TO GEORGE MONTAGU, ESQ.

[August 1, 1745.]

Dear George,—­I cannot help thinking you laugh at me when you say such very civil things of my letters, and yet, coming from you, I would fain not have it all flattery: 

    So much the more, as, from a little elf,
    I’ve had a high opinion of myself,
    Though sickly, slender, and not large of limb.

With this modest prepossession, you may be sure I like to have you commend me, whom, after I have done with myself, I admire of all men living.  I only beg that you will commend me no more:  it is very ruinous; and praise, like other debts, ceases to be due on being paid.  One comfort indeed is, that it is as seldom paid as other debts.

I have been very fortunate lately:  I have met with an extreme good print of M. de Grignan;[1] I am persuaded, very like; and then it has his touffe ebourifee; I don’t, indeed, know what that was, but I am sure it is in the print.  None of the critics could ever make out what Livy’s Patavinity is; though they are all confident it is in his writings.  I have heard within these few days what, for your sake, I wish I could have told you sooner—­that there is in Belleisle’s suite the Abbe Perrin, who published Madame Sevigne’s letters, and who has the originals in his hands.  How one should have liked to have known him!  The Marshal[2] was privately in London last Friday.  He is entertained to-day at Hampton Court by the Duke of Grafton.  Don’t you believe it was to settle the binding the scarlet thread in the window, when the French shall come in unto the land to possess it?  I don’t at all wonder at any shrewd observations the Marshal has made on our situation.  The bringing him here at all—­the sending him away now—­in short, the whole series of our conduct convinces me, that we shall soon see as silent a change as that in “The Rehearsal,” of King Usher and King Physician.  It may well be so, when the disposition of the drama is in the hands of the Duke of Newcastle—­those hands that are always groping and sprawling, and fluttering, and hurrying on the rest of his precipitate person.  But there is no describing him but as M. Courcelle, a French prisoner, did t’other day:  “Je ne scais pas,” dit il, “je ne scaurois m’exprimer, mais il a un certain tatillonage.”  If one could conceive a dead body hung in chains, always wanting to be hung somewhere else, one should have a comparative idea of him.

[Footnote 1:  M. de Grignan son-in-law to Mme. de Sevigne, the greater part of whose letters are to his wife.]

[Footnote 2:  The Marechal de Belleisle and his younger brother, the Comte de Belleisle, were the grandsons of Fouquet, the Finance Minister treated with such cruelty and injustice by Louis XIV.  The Parisians nicknamed the two brothers “Imagination” and “Common Sense.”  The Marshal was joined with the Marshal de Broglie in the disastrous expedition against Prague in the winter of 1742; when, though they succeeded in taking and occupying the city for a time, they were afterwards forced to evacuate it; and though Belleisle conducted the retreat with great courage and skill, the army, which had numbered fifty thousand men when it crossed the Rhine, scarcely exceeded twelve thousand when it regained the French territory. (See the Editor’s “History of France under the Bourbons,” c. xxv.)]