I forgot to thank you about the model, which I should have been sorry to have missed.  I long for all the things, and my Lord more. so.  Am I not to have a bill of lading, or how!

I never say any thing of the Pomfrets, because in the great city of London the Countess’s follies do not make the same figure as they did in little Florence.  Besides, there are such numbers here who have such equal pretensions to be absurd, that one is scarce aware of particular ridicules.

I really don’t know whether Vanneschi be dead; he married some low English woman, who is kept by Amorevoli; so the Abbate turned the opera every way to his profit.  As to Bonducci,(200) I don’t think I could serve him; for I have no interest with the Lords Middlesex and Holderness, the two sole managers.  Nor if I had, would I employ it, ’to bring over more ruin to the operas.  Gentlemen directors, with favourite abb`es and favourite mistresses, have almost overturned the thing in England.  You will plead my want of interest to Mr. Smith(801) too:  besides, we had Bufos here once, and from not understanding the language, people thought it a dull kind of dumb-show.  We are next Tuesday to have the Miserere of Rome.  It must be curious! the finest piece of vocal music in the world, to be performed by three good voices, and forty bad ones, from Oxford, Canterbury, and the farces!  There is a new subscription formed for an opera next year, to be carried on by the Dilettanti, a club, for which the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk:  the two chiefs are Lord Middlesex and Sir Francis Dashwood, who were seldom sober the whole time they were in Italy.

The parliament rises next week:  every body is going out of town.  My Lord goes the first week in May; but I shall reprieve myself till towards August.  Dull as London is in summer, there is always more company in it than in any one place in the country.  I hate the country:  I am past the shepherdly age of groves and streams, and am not arrived at that of hating every thing but what I do myself, as building and planting.  Adieu!

(796) Simon, second Viscount Harcourt, created an earl in 1749; in 1768 appointed ambassador at Paris, and in 1769 Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.  He was accidentally drowned in a well in his park at Nuncham, in 1777; occasioned, it is believed, by overreaching himself, in order to save the life of a favourite dog.-E.

(797) Elizabeth Trevor, daughter of Thomas Lord Trevor, wife of Charles Spencer, Duke of Marlborough.  She died in 1761.-E.

(798) Frances, only daughter of Sir Robert Worseley, first wife of Lord Carteret.

(799) First minister of the Great Duke.

(800) Bonducci was a Florentine abb`e, who translated some of Pope’s works into Italian.

(801) The English Consul at Venice.

318 Letter 104
To Sir Horace Mann. 
Arlington Street, April 25, 1743.