My Lady Orford is at Hanover, most Graciously received by “the Father of all his people!” In the papers of yesterday was this paragraph; “Lady O. who has spent several years in Italy, arrived here (Hanover) the 3d, on her return to England, and was Graciously received by his Majesty.”  Lady Denbigh is gone into the country so I don’t know where she is to lodge-perhaps at St. James’s, out of’ regard to my father’s memory.

Trust me, you escaped well in Pigwiggin’s(1079) not accepting your invitation of living with you:  you must have aired your house, as Lady Pomfret was forced to air Lady Mary Wortley’s bedchamber.  He has a most unfortunate breath:  so has the Princess his sister.  When I was at their country-house, I used to sit in the library and turn over books of prints:  out of good breeding they would not quit me; nay, would look over the prints with me.  A whiff would come from the east, and I turned short to the west, whence the Princess would puff me back with another gale full as richly perfumed as her brother’s.  Adieu!

(1078) George Fermor:  who, on the death of his father in 1753, became second Earl of Pomfret.  He died in 1785.-E.

(1079) Henrietta Louisa, Countess of Pomfret, mother of Lord Lempster.

(1080) A nickname given by Walpole to his cousin Horace, eldest son of “Old Horace Walpole,” afterwards first Earl of Orford of the second creation.  He died in 1809, at the age of eighty-six.-E.

427 Letter 172 To George Montagu, Esq.  Arlington Street, July 13, 1745.

Dear George, We are all Cabob’d and Cocofagoed, as my Lord Denbigh says.  We, who formerly, you know, could any one of us beat three Frenchmen, are now so .degenerated, that three Frenchmen(1081) can evidently beat One Englishman.  Our army is running away, all that is left to run; for half of it is picked up by three or four hundred at a time.  In short, we must step out of the high pantoufles that were made by those cunning shoemakers at Poitiers and Ramilies, and go clumping about perhaps in wooden ones.  My Lady Hervey, who you know dotes upon every thing French, is charmed with the hopes of these new shoes, and has already bespoke herself a pair of pigeon wood.  How did the tapestry at Blenheim look?  Did it glow with victory, or did all our glories look overcast?

I remember a very admired sentence in one of my Lord Chesterfield’s speeches, when he was haranguing for this war; with a most rhetorical transition, he turned to the tapestry in the House of Lords,(1082) and said, with a sigh, he feared there were no historical looms at work now!  Indeed, we have reason to bless the good patriots, who have been for employing our manufactures so historically.  The Countess of that wise Earl, with whose two expressive words I began this letter, says, she is very happy now that my lord had never a place upon the coalition, for then all this bad situation of our affairs would have been laid upon him.