What you say you have heard of strange conspiracies, fomented by our nephew(378) is not entirely groundless.  A Dr. Cameron(379) has been seized in Scotland, who certainly came over with commission to feel the ground.  He is brought to London; but nobody troubles their head about him, or any thing else, but Newmarket, where the Duke is at present making a campaign, with half the nobility and half the money of England attending him:  they really say, that not less than a hundred thousand pounds have been carried thither for the hazard of this single week.  The palace has been furnished for him from the great wardrobe, though the chief person(380) concerned flatters himself that his son is at the expense of his own amusement there.

I must now tell you how I have been treated by an old friend of yours—­don’t be frightened, and conclude that this will make against your friend San Severino:  he is only a private prince; the rogue in Question is a monarch.  Your brother has sent you some weekly papers that are much in fashion, called “The World;” three or four of them are by a friend of yours; one particularly I wrote to promote a subscription for King Theodore, who is in prison for debt.  His Majesty’s character is so bad, that it only raised fifty pounds; and though that was so much above his desert, it was so much below his expectation, that he sent a solicitor to threaten the printer with a prosecution for having taken so much liberty with his name—­take notice too, that he had accepted the money!  Dodsley, you may believe, laughed at the lawyer; but that does not lessen the dirty knavery.  It would indeed have made an excellent suit! a printer prosecuted suppose for having solicited and obtained charity for a man in prison, and that man not mentioned by his right name, but by a mock title, and the man himself not a native of the country!—­but I have done with countenancing kings!

Lord Bath has contributed a paper to the World, but seems to have entirely lost all his wit and genius:  it is a plain heavy description of Newmarket, with scarce an effort towards humour.(381) I had conceived the greatest expectations from a production of his, especially in the way of the Spectator; but I M now assured by Franklyn, the old printer of the Craftsman, (who by a comical revolution of things, is a tenant of mine at Twickenham,) that Lord Bath never wrote a Craftsman himself, only gave hints for them—­yet great part of his reputation was built on those papers.  Next week my Lord chesterfield appears in the World(382)—­I expect much less from him than I did from Lord Bath, but it is very certain that his name will make it applauded.  Adieu!

P.S.  Since I came to town, I hear that my Lord Granville has cut another colt’s tooth-in short, they say he is going to be married again; it is to Lady Juliana Collier,(383) a very pretty girl, daughter of Lord Portmore:  there are not above two or three and forty years difference in their ages, and not above three bottles difference in @ their drinking in a day, so it is a very suitable match!  She will not make so good a Queen as our friend Sophia, but will like better, I suppose, to make a widow.  If this should not turn out true,(384) I can’t help it.