If my private consistency was of no weight with you, yet, is a man nothing who is within three days’ journey of a conclave?  Nay, for what you knew, I might have been in Rome.  Harry, art thou so indifferent, as to have a cousin at the election of a pope (183) without courting him for news?  I’ll tell you, were I any where else, and even Dick Hammond were at Rome, I think verily I should have wrote to him.  Popes, cardinals, adorations, coronations, St. Peter’s! oh, what costly sounds! and don’t you write to one yet?  I shall set out in about a fortnight, and pray then think me of consequence.

I have crept on upon time from day to day here; fond of Florence to a degree:  ’tis infinitely the most agreeable of all the places I have seen since London:  that you know one loves, right or wrong, as one does one’s nurse.  Our little Arno is not bloated and swelling like the Thames, but ’tis vastly pretty, and, I don’t know how, being Italian, has something visionary and poetical in its stream.  Then one’s unwilling to leave the gallery, and-but-in short, one’s unwilling to get into a postchaise.  I am surfeited with mountains and inns, as if I had eat them.  I have many to pass before I see England again, and no Tory to entertain me on the road?  Well, this thought makes me dull, and that makes me finish.  Adieu!  Yours ever.

P. S. Direct to me, (for to be sure you will not be so outrageous as to leave me quite off), recornmand4 i Mons. Mann, Ministre de sa Majest`e Britannique @ Florence.

(181) Second Son of Francis first Lord Conway. by Charlotte Shorter, his third wife.  He was afterwards secretary in Ireland during the vice-royalty of William fourth Duke of Devonshire; groom of the bedchamber to George ii. and George iii.; secretary of state in 1765; lieutenant-general of the ordnance in 1770; commander in chief in 1782; and a field-marshal in 1793.  This correspondence commences when Mr. Walpole was twenty-three years old, and Mr. Conway two years younger.  They had gone abroad together, with Mr. Gray, in the year 1739, had spent three months together at Rheims, and afterwards separated at Geneva.

(182) Daughter of the first Earl of Pomfret, and married,, in 1744, to John second Lord Carteret and first Earl of Granville.-E.

(183) As successor of Clement XII., who died in the eighty-eighth year of his age, and the tenth of his pontificate, on the 6th Feb. 1740.  The cardinals being uncertain whom to choose, Prosper Lamberteri, the learned and tolerant Archbishop of Ancona, said, with his accustomed good-humour, “If you want a saint, choose Gotti; if a politician, Aldrosandi:  but if a good man, take me.”  His advice was followed, and he ascended the papal throne as Benedict xiv.-E.

146 Letter 19 To Richard West, Esq.  Siena, March 22, 1740, N. S.