ministers bribing Jacobites to choose friends of their own—­the name of well-wishers to the present establishment, and patriots outbidding ministers that they may make the better market of their own patriotism:—­in short, all England, under some name or other, is just now to be bought and sold; though, whenever we become posterity and forefathers, we shall be in high repute for wisdom and virtue.  My great-great-grandchildren will figure me with a white beard down to my girdle; and Mr. Pitt’s will believe him unspotted enough to have walked over nine hundred hot ploughshares, without hurting the sole of his foot.  How merry my ghost will be, and shake its ears to hear itself quoted as a person of consummate prudence!  Adieu, dear Harry!

Yours ever.

HIS MODE OF LIFE—­PLANTING—­PROPHECIES OF NEW METHODS AND NEW DISCOVERIES IN A FUTURE GENERATION.

TO THE HON.  H.S.  CONWAY.

STRAWBERRY HILL, Aug. 29, 1748.

Dear Harry,—­Whatever you may think, a campaign at Twickenham furnishes as little matter for a letter as an abortive one in Flanders.  I can’t say indeed that my generals wear black wigs, but they have long full-bottomed hoods which cover as little entertainment to the full.

[Illustration:  STRAWBERRY HILL, FROM THE SOUTH EAST.]

There’s General my Lady Castlecomer, and General my Lady Dowager Ferris!  Why, do you think I can extract more out of them than you can out of Hawley or Honeywood?  Your old women dress, go to the Duke’s levee, see that the soldiers cock their hats right, sleep after dinner, and soak with their led-captains till bed-time, and tell a thousand lies of what they never did in their youth.  Change hats for head-clothes, the rounds for visits, and led-captains for toad-eaters, and the life is the very same.  In short, these are the people I live in the midst of, though not with; and it is for want of more important histories that I have wrote to you seldom; not, I give you my word, from the least negligence.  My present and sole occupation is planting, in which I have made great progress and talked very learnedly with the nurserymen, except that now and then a lettuce run to seed overturns all my botany, as I have more than once taken it for a curious West Indian flowering shrub.  Then the deliberation with which trees grow, is extremely inconvenient to my natural impatience.  I lament living in so barbarous an age, when we are come to so little perfection in gardening.  I am persuaded that a hundred and fifty years hence it will be as common to remove oaks a hundred and fifty years old, as it is now to transplant tulip roots.[1] I have even begun a treatise or panegyric on the great discoveries made by posterity in all arts and sciences, wherein I shall particularly descant on the great and cheap convenience of making trout-rivers—­one of the improvements which Mrs. Kerwood wondered Mr. Hedges would not make at his country-house, but which