Our beauties are travelling Paris-ward:  Lady Caroline Petersham and Lady Coventry are just gone thither.  It will scarce be possible for the latter to make as much noise there as she and her sister have in England.  It is literally true that a shoemaker it Worcester got two guineas and a half by showing a shoo that he was making for the Countess, at a penny a piece.  I can’t say her genius is equal to her beauty:  she every day says some new sproposito.  She has taken a turn of vast fondness for her lord:  Lord Downe met them at Calais, and offered her a tent-bed, for fear of bugs in the inns.  “Oh!” said she, “I had rather be bit to death, than lie one night from my dear Cov.!” I can conceive my Lady Caroline making a good deal of noise even at Paris; her beauty is set off by a genius for the extraordinary, and for strokes that will make a figure in any country.  Mr. Churchill and my sister are just arrived from France; you know my passion for the writing of the younger Cr`ebillon:(324) you shall hear how I have been mortified by the discovery of the greatest meanness in him; and you will judge how much one must be humbled to have one’s favourite author convicted of mere mercenariness!  I had desired lady Mary to lay out thirty guineas for ne with Liotard, and wished, if I could, to have the portraits of Cr`ebillon and Marivaux(325) for my cabinet.  Mr. Churchill wrote me word that Liotard’s(326) price was sixteen guineas; that Marivaux was intimate with him, and would certainly sit, and that he believed he could get Cr`ebillon to sit too.  The latter, who is retired into the provinces with an English wife,(327) was just then at Paris for a month:  Mr. Churchill went to him, told him that a gentleman in England, who was making a collection of portraits of famous people, would be happy to have his, etc.  Cr`ebillon was humble, “unworthy,” obliged; and sat:  the picture was just finished, when, behold! he sent Mr. Churchill word, that he expected to have a copy of the picture given him-neither more nor less than asking sixteen guineas for sitting!  Mr. Churchill answered that he could not tell what he should do, were it his own case, but that this was a limited commission, and he could not possibly lay out double; and was now so near his return, that he could not have time to write to England and receive an answer.  Cr`ebillon said, then he would keep the picture himself-it was excessively like.  I am still sentimental enough to flatter myself, that a man who could beg sixteen gineas will not give them, and so I may still have the picture.

I am going to trouble you with a commission, my dear Sir, that will not subject me to any such humiliations.  You may have heard that I am always piddling about ornaments and improvements for Strawberry Hill-I am now doing a great deal to the house—­stay, I don’t want Genoa damask!(328) What I shall trouble you to buy is for the garden:  there is a small recess, for which I should be glad to have an antique Roman sepulchral altar, of the kind of the pedestal to my eagle; but as it will stand out of doors, I should not desire to have it a fine one:  a moderate one, I imagine, might be picked up easily at Rome at a moderate price:  if you could order any body to buy such an one, I should be much obliged to you.