it will come safe.  Oh, Mrs. Masham and I are very well; we write to one another, but it is upon business; I believe I told you so before:  pray pardon my forgetfulness in these cases; poor Presto can’t help it.  MD shall have the money as soon as Tooke gets it.  And so I think I have answered all, and the paper is out, and now I have fetched up my week, and will send you another this day fortnight.—­Why, you rogues, two crowns make tench-ill-ling:[16] you are so dull you could never have found it out.  Farewell, etc. etc.

LETTER 34.

London, Nov. 3, 1711.

My thirty-third lies now before me just finished, and I am going to seal and send it, so let me know whether you would have me add anything:  I gave you my journal of this day; and it is now nine at night, and I am going to be busy for an hour or two.

4.  I left a friend’s house to-day where I was invited, just when dinner was setting on, and pretended I was engaged, because I saw some fellows I did not know; and went to Sir Matthew Dudley’s, where I had the same inconvenience, but he would not let me go; otherwise I would have gone home, and sent for a slice of mutton and a pot of ale, rather than dine with persons unknown, as bad, for aught I know, as your deans, parsons, and curates.  Bad slabby weather to-day.—­Now methinks I write at ease, when I have no letter of MD’s to answer.  But I mistook, and have got the large paper.  The Queen is laid up with the gout at Hampton Court:  she is now seldom without it any long time together; I fear it will wear her out in a very few years.  I plainly find I have less twitchings about my toes since these Ministers are sick and out of town, and that I don’t dine with them.  I would compound for a light easy gout to be perfectly well in my head.—­Pray walk when the frost comes, young ladies go a frost-biting.  It comes into my head, that, from the very time you first went to Ireland, I have been always plying you to walk and read.  The young fellows here have begun a kind of fashion to walk, and many of them have got swingeing strong shoes on purpose; it has got as far as several young lords; if it hold, it would be a very good thing.  Lady Lucy[1] and I are fallen out; she rails at me, and I have left visiting her.

5.  MD was very troublesome to me last night in my sleep; I was a dreamed, methought, that Stella was here.  I asked her after Dingley, and she said she had left her in Ireland, because she designed her stay to be short, and such stuff.—­Monsieur Pontchartain, the Secretary of State in France, and Monsieur Fontenelle, the Secretary of the Royal Academy there (who writ the Dialogues des Morts, etc.), have sent letters to Lord Pembroke that the Academy have, with the King’s consent, chosen him one of their members in the room of one who is lately dead.  But the cautious gentleman has given me