Now I have been talking of remarkable periods in our annals, I must tell you what my Lord Baltimore thinks one:—­He said to the Prince t’other day, “Sir, your Royal Highness’s marriage will be an area in English history.”

If it were not for the life that is put into the town now and then by very bad news from abroad, one should be quite stupefied.  There is nobody left but two or three solitary regents; and they are always whisking backwards and forwards to their villas; and about a dozen antediluvian dowagers, whose carcasses have miraculously resisted the wet, and who every Saturday compose a very reverend catacomb at my old Lady Strafford’s.  She does not take money at the door for showing them, but ’you pay twelvepence apiece under the denomination of card-money.  Wit and beauty, indeed, remain in the persons of Lady Townshend and Lady Caroline Fitzroy; but such is the want of taste of this age, that the former is very often forced to wrap up her wit in plain English before it can be understood; and the latter is almost as often obliged to have recourse to the same artifices to make her charms be taken notice of.

Of beauty, I can tell you an admirable story.  One Mrs. Comyns, an elderly gentlewoman, has lately taken a house in St. James’s Street:  some young gentlemen went there t’other night;—­“Well, Mrs. Comyns, I hope there won’t be the same disturbances here that were at your other house in Air Street.”—­“Lord, Sir, I never had any disturbances there:  mine was as quiet a house as any in the neighbourhood, and a great deal of company came to me:  it was only the ladies of quality that envied Me.”—­“Envied you! why, your house was pulled down about your ears.”—­“Oh, dear Sir! don’t you know how that happened?”—­“No; pray how?”—­“Why, dear Sir, it was my Lady **** who gave ten guineas to the mob to demolish my house, because her ladyship fancied I got women for Colonel Conway.”

My dear George, don’t you delight in this story?  If poor Harry(1083) comes back from Flanders, I intend to have infinite fun with his prudery about this anecdote, which is full as good as if it was true.  I beg you will visit Mrs. Comyns when you come to town- she has infinite humour.

(1081) Alluding to the success of the French army in Flanders, under the command of Mareschal Saxe.

(1082) Representing the defeat of the Spanish armada in 1588, and surrounded by portraits of the principal officers who commanded the fleet.  This noble suit of hangings was wrought in Holland, at the expense of the Earl of Nottingham, lord high admiral.-E.

(1083) The Honourable Henry Seymour Conway.

428 Letter 173
To Sir Horace Mann. 
July 15, 1745.