For my own part, I comfort myself with the humane reflection of the Irishman in the ship that was on fire—­I am but a passenger!  If I were not so indolent, I think I should rather put in practice the late Duchess of Bolton’s geographical resolution of going to China, when Whiston told her the world would be burnt in three years.  Have you any philosophy?  Tell me what you think.  It is quite the fashion to talk of the French coming here.  Nobody sees it in any other light but as a thing to be talked of, not to be precautioned against.  Don’t you remember a report of the plague being in the City, and everybody went to the house where it was to see it?  You see I laugh about it, for I would not for the world be so unenglished as to do otherwise.  I am persuaded that when Count Saxe,[1] with ten thousand men, is within a day’s march of London, people will be hiring windows at Charing-cross and Cheapside to see them pass by.  ’Tis our characteristic to take dangers for sights, and evils for curiosities.

[Footnote 1:  The great Marechal Saxe, Commander-in-chief of the French army in Flanders during the war of the Austrian succession.]

Adieu! dear George:  I am laying in scraps of Cato against it may be necessary to take leave of one’s correspondents a la Romaine, and before the play itself is suppressed by a lettre de cachet to the book-sellers.

P.S.—­Lord! ’tis the first of August,[1] 1745, a holiday that is going to be turned out of the almanack!

[Footnote 1:  August 1 was the anniversary of the accession of George I.]

INVASION OF SCOTLAND BY THE YOUNG PRETENDER—­FORCES ARE SAID TO BE PREPARING IN FRANCE TO JOIN HIM.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

ARLINGTON STREET, Sept. 6, 1745.

It would have been inexcusable in me, in our present circumstances, and after all I have promised you, not to have written to you for this last month, if I had been in London; but I have been at Mount Edgecumbe, and so constantly upon the road, that I neither received your letters, had time to write, or knew what to write.  I came back last night, and found three packets from you, which I have no time to answer, and but just time to read.  The confusion I have found, and the danger we are in, prevent my talking of anything else.  The young Pretender, at the head of three thousand men, has got a march on General Cope, who is not eighteen hundred strong; and when the last accounts came away, was fifty miles nearer Edinburgh than Cope, and by this time is there.  The clans will not rise for the Government:  the Dukes of Argyll and Athol are come post to town, not having been able to raise a man.  The young Duke of Gordon sent for his uncle, and told him he must arm their clan.  “They are in arms.”—­“They must march against the rebels.”—­“They will wait on the Prince of Wales.”  The Duke flew in a passion; his uncle pulled out a pistol, and told him it was in vain to dispute.  Lord Loudon, Lord Fortrose, and Lord Panmure have been very zealous, and have raised some men; but I look upon Scotland as gone!  I think of what King William said to Duke Hamilton, when he was extolling Scotland:  “My Lord, I only wish it was a hundred thousand miles off, and that you was king of it!”