Albani’s letter, p. 14.”  You shall no longer be the dear Miny, but Manone, the Great Man; you shall figure with the Great Pan, and the Great Patapan.  I wish you and your laurels and your operations were on the Rhine, in Piedmont, or in Bohemia; and then Prince Charles would not have repassed the first, nor the Prince of Conti advanced within three days of Turin, and the King of Prussia would already have been terrified from entering the last-all this lumping bad news came to counterbalance your Neapolitan triumphs.  Here is all the war to begin again! and perhaps next winter a second edition of Dunkirk.  We could not even have the King of France die, though he was so near it.  He was in a woful fright, and promised the Bishop of Soissons, that if he lived, he would have done with his women.(971) A man with all these crowns on his head, and attaching and disturbing all those on the heads of other princes, who is the soul of all the havoc and ruin that has been and is to be spread through Europe in this war, haggling thus for his bloody life, and cheapening it at the price of a mistress or two! and this was the fellow that they fetched to the army to drive the brave Prince Charles beyond the Rhine again.  It is just Such another paltry mortal(972) that has fetched him back into Bohemia-I forget which of his battles(973) it was, that when his army had got the victory, they could not find the King:  he had run away for a whole day without looking behind him.

I thank you for the particulars of the action, and the list of the prisoners:  among them is one Don Theodore Diamato Amor, a cavalier of so romantic a name, that my sister and Miss Leneve quite interest themselves in his captivity; and make their addresses to you, who, they hear, have such power with Prince Lobkowitz, to obtain his liberty.  If he has Spanish gallantry in any proportion to his name, he will immediately come to England, and vow himself their knight.

Those verses I sent you on Mr. Pope, I assure you, were not mine; I transcribed them from the newspapers; from whence I must send you a very good epigram on Bishop Berkeley’s tar-water: 

“Who dare deride what pious Cloyne has done? 
The Church shall rise and vindicate her son;
She tells us, all her Bishops shepherds are-
And shepherds heal their rotten sheep with tar.”

I am not at all surprised at my Lady Walpole’s ill-humour to you about the messenger.  If the resentments of women did not draw them into little dirty spite, their hatred would be very dangerous; but they vent the leisure they have to do mischief in a thousand meannesses, which only serve to expose themselves.

Adieu!  I know nothing here but public politics, of which I have already talked to you, and which you hear as soon as I do.

Thank dear Mr. Chute for his letter; I will answer it very soon; but in the country I am forced to let my pen lie fallow between letter and letter.