The Speaker told me t’other day, that he had received a letter from Lord Hyde, which confirms what Mr. Churchill writes me, the distress and poverty of France and the greatness of their divisions.  Yet the King’s expenses are incredible; Madame de Pompadour is continually busied in finding out new journeys and diversions to keep him from falling into the hands of the clergy.  The last party of pleasure she made for him, was a stag-hunting; the stag was a man in a skin and horns, worried by twelve men dressed like bloodhounds!  I have read of Basilowitz, a Czar of Muscovy, who improved on such a hunt, and had a man in a bearskin worried by real dogs; a more kingly entertainment!

I shall make out a sad Journal of other news; yet I will be like any gazette, and scrape together all the births, deaths, and marriages in the parish.  Lady Hartington and Lady Rachel Walpole are brought to bed of sons; Lord Burlington and Lord Gower have had new attacks of palsies:  Lord Falkland is to marry the Southwark Lady Suffolk;(317) and Mr. Watson, Miss Grace Pelham.  Lady Coventry has miscarried of one or two children, and is going on with one or two more, and is gone to France to-day.  Lady Townshend and Lady Caroline Petersham have had their anniversary quarrel, and the Duchess of Devonshire has had her secular assembly, which she keeps once in fifty years:  she was more delightfully vulgar at it than you can imagine; complained of the wet night, and how the men would dirty the rooms with their shoes; called out at supper to the Duke, “Good God! my lord, don’t cut the ham, nobody will eat any!” and relating her private m`enage to Mr. Obnir, she said, “When there’s only my lord and I, besides a pudding we have always a dish of Yeast!” I am ashamed to send you such nonsense, or to tell you how the good women at Hampton Court are scandalized at Princess Emily’s coming to chapel last Sunday in riding-clothes with a dog under her arm; but I am bid to send news:  what can we do -,it such a dead time of year?  I must conclude, as my Lady Gower did very well t’other day in a letter into the country, “Since the two Misses(318) were hanged, and the two Misses(319) were married, there is nothing at all talked of.”  Adieu!  My best compliments and my wife’s to your two ladies.

(315) Now first published.

(316) Their daughter, Ann Seymour Conway.

(317) Sarah, Duchess-dowager of Suffolk, daughter of Thomas Unwen, Esq. of Southwark.-E.

(318) Miss Blandy and Miss Jefferies.

(319) The Gunnings.

133 Letter 62
To George Montagu, Esq. 
Strawberry Hill, July 20, 1752.