great fete at St. Cloud; he excused himself, “because it would make him miss a music-meeting at Worcester;” and she excused herself from the fireworks at Madame Pompadour’s, “because it was her dancing-master’s hour.”  I will tell you but one more anecdote, and I think You cannot be imperfect in your ideas of them.  The Mar`echale de lowendahl was pleased with an English fan Lady Coventry had, who very civilly gave it her:  my lord made her write for it again next morning, because he had given it her before marriage, and her parting with it would make an irreparable breach,” and send an old one in the room of it!  She complains to every body she meets, “How odd it is that my lord should use her so ill, when she knows he has so great a regard that he would die for her, and when he was so good as to marry her without a shilling!” Her sister’s history is not unentertaining:  Duke Hamilton is the abstract of Scotch pride:  he and the Duchess at their own house walk in to dinner before their company, sit together at the upper end of their own table, eat off the same plate, and drink to nobody beneath the rank of Earl-would not one wonder how they could get any body either above or below that rank to dine with them at all?  I don’t know whether you will not think all these very trifling histories; but for myself, I love any thing that marks a character so Strongly.

I told you how the younger Cr`ebillon had served me, and how angry I am; yet I must tell you a very good reply of his.  His father one day in a passion with him, said, “Il y a deux choses que je voudrois n’avoir jamais fait, mon Catilina et vous!” He answered, “Consolez vous, mon p`ere, car on pr`etend que vous n’avez fait ni l’un ni l’autre.”  Don’t think me infected with France, if I tell you more French stories; but I know no English ones, and we every day grow nearer to the state of a French province, and talk from the capital.  The old Cr`ebillon, who admires us as much as we do them. has long had by him a tragedy called Oliver Cromwell, and had thoughts of dedicating it to the Parliament of England:  he little thinks how distant a cousin the present Parliament is to the Parliament he wots of.  The Duke of Richelieu’s son,(349) who certainly must not pretend to declare off, like Cr`ebillon’s, (he is a boy of ten years old,) was reproached for not minding his Latin:  he replied, “Eh! mon p`ere n’a jamais s`cu le Latin, et il a eu les plus jolies femmes de France!” My sister was exceedingly shocked with their indecorums:  the night She arrived at Paris, asking for the Lord knows what utensil, the footman of the house came and “showed it her himself, and every thing that is related to it.  Then, the footmen who brought messages to her, came into her bedchamber in person; for they don’t deliver them to your servants, in the English way.  She amused me with twenty other new fashions, which I should be ashamed to set down, if a letter was at all upon a