Here are three new ballads,(683) and you must take them as a plump part of a long letter.  Consider, I am in the barren land of Norfolk, where news grows as slow as any thing green; and besides, I am in the house of a fallen minister!  The first song I fancy is Lord Edgcumbe’s; at least he had reason to write it.  The second I do not think so good as the real Story that occasioned it.  The last is reckoned vastly the best, and is much admired:  I cannot say I see all those beauties in it, nor am charmed with the poetry, which is cried up.  I don’t find that any body knows whose it is.(684) Pultney is very anoyed, especially as he pretends, about his wife, and says, “it is too much to abuse ladies!” You see, their twenty years’ satires come back home!  He is gone to the Bath in great dudgeon:  the day before he went, he went in to the King to ask him to turn out Mr. Hill of the customs, for having opposed him at Heydon.  “Sir,” said the King, “was it not when you was opposing me?  I won’t turn him out:  I will part with no more of my friends.”  Lord Wilmington was waiting to receive orders accordingly, but the King gave him none.

We came hither last Saturday; as we passed through Grosvenor-square, we met Sir Roger Newdigate, (685) with a vast body of Tories, proceeding to his election at Brentford:  we might have expected some insult, but only one single fellow hissed. and was not followed.  Lord Edgcumbe, Mr. Ellis, and Mr. Hervey, in their way to Coke’s,(686) and Lord Chief Justice Wills (on the circuit) are the Only company here yet.  My Lord invited nobody, but left it to their charity.  The other night, as soon as he had gone through showing Mr. Wills the house, Well,” said he, “here I am to enjoy ’t, and my Lord of Bath may—.”  I forgot to tell you, in confirmation of what you see in the song of the wife of Bath having shares of places, Sir Robert told me, that when formerly she got a place for her own father, she took the salary and left him only the perquisites!

It is much thought that the King will go abroad, if he can avoid leaving the Prince in his place—.  Imagine all this!

I received to-day yours of July 21), and two from Mr. Chute and Madame Pucci,(687) which I will answer very soon:  where is she now?  I delight in Mr. Villiers’s, (688) modesty-in one place you had written it villette’s; I fancy on purpose, for it would do for him.

Good night, my dear child!  I have written myself threadbare.  I know you will hate my campaign, but what can one do!

(683) As these ballads are to be found in the edition of Sir Charles Hanbury Williams’s works, published in 1822, it has been deemed better to omit them here.  They are called, “Labour in Vain,” “The Old Coachman,” and “The Country Girl."-D.

(684) it was written by Hanbury Williams.

(685) Sir Roger Newdigate, the fifth baronet of the family.  He was elected member for Middlesex, upon the vacancy occasioned by Pultney’s being created Earl of Bath.  He belonged to the Tory or Jacobite party.-D. [Sir Roger afterwards represented the University of Oxford in five parliaments, and died in 1806, in his eighty-seventh year.  Among other benefactions to his Alma Mater, he gave the noble candelabra in the Radcliffe library, and founded an annual prize for English verses on ancient painting, sculpture, and architecture.]