in English, which was right; why should we talk Latin to our Kings rather than Russ or Iroquois?  Is this a season for being ashamed of our country?  Dr. Barnard, the master, is the Pitt of masters, and has raised the school to the most flourishing state it ever knew.

Lady Mary Wortley[1] has left twenty-one large volumes in prose and verse, in manuscript; nineteen are fallen to Lady Bute, and will not see the light in haste.  The other two Lady Mary in her passage gave to somebody in Holland, and at her death expressed great anxiety to have them published.  Her family are in terrors lest they should be, and have tried to get them:  hitherto the man is inflexible.  Though I do not doubt but they are an olio of lies and scandal, I should like to see them.  She had parts, and had seen much.  Truth is often at bottom of such compositions, and places itself here and there without the intention of the mother.  I dare say in general, these works are like Madame del Pozzo’s Memoires.  Lady Mary had more wit, and something more delicacy; their manners and morals were a good deal more alike.

[Footnote 1:  In a note to this letter, subsequently added by Walpole, he reduces this statement to seventeen, saying:  “It was true that Lady Mary did leave seventeen volumes of her works and memories.  She gave her letters from Constantinople to Mr. Sowden, minister of the English Church at Rotterdam, who published them; and, the day before she died, she gave him those seventeen volumes, with injunctions to publish them too; but in two days the man had a crown living from Lord Bute, and Lady Bute had the seventeen volumes.”]

There is a lad, a waiter at St. James’s coffee-house, of thirteen years old, who says he does not wonder we beat the French, for he himself could thrash Monsieur de Nivernois.  This duke is so thin and small, that when minister at Berlin, at a time that France was not in favour there, the King of Prussia said, if his eyes were a little older, he should want a glass to see the embassador.  I do not admire this bon-mot.  Voltaire is continuing his “Universal