I find another letter from you to-night of August 6th, and thank you a thousand times for your goodness about Mr. Conway:  but I believe I told you, that as he is in the Guards, he was not engaged.  We hear nothing but that we are going to cross the Rhine.  All we know is from private letters:  the Ministry hear nothing.  When the Hussars went to Kevenhuller for orders, he said, “Messieurs, l’Alsace est `a vous; je n’ai point d’autres ordres `a vous donner.”  They have accordingly taken up their residence in a fine chateau belonging to the Cardinal de Rohan, as Bishop of Strasbourg.  We expect nothing but war; and that war expects nothing but conquest.

Your account of our officers was very false; for, instead of the soldiers going on without commanders, some of them were ready to go without their soldiers.  I am sorry you have such plague with your Neptune(845) and the Sardinian-we know not of them scarce.

I really forget any thing of an Italian greyhound for the Tesi.  I promised her, I remember, a black spaniel-but how to send it!  I did promise one of the former to Marquis Mari at Genoa, which I absolutely have not been able to get yet, though I have often tried; but since the last Lord Halifax died, there is no meeting with any of the breed.  If I can, I will get her one.  I am sorry you are engaged in the opera.  I have found it a most dear undertaking.  I was not in the management:  Lord Middlesex was chief.  We were thirty subscribers, at two hundred pounds each, which was to last four years, and no other demands ever to be made.  Instead of that, we have been made to pay fifty-six pounds over and above the subscription in one winter.  I told the secretary in a passion, that it was the last money I would ever pay for the follies of directors.

I tremble at hearing that the plague is not over, as we thought, but still spreading.  You will see in the papers That Lord Hervey is dead-luckily, I think. for himself; for he had outlived the last inch of character.  Adieu!

(844) A copy of a celebrated picture by Guido at Bologna, of the Patron Saints of that city.  VOL. 1. 29.-D.

(845) Admiral Matthews.

338 letter 117
To John Chute, Esq.(846)
Houghton, August 20, 1743.

Indeed, my dear Sir, you certainly did not use to be stupid, and till you give me more substantial proof that you are so, I shall not believe it.  As for your temperate diet and milk bringing about such a metamorphosis, I hold it impossible.  I have such lamentable proofs every day before my eyes of the stupefying qualities of beef, ale, and wine, that I have contracted a most religious veneration for your spiritual nouriture.  Only imagine that I here every day see men, who are mountains of roast beef, and only seem just roughly hewn out into the outlines of human form, like the giant-rock at Pratolino!  I shudder when I see them brandish their knives in act to carve, and look on them as savages that devour