that relate to her and her acquaintance.  Out of this closet is the room where we always live, hung with a blue and white paper in stripes adorned with festoons, and a thousand plump chairs, couches, and luxurious settees covered with linen of the same pattern, and with a bow-window commanding the prospect, and gloomed with limes that shade half each window, already darkened with painted glass in chiaroscuro, set in deep blue glass.  Under this room is a cool little hall, where we generally dine, hung with paper to imitate Dutch tiles.

I have described so much, that you will begin to think that all the accounts I used to give you of the diminutiveness of our habitation were fabulous; but it is really incredible how small most of the rooms are.  The only two good chambers I shall have are not yet built:  they will be an eating-room and a library, each twenty by thirty, and the latter fifteen feet high.  For the rest of the house I could send it you in this letter as easily as the drawing, only that I should have nowhere to live till the return of the post.  The Chinese summer-house, which you may distinguish in the distant landscape, belongs to my Lord Radnor.  We pique ourselves upon nothing but simplicity, and have no carvings, gildings, paintings, inlayings, or tawdry businesses.

You will not be sorry, I believe, by this time to have done with Strawberry Hill, and to hear a little news.  The end of a very dreaming session has been extremely enlivened by an accidental bill which has opened great quarrels, and those not unlikely to be attended with interesting circumstances.  A bill to prevent clandestine marriages,[1] so drawn by the Judges as to clog all matrimony in general, was inadvertently espoused by the Chancellor; and having been strongly attacked in the House of Commons by Nugent, the Speaker, Mr. Fox, and others, the last went very great lengths of severity on the whole body of the law, and on its chieftain in particular, which, however, at the last reading, he softened and explained off extremely.  This did not appease:  but on the return of the bill to the House of Lords, where our amendments were to be read, the Chancellor in the most personal terms harangued against Fox, and concluded with saying that “he despised his scurrility as much as his adulation and recantation.”  As Christian charity is not one of the oaths taken by privy-counsellors, and as it is not the most eminent virtue in either of the champions, this quarrel is not likely to be soon reconciled.  There are natures whose disposition it is to patch up political breaches, but whether they will succeed, or try to succeed in healing this, can I tell you?

[Footnote 1:  These clandestine marriages were often called “Fleet marriages.”  Lord Stanhope, describing this Act, states that “there was ever ready a band of degraded and outcast clergymen, prisoners for debt or for crime, who hovered about the verge of the Fleet prison soliciting customers, and plying, like porters, for employment....  One of these wretches, named Keith, had gained a kind of pre-eminence in infamy.  On being told there was a scheme on foot to stop his lucrative traffic, he declared, with many oaths, he would still be revenged of the Bishops, that he would buy a piece of ground and outbury them!” ("History of England,” c. 31).]