( 883 This did not happen.

(884) Earl of Strafford; but it alludes to Lord Bath.

(885) The Treasury.

(886) A gossiping old Florentine nobleman, whose whole employment was to inform himself of the state of marriages, pregnancies, lyings-in, and such like histories.

354 Letter 126 To Sir Horace Mann.  Arlington Street, Dec. 26, 1743.

I shall complain of inflammations in my eyes till you think it is an excuse for not writing; but your brother is@My Witness that I have been shut up in a dark room for this week.  I got frequent colds, which fall upon my eyes; and then I have bottles of sovereign eye- waters from all my acquaintance; but as they are Only accidental colds, I never use any thing but sage, which braces my eye-fibres again in a few days.  I have had two letters since my last to you; One Complaining of my silence, and the other acknowledging one from me after a week’s intermission:  indeed, I never have been so long without writing to you — I do sometimes miss two weeks on any great dearth of news, which is all I have to fill a letter; for living as I do among people, whom, from your long absence, you cannot know, should talk Hebrew to mention them to you.  Those, that from eminent birth, folly, or parts, are to be found in the chronicles of the times, I tell you of, whenever necessity or the King puts them into new lights.  The latter, for I cannot think the former had any hand in it, has made
                    Sandys, as I told you, a lord and
cofferer!  Lord Middlesex is one of the new treasury, not ambassador as you heard.  So the Opera-house and White’s have contributed a commissioner and a secretary to the
                    treasury,(887) as their quota to the
government.  It is a period to make a figure in history.

There is a recess of both Houses for a fortnight; and we are to meet again, with all the quotations and flowers that the young orators can collect-,ind forcibly apply to the Hanoverians; with all the malice which the disappointed Old have hoarded against Carteret, and with all the impudence his defenders can sell him — and when all that is
                    vented-what then?-why then, things will
just be where they were.

General Wade (888) is made field-marshal, and is to have command of the army, as it is supposed, on the King’s not going abroad; but that is not declared .  The French preparations go on with much more vigour than ours; they not having a House of Commons to combat all the winter; a campaign that necessarily engages all the attention of ministers, who have no great variety of apartments in their understandings.