129 Letter 8 To George Montagu, Esq.  Christopher Inn, Eton.

The Christopher.  Lord! how great I used to think anybody just landed at the Christopher!  But here are no boys for me to send for-here I am, like Noah, just returned into his old world again, with all sorts of queer feels about me.  By the way, the clock strikes the old cracked sound-I recollect so much, and remember so little-and want to play about-and am so afraid of my playfellows-and am ready to shirk Ashton and can’t help making fun of myself-and envy a dame over the way, that has just locked in her boarders, and is going to sit down in a little hot parlour to a very bad supper, so comfortably! and I could be so jolly a dog if I did not fat, which, by the way, is the first time the word was ever applicable to me.  In short, I should be out of all bounds if I was to tell you half I feel, how young again I am one minute, and how old the next.  But do come and feel with me, when you will-to-morrow-adieu!  If I don’t compose myself a little more before Sunday morning, when Ashton is to preach, I shall certainly be in a bill for laughing at church; but how to belt it, to see him in the pulpit, when the last time I saw him here, was standing up funking at a conduit to be catechised.  Good night; yours.

1739

130 Letter 9
                       To Richard West, Esq. 
Paris, April 21, N. S. 1739. (157)

Dear West, You figure us in a set of pleasures, which, believe me, we do not find; cards and eating are so universal, that they absorb all variation of pleasures.  The operas, indeed, are much frequented three times a week; but to me they would be a greater penance than eating maigre:  their music resembles a gooseberry tart as much as it does harmony.  We have not yet been at the Italian playhouse; scarce any one goes there.  Their best amusement, and which in some parts, beats ours, is the comedy three or four of the actors excel any we have:  but then to this nobody goes, if it is not one of the fashionable nights; and then they go, be the play good or bad-except on Moli`ere’s nights, whose pieces they are quite weary of.  Gray and I have been at the Avare to-night; I cannot at all commend their performance of it.  Last night I was in the Place de Louis le Grand (a regular octagon, uniform, and the houses handsome, though not so large as Golden Square), to see what they reckoned one of the finest burials that ever was in France.  It was the Duke de Tresmes, governor of Paris and marshal of France.  It began on foot from his palace to his parish-church, and from thence in coaches to the opposite end of Paris, to b interred in the church of the Celestins, where is his family-vault.  About a week ago we happened to see the grave digging, as we went to see the church, which is old and small., but fuller of fine ancient monuments than any, except St. Denis, which we saw on the road, and excels Westminster; for the windows are all ’ painted in mosaic,