Should I answer the letters from the court of Petraria again? there will be no end of our magnificent correspondence!-but would it not be too haughty to let a princess write last?

Oh, the cats!  I can never keep them, and yet It is barbarous to send them all to Lord Islay:  he will shut them up and starve them, and then bury them under the stairs with his wife.  Adieu!

(669) Solicitor to the treasury.  See ante, p. 246.

(670) Sir R. Walpole’s house at Chelsea.-D.

(671) Lord Walpole was ranger of Newpark. (Now called Richmond Park.-D.)

(672) One of the band of incapables who obtained power and place on the fall of Walpole.  Horace Walpole, in his Memoires, calls him “that old rag of Lord Bath’s quota to an administration, the mute Harry Furnese."-D.

(673) This occurrence was celebrated in a ballad which is inserted in C. Hanbury Williams’s works, and begins thus.

“As Caleb and Carteret, two birds of a feather, Went down to a feast at Newcastle’s together.”

Lord Bath is called “Caleb,” in consequence of the name of Caleb DAnvers having been used in The Craftsman, of which he was the principal author.-D.

(674) It was very remarkable that Lord Orford could get and keep such an ascendant with King George 1. when they had no way of conversing but very imperfectly in Latin.

(675) The coffee-house at Florence where the nobility meet.

(676) The keeper of the round-house was tried but acquitted of wilful murder. [The keeper, whose name was William Bird, was tried at the Old Bailey in October, and received sentence of death; which was afterwards transmuted to transportation.]

(677) The Honourable John Spencer, second son of Charles, third Earl of Sunderland, by Anne his wife, second daughter of the great Duke of Marlborough.  He was the favourite grandson of old Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough who left him a vast fortune, having disinherited, to the utmost of her power, his eldest brother, Charles, Duke of Marlborough.  The condition upon which she made this bequest was that neither he nor his heirs should take any place or pension from any government, except the rangership of Windsor Park.  He was the ancestor of the present Earl Spencer, and died in 1746.- D.

(678) Lord George Graham, youngest son of the Duke of Montrose, and a captain in the navy.  He died in 1747.-D.

(679) Prince and Princess Craon.

278 Letter 79
To Sir Horace Mann. 
Chelsea, July 29, 1742.

I am quite out of humour; the whole town is melted away; you never saw such a desert.  You know what Florence is in the vintage-season, at least I remember what it was:  London is just as empty, nothing but half-a-dozen private gentlewomen left, who live upon the scandal that they laid up in the winter.  I am going too! this day se’nnight we set out for Houghton, for three months; but I scarce