You will think I have removed my philosophy from Windsor with my tea-things hither; for I am writing to you in all this tranquillity, while a Parliament is bursting about my ears.  You know it is going to be dissolved:  I am told, you are taken care of, though I don’t know where, nor whether any body that chooses you will quarrel with me because he does choose you, as that little bug the Marquis of Rockingham did; one of the calamities of my life which I have bore as abominably well as I do most about which I don’t care.  They say the Prince has taken up two hundred thousand pounds, to carry elections which he won’t carry:—­he had much better have saved it to buy the Parliament after it is chosen.  A new set of peers are in embryo, to add more dignity to the silence of the House of Lords.

I make no remarks on your campaign,(1375) because, as you say, you do nothing at all; which, though very proper nutriment for a thinking head, does not do quite so well to write upon.  If any one of you can but contrive to be shot upon your post, it is all we desire, shall look upon it as a great curiosity, and will take care to set up a monument to the person so slain; as we are doing by vote to Captain Cornwall, who was killed at the beginning Of the action in the Mediterranean four years ago.(1376) In the present dearth of glory, he is canonized; though, poor man! he had been tried twice the year before for cowardice.(1377)

I could tell you much election news, none else; though not being thoroughly attentive to so important a subject, as to be sure one ought to be, I might now and then mistake, and give you a candidate for Durham in place of one for Southampton, or name the returning-officer instead of the candidate.  In general, I believe, it is much as usual-those sold in detail that afterwards will be sold in the representation—­the ministers bribing Jacobites to choose friends of their own--the name of well-wishers to the present establishment, and patriots outbidding ministers that they may make the better market of their own patriotism:-in short, all England, under some flame or other, is just now to be bought and sold; though, whenever we become posterity and forefathers, we shall be in high repute for wisdom and virtue.  My great-great-grandchildren will figure me with a white beard down to my girdle; and Mr. Pitt’s will believe him unspotted enough to have walked over nine hundred hot ploughshares, without hurting the sole of his foot.  How merry my ghost will be, and shake its ears to hear itself quoted as a person of consummate prudence!  Adieu, dear Harry!  Yours ever.

(1375) Mr Conway was in Flanders with the Duke of Cumberland.

(1376) The House of Commons, on the 28th of May, had agreed to erect a monument in Westminster Abbey to the memory of Captain Cornwall, of the Marlborough; who was slain while bravely defending his ship.  The monument, designed and executed bye Taylor, was completed in 1755. —­E.