to hear that good Dr. Cocchi(405) was in the Inquisition than in prescribing to a snuff-twitter-nerve-fever!  You say people tell you that leaving off snuff all at once may be attended with bad consequences—­I can’t conceive what bad consequences, but to the snuff-shop, who, I conclude by your lamentations, must have sold you tolerable quantities; and I know what effects any diversion of money has upon the tobacco-trade in Tuscany.  I forget how much it was that the duty sank at Florence in a fortnight after the erection of the first lottery, by the poor people abridging themselves of snuff to buy tickets; but I think I have said enough, considering I don’t intend to scold.

Thank you for your civilities to Mr. Stephens; not at all for those to Mr. Perry,(406) who has availed himself of the partiality which he found you had for me, and passed Upon you for my friend.  I never spoke one word to him in my life, but when he went out of his own dressing-room at Penshurst that Mr. Chute and I might see it, and then I said, “Sir, I hope we don’t disturb you;” he grunted something, and walked away—­la belle amiti`e!—­yet, my dear child, I thank you, who receive bad money when it is called My coin.  I Wish you had liked my Lady Rochford’s beauty more:  I intended it should return well preserved:  I grow old enough to be piqued for the charms of my contemporaries.

Lord Pomfret(407) is dead, not a thousand pound in debt.  The Countess has two thousand a-year rent-charge for jointure, five hundred as lady of the bedchamber to the late Queen, and fourteen thousand pounds in money, in her own power, just recovered by a lawsuit-what a fund for follies!  The new Earl has about two thousand four hundred pounds a-year in present but deep debts and post-obits.  He has not put on mourning, but robes; that is, in the middle of this very hot summer, he has produced himself in a suit of crimson velvet, that he may be sure of not being mistaken for being in weepers.  There are rents worth ten thousand pounds left to little Lady Sophia Carteret,(408) and the whole personal estate between the two unmarried daughters;(409) so the seat(410) must be stripped.  There are a few fine small pictures, and one(411) very curious One of Henry VII. and his Queen, with Cardinal Morton, and, I think, the Abbot of Westminster.  Strawberry casts a Gothic eye upon this, but I fear it will pass our revenues.  The statues,(412) which were part of the Arundel collection, are famous, but few good.  The Cicero is fine and celebrated:  the Marius I think still finer.  The rest are Scipios, Cincinnatus’s and the Lord knows who, which have lost more of their little value than of their false pretensions by living out of doors; and there is a green-house full of colossal fragments.  Adieu!  Have you received the description and portrait of my castle?

(405) he was a very free thinker, and suspected by the Inquisition.

(406) He married one of the coheiresses of the Sidneys, Earls of Leicester.