lawyers.  I say I am told; for I was content with having been beat twice, and did not attend.  The heats between the two ministers were far from cooling by the length of the debate.  Adieu!  You did little expect in these times, and at this season, to have heard such a parliamentary history!  The bill is not near finished;(393) Mr. Fox has declared he will dispute every inch of ground.  I hope he won’t be banished to Pontoise.(394) I shall write to you no more; so pray return.  I hear most favourable accounts of my Lady Ailesbury.

(389) The following is Tindal’s account of the origin of this bill:  “The fatal consequences of clandestine marriages had been long complained of in England, as rendering the succession to all property insecure and doubtful.  Every day produced hearings of the most shocking kind in the court of Chancery, and appeals in the House of Lords, concerning the validity of such marriages; and sometimes the innocent offspring were cut off from succession, though their parents had been married bona fide, because of the irregularity of such marriage.  On the other hand, both women and men of the most infamous characters had opportunities of ruining the sons and daughters of the greatest families in England, by conveniences of marrying in the Fleet, and other unlicensed places; and marrying was now become as much a trade as any mechanical profession."-E.

(390 Sir Dudley Ryder.

(391) Dr. Henry Gally, one of the King’s chaplains in ordinary.  Besides the pamphlet here spoken of, which was entitled “Some Considerations upon Clandestine Marriages,” he wrote a “Dissertation on Pronouncing the Greek Language,” and several other works He died in 1769.-E.

(392) An Irishwoman who was, for a short time, mistress to Louis xv.

(393) “The opposition to the bill was such that few clauses remained unaltered; and Mr. Fox, holding it up in the House, as Antony exposed the murdered body of Caesar, made a kind of a parody of the speech in Shakespeare upon that occasion.”  Tindal.-E.

(394) The Parliament of Paris having espoused the clause of religious liberty, and apprehended several priests who, by the authority of the Archbishop of Paris and other prelates, had refused the sacraments to those who would not subscribe to the bull Unigunitus, were banished by Louis xv. to Pontoise.

169 Letter 79 To George Montagu, Esq.  Strawberry Hill, June 11, 1753.

You will think me very fickle, and that I have but a slight regard to the castle I am building for my ancestors, when you hear that I have been these last eight days in London amid dust and stinks, instead of seringa, roses, battlements, and niches; but you perhaps recollect that I have another Gothic passion, which is for squabbles in the Wittenagemot.(395) I can’t say that the contests have run so high in either House as they have sometimes done in former days, but this age has found out a new method of parliamentary