The Poemata-Grayo-Bentleiana, or Gray’s Odes, better illustrated than ever odes were by a Bentley, are in great forwardness, and I trust will appear this Winter.  I shall tell you One little anecdote about the authors and conclude.  Gray is in love to distraction with a figure of Melancholy, which Mr Bentley has drawn for one of the Odes, and told him he must have something of his pencil:  Mr. Bentley desired him to choose a subject.  He chose Theodore and Honoria!—­don’t mention this, for we are shocked.  It is loving melancholy till it is not strong enough, and he grows to dram with Horror.  Good night! my compliments to Miss Montagu; did you receive my recipes?

(348) Charlotte, daughter and co-heiress of Colonel Godfrey, married in 1700 to Lord Falmouth.-E.

146 Letter 66 To Sir Horace Mann.  Strawberry Hill, Oct. 28, N. S. 1752.

I must certainly make you a visit, for I have nothing to say to you.  Perhaps you will think this an odd reason; but as I cannot let our intimacy drop, and no event happens here for fuel to the correspondence, if we must be silent, it shall be like a matrimonial silence, t`ete-`a-t`ete.  Don’t look upon this paragraph as a thing in the air, though I dare to say you will, upon my repeating that I have any thoughts of a trip to Florence:  indeed I have never quite given up that intention and if I can possibly settle my affairs at all to my mind, I shall certainly execute my scheme towards the conclusion of this Parliament, that is, about next spring twelvemonth:  I cannot bear elections:  and still less, the hash of them over again in a first session.  What vivacity such a reverberation may give to the blood of England, I don’t know; at present it all stagnates.  I am sometimes almost tempted to go and amuse myself at Paris with the bull Unigenius.  Our beauties are returned, and have done no execution.  The French would not conceive that Lady Caroline Petersham ever had been handsome, nor that my Lady Coventry has much pretence to be so now.  Indeed all the travelled English allow that there is a Madame de Broune handsomer, and a finer figure.  Poor Lady Coventry was under piteous disadvantages; for besides being very silly, ignorant of the world, breeding, speaking no French, and suffered to wear neither red nor powder, she had that perpetual drawback upon her beauty her lord, who is sillier in a wise way, as ignorant, ill bred, and speaking very little French himself-just enough to show how ill-bred he is.  The Duke de Luxemburg told him he had called upon my Lady Coventry’s coach; my lord replied, “Vous avez fort bien fait.”  He is jealous, prude, and scrupulous; at a dinner at Sir John Bland’s, before sixteen persons, he coursed his wife round the table, on suspecting she had stolen on a little red, seized her, scrubbed it off by force with a napkin, and then told her, that since she had deceived him and broke her promise, he would carry her back directly to England.  They were pressed to stay for the