Adieu!  I have told you much more than I intended, and much more than I could conceive I had to say, except how does Miss Montagu?

P. S. Did you hear Captain Hotham’s bon-mot on Sir Thomas Robinson’s making an assembly from the top of his house to the bottom?  He said, he wondered so many people would go to Sir Thomas’s, as he treated them all de haut en bas.

(309) “Among other diversions and amusements which increase upon us, the town,” says the Gentleman’s Magazine for January 1752, “has been lately entertained with a kind of farcical performance, called ‘The Old Woman’s Oratory,’ conducted by Mrs. Mary Midnight and her family, intended as a banter on Henley’s Oratory, and a puff for the Old Woman’s Magazine."-E.

128 Letter 58 To Sir Horace Mann.  Arlington Street, May 13, 1752.

By this time you know my way, how much my letters grow out of season, as it grows summer.  I believe it is six weeks since I wrote to you last; but there is not only the usual deadness of summer to account for my silence; England itself is no longer England.  News, madness, parties, whims, and twenty other causes, that used to produce perpetual events are at an end; Florence itself is not more inactive.  Politics,

“Like arts and sciences are travelled west.”

They are cot into Ireland, where there is as much bustle to carry a question in the House of Commons, as ever it was here in any year forty-one.  Not that there is any opposition to the King’s measures; out of three hundred members, there has never yet been a division of above twenty-eight against the government:  they are much the most zealous subjects the king has.  The Duke of Dorset has had the art to make them distinguish between loyalty and aversion to the Lord Lieutenant.

I last night received yours of May 5th; but I cannot deliver your expressions to Mr. Conway, for he and Lady Ailesbury are gone to his regiment in Ireland for four months, which is a little rigorous, not only after an exile in Minorca, but more especially unpleasant now as they have just bought one of the most charming ’places in England, Park-place, which belonged to Lady Archibald Hamilton, and then to the Prince.  You have seen enough of Mr. Conway to judge how patiently he submits to his duty.  Their little girl is left with me.

The Gunnings are gone to their several castles, and one hears no more of them, except that such crowds flock to see the Duchess Hamilton pass, that seven hundred people sat up all night in and about an inn in Yorkshire to see her get into her postchaise next morning.

I saw lately at Mr. Barret’s a print of Valombrosa, which I should be glad to have, if you please; though I don’t think it gives much idea of the beauty of the place:  but you know what a passion there is for it in England, as Milton has mentioned it.

Miss Blandy died with a coolness of courage that is astonishing, and denying the fact,(310) which has made a kind of party in her favour as if a woman who would not stick at parricide, would scruple a lie!