287 Letter 85
          To Sir Horace Mann. 
Houghton, Oct. 8th, 1742.

I have not heard from you this fortnight; if I don’t receive a letter to-morrow, I shall be quite out of humour.  It is true, of late I have written to you but every other post; but then I have been in the country, in Norfolk, in Siberia!  You were still at Florence, in the midst of Kings of Sardinia, Montemars, and Neapolitan neutralities; your letters are my only diversion.  As to German news, it is all so simple that I am peevish:  the raising of the siege of Prague,((714) and Prince Charles and Marechal Maillebois playing at hunt the squirrel, have disgusted me from inquiring about the war.  The earl laughs in his great chair, and sings a bit of an old ballad,

“They both did fight, they both did beat, they both did run
     away,
They both strive again to meet, the quite contrary way.”

Apropos!  I see in the papers that a Marquis de Beauvau escaped out of Prague with the Prince de Deuxpons and the Duc de Brissac; was it our Prince Beauvau?

At last the mighty monarch does not go to Flanders, after making the greatest preparations that ever were made but by Harry the Eighth, and the authors of the grand Cyrus and the illustrious Hassa:  you may judge by the quantity of napkins, which were to the amount of nine hundred dozen-indeed, I don’t recollect that ancient heroes were ever so provident of necessaries, or thought how they were to wash their hands and face after a victory.  Six hundred horses, under the care of the Duke of Richmond, were even shipped; and the clothes and furniture of his court magnificent enough for a bull-fight at the conquest of Granada.  Felton Hervey’s(715) war-horse, besides having richer caparisons than any of the expedition, had a gold net to keep off the flies-in winter!  Judge of the clamours this expense to no purpose will produce!  My Lord Carteret is set out from the Hague, but was not landed when the last letters came from London:  there are no great expectations from this trip; no more than followed from my Lord Stair’s.

I send you two more odes on Pultney,(716) I believe by the same hand as the former, though none are equal to the Nova Progenies, which has been more liked than almost ever any thing was.  It is not at all known whose they are; I believe Hanbury Williams’s.  The note to the first was printed with it:  the advice to him to be privy seal has its foundation; for when the consultation was held who were to have places, and my Lord Gower was named to succeed Lord Hervey, Pultney said with some warmth, “I designed to be privy seal myself!”

We expect some company next week from Newmarket:  here is at present only Mr. Keene and Pigwiggin,(717)-you never saw so agreeable a creature!-oh yes! you have seen his parents!  I must tell you a new story of them Sir Robert had given them a little horse for Pigwiggin, and somebody had given them another:  both which, to save the charge of keeping, they sent to grass in Newpark.  After three years that they had not used them, my Lord Walpole let his own son ride them, while he was at the park, in the holidays.  Do you know, that the woman Horace sent to Sir Robert, and made him give her five guineas for the two horses, because George had ridden them?  I give you my word this is fact.