The King, the Duke, and Princess Emily saw it from the Library, with their courts:  the Prince and Princess, with their children, from Lady Middlesex’s; no place being provided for them, nor any invitation given to the library.  The Lords and Commons had galleries built for them and the chief citizens along the rails of the Mall:  the Lords had four tickets a-piece, and each Commoner, at first, but two, till the Speaker bounced and obtained a third.  Very little mischief was done, and but two persons killed:  at Paris, there were forty killed and near three hundred wounded, by a dispute between the French and Italians in the management, who, quarrelling for precedence in lighting the fires, both lighted at once and blew up the whole.  Our mob was extremely tranquil, and very unlike those I remember in my father’s time, when it was a measure in the Opposition to work up everything to mischief, the Excise and the French players, the Convention and the Gin Act.  We are as much now in the opposite extreme, and in general so pleased with the peace, that I could not help being struck with a passage I read lately in Pasquier, an old French author, who says, “that in the time of Francis I. the French used to call their creditors ‘Des Anglois,’ from the facility with which the English gave credit to them in all treaties, though they had broken so many.”  On Saturday we had a serenta at the Opera-house, called Peace in Europe, but it was a wretched performance.  On Monday there was a subscription masquerade, much fuller than that of last year, but not so agreeable or so various in dresses.  The King was well disguised in an old-fashioned English habit, and much pleased with somebody who desired him to hold their cup as they were drinking tea.  The Duke had a dress of the same kind, but was so immensely corpulent that he looked like Cacofogo, the drunken captain, in “Rule a Wife and have a Wife.”  The Duchess of Richmond was a Lady Mayoress in the time of James I.; and Lord Delawarr, Queen Elizabeth’s porter, from a picture in the guard-chamber at Kensington:  they were admirable masks.  Lord Rochford, Miss Evelyn, Miss Bishop, Lady Stafford, and Mrs. Pitt, were in vast beauty; particularly the last, who had a red veil, which made her look gloriously handsome.  I forgot Lady Kildare.  Mr. Conway was the Duke in “Don Quixote,” and the finest figure I ever saw.  Miss Chudleigh was Iphigenia, but so naked that you would have taken her for Andromeda; and Lady Betty Smithson [Seymour] had such a pyramid of baubles upon her head, that she was exactly the Princess of Babylon in Grammont.

You will conclude that, after all these diversions, people begin to think of going out of town—­no such matter:  the Parliament continues sitting, and will till the middle of June; Lord Egmont told us we should sit till Michaelmas.  There are many private bills, no public ones of any fame.  We were to have had some chastisement for Oxford, where, besides the late riots, the famous Dr. King,[1] the