I have received yours of July 21.  Did neither I nor your brother tell you, that we had received the Neapolitan snuff-box?(962) it is above a month ago:  how could I be so forgetful? but I have never heard one word of the cases, nor of Lord Conway’s guns, nor Lord Hartington’s melon-seeds, all which you mention to have sent.  Lestock has long been arrived, so to be sure the cases never came with him:  I hope Matthews will discover them.  Pray thank Dr. Cocchi very particularly for his book.

I am very sorry too for your father’s removal; it was not done in the most obliging manner by Mr. Winnington; there was something exactly like a breach of promise in it to my father, which was tried to be softened by a civil alternative, that was no alternative at all.  He was forced to it by my Lady Townshend, who has an implacable aversion to all my father’s people; and not having less to Mr. Pelham’s, she has been as brusque with Winnington about them.  He has no principles himself, and those no principles of his are governed absolutely by hers, which are no-issimes.

I don’t know any of your English.  I should delight in your Vauxhall-ets:  what a figure my Grifona must make in such a romantic scene!  I have lately been reading the poems of the Earl of Surrey,(963) in Henry the Eighth’s time; he was in love with the fair Geraldine of Florence; I have a mind to write under the Grifona’s picture these two lines from one of his sonnets: 

“From Tuscane came my lady’s worthy race, Fair Florence was some time her auncient seat.”

And then these: 

“Her beauty of kinde, her vertue from above;
Happy is he that can obtaine her love!”

I don’t know what of kinde means, but to be sure it was something prodigiously expressive and gallant in those days, by its being unintelligible now.  Adieu!  Do the Chutes cicisb`e it?

(961) I think it was the ballet de la paix.

(962) It was for a present to Mr. Stone, the Duke of Newcastle’s secretary

(963) Henry Howard, son of the Duke of Norfolk.  Under a charge of high-treason, of which he was manifestly innocent, this noble soldier and accomplished poet was found guilty, and in 1547, in his thirty-first year, was beheaded on Tower Hill.  History is silent as to the name of fair Geraldine.-E.

385 Letter 146 To Sir Horace Mann.  London, Aug. 16, 1744.

I am writing to you two or three days beforehand, by way of settling my affairs-not that I am going to be married or to die; but something as bad as either if it were to last as long.  You will guess that it can only be going to Houghton; but I make as much an affair of that, as other people would of going to Jamaica.  Indeed I don’t lay in store of cake and bandboxes, and citron-water, and cards, and cold meat, as country-women do after the session.  My packing-up and travelling concerns lie in very small compass; nothing but myself and Patapan, my