As you must of course write me a letter of thanks for my brawn, I beg you will take that opportunity Of telling me very particularly how my Lady Aylesbury does, and if she is quite recovered, as I much hope?  How does my sweet little wife do @ Are your dragons all finished?  Have the Coopers seen Miss Blandy’s ghost, or have they made Mr. Cranston poison a dozen or two more private gentlewomen?  Do you plant without rain as I do, in order to have your trees die, that you may have the pleasure of planting them over again with rain?  Have you any Mrs. Clive(355) that pulls down barns that intercept your prospect; or have you any Lord Radnor(356) that plants trees to intercept his own prospect, that he may cut them down again to make an alteration?  There! there are as many questions as if I were your schoolmaster or your godmother!  Good night!

(352) Now first printed.

(353) He means such as are painted on old china with the brown edge, and representations of wheatsheafs.-E.

(354) Fashionable china-shops.-E.

(355) Then living at Little Strawberry Hill.-E.

(356) The last Lord Radnor of the family of Robarts, then living at Twickenham, very near Strawberry Hill.-E.

150 Letter 68
To George Montagu, Esq. 
White’s, December 3, 1752.

I shall be much obliged to you for the passion-flower, notwithstanding it comes out of a garden of Eden, from which Eve, my sister-in-law, long ago gathered passion-fruit.  I thank you too for the offer of your Roman correspondences, but you know I have done with virt`u, and deal only with the Goths and Vandals.

You ask a very improper person, why my Lord Harcourt(357) resigned.  My lord Coventry says it is the present great arcanum of government, and you know I am quite out of the circle of secrets.  The town says, that it was finding Stone is a Jacobite; and it says, too, that the Whigs are very uneasy.  My Lord Egremont says the Whigs can’t be in danger, for then my Lord Hartington would not be gone a-hunting.  Every body is as inpatient as you can be, to know the real cause, but I don’t find that either Lord or Bishop is disposed to let the world into the true secret.  It is pretty certain that one Mr. Cresset has abused both of them without ceremony, and that the Solicitor-general told the Bishop in plain terms that my Lord Harcourt was a cipher, and was put in to be a cipher:  an employment that, considering it is a sinecure, seems to hang unusually long upon their hands.  They have so lately quarrelled with poor Lord Holderness for playing at blindman’s-buff at Tunbridge, that it will be difficult to give him another place only because he is fit to play at blind-man’s-buff; and yet it is much believed that he will be the governor, and your cousin his successor.  I am as improper to tell you why the governor of Nova Scotia is to be at the head of the Independents.  I have long thought him one of the greatest dependents, and I assure you I have seen nothing since his return, to make me change my opinion.  He is too busy in the bedchamber to remember me.