I now jump to another topic; I find all this letter will be detached scraps; I can’t at all contrive to hide the seams:  but I don’t care.  I began my letter merely to tell you of the earthquake, and I don’t pique myself upon doing any more than telling you what you would be glad to have told you.  I told you too how pleased I was with the triumphs of another old beauty, our friend the Princess.  Do you know, I have found a history that has great resemblance to hers; that is, that will be very like hers, if hers is but like it.  I will tell it you in as few words as I can.  Madame la Marechale l’Hopital was the daughter of a seamstress; a young gentleman fell in love with her, and was going to be married to her, but the match was broken off.  An old fermier-general, who had retired into the province where this happened, hearing the story, had a curiosity to see the victim; he liked her, married her, died, and left her enough not to care for her inconstant.  She came to Paris, where the Marechal de l’Hopital married her for her riches.  After the Marechal’s death, Casimir, the abdicated King of Poland, who was retired into France, fell in love with the Marechale, and privately married her.  If the event ever happens, I shall certainly travel to Nancy, to hear her talk of ma belle fille la Reine de France.  What pains my Lady Pomfret would take to prove that an abdicated King’s wife did not take place of an English countess; and how the Princess herself would grow still fonder of the Pretender for the similitude of his fortune with that of le Roi mon mari!  Her daughter, Mirepoix, was frightened the other night, with Mrs. Nugent’s calling out, un voleur! un voleur!  The ambassadress had heard so much of robbing, that she did not doubt but dans ce pais cy, they robbed in the middle of an assembly.  It turned out to be a thief in the candle!  Good night!

GENERAL PANIC—­SHERLOCK’S PASTORAL LETTER—­PREDICTIONS OF MORE EARTHQUAKES—­A GENERAL FLIGHT FROM LONDON—­EPIGRAMS BY CHUTE AND WALPOLE HIMSELF—­FRENCH TRANSLATION OF MILTON.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

ARLINGTON STREET, April 2, 1750.

You will not wonder so much at our earthquakes as at the effects they have had.  All the women in town have taken them up upon the foot of Judgments; and the clergy, who have had no windfalls of a long season, have driven horse and foot into this opinion.  There has been a shower of sermons and exhortations:  Seeker, the Jesuitical Bishop of Oxford, began the mode.  He heard the women were all going out of town to avoid the next shock; and so, for fear of losing his Easter offerings, he set himself to advise them to await God’s good pleasure in fear and trembling.  But what is more astonishing, Sherlock, who has much better sense, and much less of the Popish confessor, has been running a race with him for the old ladies, and has written a pastoral letter, of which ten thousand were sold in two days; and fifty thousand have been subscribed for, since the two first editions.