(305) Now first published.

(306) Alluding to the wife of his eldest brother, Lord Walpole, Margaret Rolle, who had separated Herself from her husband, and resided in Italy.—­E.

(307) Lady Townshend.-E.

(308) All this letter refers to Ann Seymour Conway, then three years old, who had been left with her nurse at Mr. Walpole’s, during an absence of her father and mother in Ireland.-E.

127 Letter 57 To George Montagu, Esq.  Arlington Street, May 12, 1752.

You deserve no charity, for you never write but to ask it.  When you are tired of yourself and the country, you think over all London, and consider who will be proper to send you an account of it.  Take notice, I won’t be your gazetteer; nor is my time come for being a dowager, a maker of news, a day-labourer in scandal.  If you care for nobody but for what they can tell you, you must provide yourself elsewhere.  The town is empty, nothing in it but flabby mackerel, and wooden gooseberry tarts, and a hazy east wind.  My sister is gone to Paris; I go to Strawberry Hill in three days for the summer, if summer there will ever be any.

If you want news you must send to Ireland, where there is almost a civil war, between the Lord Lieutenant and Primate on one side (observe, I don’t tell you what that side is), and the Speaker on the other, who carries questions by wholesale in the House of Commons against the Castle; and the teterrima belli causa is not the common one.

Reams of scandalous verses and ballads are come over, too bad to send you, if I had them, but I really have not.  What is more provoking for the Duke of Dorset, an address is come over directly to the King (not as usual through the channel of the Lord Lieutenant), to assure him of their great loyalty, and apprehensions of being misrepresented.  This is all I know, and you see, most imperfectly.

I was t’other night to see what is now grown the fashion, Mother Midnight’s Oratory.(309) It appeared the lowest buffoonery in the world even to me, who am used to my uncle Horace.  There is a bad oration to ridicule, what it is too like, Orator Henley; all the rest is perverted music:  there is a man who plays so nimbly on the kettle-drum, that he has reduced that noisy instrument to an object of sight; for, if you don’t see the tricks with his hands, it is no better than ordinary:  another plays on a violin and trumpet together:  another mimics a bagpipe with a German flute, and makes it full as disagreeable.  There is an admired dulcimer, a favourite salt-box, and a really curious jew’s-harp.  Two or three men intend to persuade you that they play on a broomstick, which is drolly brought in, carefully shrouded in a case, so as to be mistaken for a bassoon or bass-viol; but they succeed in nothing but the action.  The last fellow imitates * * * * * curtseying to a French horn.  There are twenty medley overtures, and a man who speaks a prologue and an epilogue, in which he counterfeits all the actors and singers upon earth:  in short, I have long been convinced, that what I used to imagine the most difficult thing in the world, mimicry, is the easiest; for one has seen for these two or three years, at Foote’s and the other theatres, that when they lost one mimic, they called ,Odd man!” and another came and succeeded just as well.