the Duke, whom I sincerely prefer to Alexander, and who certainly can intercept more sunshine, would but stand out of my way, which he is extremely in, while he lives in the park here,(1296) I should love my little tub of forty pounds a-year, more than my palace dans la rue des ministers, with all my pictures and bronzes, which you ridiculously imagine I have encumbered myself with in my solitude.  Solitude it is, as to the tub itself, for no soul lives in it with me; though I could easily give you room at the butt end of it, and with -vast pleasure; but George Montagu, who perhaps is a philosopher too, though I am sure not of Pythagoras’s silent sect, lives but two barrels off; and Asheton, a Christian philosopher of our acquaintance, lives -,it the foot of that hill which you mention with a melancholy satisfaction that always attends the reflection.  A-propos, here is an Ode on the very subject, which I desire you will please to like excessively:(1297) ****************

You will immediately conclude, out of good breeding, that it is mine, and that it is charming.  I shall be much obliged to you for the first thought, but desire you will retain only the second; for it is Mr. Gray’s, and not your humble servant’s.

(1296) " The Duke of Cumberland is here at his lodge with three women, and three aide-de-camps; and the country swarms with people.  He goes to races and they make a ring about him as at a bear-baiting.”  Gray to Wharton, Sept. 11.  Works, vol. iii. p. 10.-E.

(1297) Here follows, in the original Mr. Gray’s Ode on a, distant prospect of Eton College. [This, which was the first English production of Gray which appeared in print, was published by Dodsley in the following year.  Dr. Warton says, that " little notice was taken of it, on its first publication."-E.

508 Letter 221 To Sir Horace Mann.  Arlington Street, Oct. 14, 1746.

You will have been alarmed with the news of another battle(1298) lost in Flanders, where we have no Kings of Sardinia.  We make light of it; do not allow it to be a battle, but call it “the action near Liege.” then, we have whittled down our loss extremely, and will not allow a man more than three hundred and fifty English slain out of the four thousand.  The whole of’ it, as It appears to me, is, that we gave up eight battalions to avoid fighting; as at Newmarket people pay their forfeit when they foresee they should lose the race; though, if the whole army had fought, and we had lost the day, one might have hoped to have come off for eight battalions.  Then they tell you that the French had four-and-twenty-pounders, and that they must beat us by the superiority of their cannon; so that to me it is grown a paradox, to war with a nation who have a mathematical certainty of beating you; or else it is a still stranger paradox, why you cannot have as large cannon as the French.  This loss was balanced by a pompous account of the triumphs of our invasion of Bretagne; which, in plain terms, I think, is reduced to burning two or three villages and reimbarking:  at least, two or three of the transports are returned with this history, and know not what is become of Lestock and the rest of the invasion.  The young Pretender is landed in France, with thirty Scotch, but in such a wretched condition that his Highland Highness had no breeches.(1299)