Are your charming lawns burnt up like our humble hills?  Is your sweet river as low as our deserted Thames?—­I am wishing for a handful or two of those floods that drowned me last year all the way from Wentworth Castle.  I beg my best compliments to my lady, and my best wishes that every pheasant egg and peacock egg may produce as many colours as a harlequin-jacket.

Tuesday, July 5th.

Luckily, my good lord, my conscience had saved its distance.  I had writ the above last night, when I received the honour of your kind letter this morning.  You had, as I did not doubt, received accounts of all our strange histories.  For that of the pretty Countess [of Coventry], I fear there is too much truth in all you have heard:  but you don’t seem to know that Lord Corydon and Captain Corydon his brother have been most abominable.  I don’t care to write scandal; but when I see you, I will tell you how much the chits deserve to be whipped.  Our favourite general [Conway] is at his camp:  Lady Ailesbury don’t go to him these three weeks.  I expect the pleasure of seeing her and Miss Rich and Fred. Campbell here soon for a few days.  I don’t wonder your lordship likes St. Philippe better than Torcy:[1] except a few passages interesting to Englishmen, there cannot be a more dry narration than the latter.  There is an addition of seven volumes of Universal History to Voltaire’s Works, which I think will charm you:  I almost like it the best of his works.  It is what you have seen extended, and the Memoirs of Louis XIV. refondues in it.  He is a little tiresome with contradicting La Beaumelle and Voltaire, one remains with scarce a fixed idea about that time.  I wish they would produce their authorities and proofs; without which, I am grown to believe neither.  From mistakes in the English part, I suppose there are great ones in the more distant histories; yet altogether it is a fine work.  He is, as one might believe, worst informed on the present times.—­He says eight hundred persons were put to death for the last Rebellion—­I don’t believe a quarter of the number were:  and he makes the first Lord Derwentwater—­who, poor man! was in no such high-spirited mood—­bring his son, who by the way was not above a year and a half old, upon the scaffold to be sprinkled with his blood.—­However, he is in the right to expect to be believed:  for he believes all the romances in Lord Anson’s Voyage, and how Admiral Almanzor made one man-of-war box the ears of the whole empire of China!—­I know nothing else new but a new edition of Dr. Young’s Works.  If your lordship thinks like me, who hold that even in his most frantic rhapsodies there are innumerable fine things, you will like to have this edition.  Adieu, once more, my best lord!

[Footnote 1:  Torcy had been Secretary of State in the time of Louis XIV., and was the diplomatist who arranged the details of the First Partition Treaty with William III.]

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