that if he gave his daughter to the Admiral, he would be obliged hereafter to pronounce a sentence of dissolution of the marriage.  The Chancellor replied, that his daughter had been taught to think of the union of the soul, not of the body:  the gentleman then made the same confidence to the Chancelloress, and received much such an answer:  that her daughter had been bred to submit herself to the will of God.  I don’t at all give you all this for true; but there is an ugly circumstance in his voyages of his not having the curiosity to see a beautiful captive, that he took on board a Spanish ship.  There is no record of Scipio’s having been in Doctors’ Commons.  I have been reading these voyages, and find them very silly and contradictory.  He sets out with telling you, that he had no soldiers sent with him but old invalids without legs or arms; and then in the middle of’ the book there is a whole chapter to tell you what they would have done if they had set out two months sooner, and that was no less than conquering Peru and Mexico -with this disabled army.  At the end there is an account of the neglect he received from the Viceroy of Canton, till he and forty of his sailors put out a great fire in that city, which the Chinese and five hundred firemen could not do, which he says proceeded from their awkwardness; a new character of the Chinese!  He was then admitted to an audience, and found two hundred men at the gate of the city, and ten thousand in the square before the palace, all new dressed for the purpose.  This is about as true as his predecessor Gulliver * -* * out the fire at Lilliput.  The King is still wind-bound; the fashionable bon mot is, that the Duke of Newcastle has tied a stone about his neck and sent him to sea.  The city grows furious about the peace; there is one or two very uncouth Hanover articles, besides a persuasion of a pension to the Pretender, which is so very ignominious, that I don’t know how to persuade myself it is true.  The Duke of Argyle has made them give him three places for life of a thousand and twelve hundred a-year for three of his court, to compensate for their making a man president of the session against his inclination. the Princess of Wales has got a confirmed jaundice, but they reckon her much better.  Sir Harry Calthrop is gone mad:  he walked down Pall Mall t’other day with his red riband tied about his hair said he was going to the King, and would not submit to be blooded till they told him the King commanded it.

I went yesterday to see Marshal Wade’s house, which is selling by auction:  it is worse contrived on the inside than is conceivable, all to humour the beauty of the front.  My Lord Chesterfield said, that to be sure he could not live in it, but intended to take the house over against it to look at it.  It is literally true, that all the direction he gave my Lord Burlington was to have a place for a cartoon of Rubens that he bought in Flanders; but my lord found it necessary to have so many correspondent doors, that there was no room at last for the picture; and the Marshal was forced to sell the picture to my father:  it is now at Houghton.(1436)