We have still tough work to do:  there are the estimates on The extraordinaries of the campaign, and the treaty of Worms (897) to come;—­I know who (898) thinks this last more difficult to fight than the Hanover troops.  It is likely to turn out as laborious a session as ever was.  All the comfort is, all the abuse don’t lie at your door nor mine; Lord Carteret has the full perquisites of the ministry.  The other day, after Pitt had called him “the Hanover troop-minister, a flagitious taskmaster,” and said, “that the sixteen thousand Hanoverians were all the party he had, and were his placemen;” in short, after he had exhausted invectives, he added, “But I have done:  if he were present, I would say ten times more."(899) Murray shines as bright as ever he did at the bar; which he seems to decline, to push his fortune in the House of Commons under Mr. Pelham.

This is the present state of our politics, which is our present state; for nothing else is thought of.  We. fear the King will again go abroad.

Lord Hartington has desired me to write to you for some melon-seeds, which you will be so good to get the best, and send to me for him.

I can’t conclude without mentioning again the Toulon squadron:  we vapour and say, by this time Matthews has beaten them, while I see them in the port of Leghorn!

My dear Mr. Chute, I trust to your friendship to comfort our poor Miny:  for my part, I am all apprehension!  My dearest child, if it turns out so, trust to my friendship for working every engine to restore you to as good a situation as you will lose, If my fears prove prophetic!  The first peace would reinstate you in your favourite Florence, whoever were sovereign of it.  I wish you may be able to smile at the vanity of my fears, as I did at yours about Richcourt.  Adieu! adieu!

(894) Sir Horace Mann had written in great uneasiness, in consequence of his having heard that Count Richcourt, the Great Duke’s minister; was using all his influence with the English government, in conjunction with Lady Walpole, to have Sir Horace removed from his situation at Florence.-D.

(895) “Lord Orford’s personal credit with his friends was the main reason that the question was so well disposed of:  he never laboured any point during his own administration with more zeal, and at a dinner at Hanbury Williams’s had a meeting with such of the old court party as were thought most averse to concurring in this measure; where he took great pains to convince them of the necessity there was for repeating it.”  Mr. P. Yorke’s MS. Journal.-E.

(896) It appears from Mr. Philip Yorke’s Parliamentary Journal, that the letter-writer took a part in the debate-"Young Mr. Walpole’s speech,” he says, “met with deserved applause from every body:  it was judicious and elegant:  he applied the verse which Lucan puts in Curia’s mouth to Caesar, to the King:-

“Livor edax tibi cuncta negat, Gallasque subactos, Vix impune feres."-E.