this charming and cool?  The air is so serene, and so secure, that one sleeps with all the windows and doors thrown open to the river, and only covered with a slight gauze to keep away the gnats.  Lady Pomfret (199) has a charming conversation once a week.  She has taken a vast palace and a vast garden, which is vastly commode, especially to the cicisbeo-part of mankind, who have free indulgence to wander in pairs about the arbours.  You know her daughters :  Lady Sophia (200) is still, nay she must be, the beauty she was:  Lady Charlotte, (201) is much improved, and is the cleverest girl in the world; speaks the purest Tuscan, like any Florentine.  The Princess Craon (202) has a constant pharaoh and supper every night, where one is quite at one’s ease.  I am going into the country with her and the prince for a little while, to a villa of the Great Duke’s.  The people are good-humoured here and easy; and what makes me pleased with them, they are pleased with me.  One loves to find people care for one, when they can have no view in it.

You see how glad I am to have reasons for not returning; I wish I had no better.

As to Hosier’s Ghost, (203) I think it very easy, and consequently pretty; but, from the ease, should never have guessed it Glover’s.  I delight in your, “the patriots cry it up, and the courtiers cry it down, and the hawkers cry it up and down,” and your laconic history of the King and Sir Robert, on going to Hanover, and turning out the Duke of Argyle.  The epigram, too, you sent me on the same occasion is charming.

Unless I sent you back news that you and others send me, I can send you none.  I have left the conclave, which is the only stirring thing in this part of the world, except the child that the Queen of Naples is to be delivered of in August.  There is no likelihood the conclave will end, unless the messages take effect which ’tis said the Imperial and French ministers have sent to their respective courts for leave to quit the Corsini for the Albani faction:  otherwise there will never be a pope.  Corsini has lost the only one he could have ventured to make pope, and him he designed; ’twas Cenci, a relation of the Corsini’s mistress.  The last morning Corsini made him rise, stuffed a dish of chocolate down his throat, and would carry him to the scrutiny.  The poor old creature went, came back, and died.  I am sorry to have lost the sight of the pope’s coronation, but I might have stayed for seeing it till I had been old enough to be pope myself.

Harry, what luck the chancellor has! first, indeed, to be in himself so great a man; but then in accidents:  he is made chief justice and peer, when Talbot is made chancellor and peer:  (204) Talbot dies in a twelvemonth, and leaves him the seals at an age when others are scarce made solicitors:  (205)-then marries his son into one of the first families of Britain, (206) obtains a patent for a marquisate and eight thousand pounds a year after the Duke of Kent’s