(425) Anne, daughter of William, second Duke of Hamilton, and wife of Robert, third Earl of Southesk.-E.

(426) Sir Thomas Clifford, created Lord Clifford of Chudleigh.  He was one of “The Cabal."-E.

(427) Lucy, daughter of Hugh Fortescue, Esq. of Filleigh; upon whose death, in 1746-7, Lord Lyttelton wrote his Celebrated monody.-E.

(428) John Hutchinson, the founder of this sect, was born in 1674, and died in 1737, leaving a number of works on the Hebrew language, which were collected in 1748, in twelve volumes octavo.  He imagined all knowledge to be contained in the Hebrew Scriptures, and, rejecting the points, he gave a fanciful meaning to every one of the Hebrew letters.  He possessed great mechanical skill, and invented a chronometer for the discovery of the longitude, which was much approved by Sir Isaac Newton.-E.

(429) Among his followers were the amiable Dr. Horne, Bishop of Norwich, who published an “Abstract” of his writings, and Parkhurst, the author of the Hebrew Lexicon.-E.

186 Letter 86 To Sir Horace Mann.  Strawberry Hill, Oct. 6, 1753.

I fear the letter of July 21st, which you tell me you have received, was the last I wrote.  I will make no more excuses for my silence; I think they take up half my letters.  The time of year must be full excuse; and this autumn is so dead a time, that people even don’t die.

You have puzzled me extremely by a paragraph in yours about one Wilton, a sculptor, who, you say, is mentioned with encomiums one of the Worlds:(430) I recollected no such thing.  The first parcel your brother sends you shall convey the other numbers of that paper, and I will mark all the names I know of the authors:  there are several, and of our first writers;(431) but in general you will not find that the paper answers the idea you have entertained of it.

I grieve for my Florentine friends, and for the doubling of their yoke:  the Count has shown great art.  I am totally ignorant, not to say indifferent, about the Modenese treaty;(432) indeed, I have none of that spirit which was formerly so much objected to some of my family, the love of negotiations during a settled peace.  Treaties within treaties are very dull businesses:  contracts of marriage between baby-princes and miss-princesses give me no curiosity.  If I had not seen it in the papers, I should never have known that Master Tommy the Archduke was playing at marrying Miss Modena.  I am as sick of the hide-and-seek at which all Europe has been playing about a King of the Romans!  Forgive me, my dear child, you who are a minister, for holding your important affairs so cheap.  I amuse myself with Gothic and painted glass, and am as grave about my own trifles as I could be at Ratisbon.  I shall tell you one or two events within my own very small sphere, and you must call them a letter.  I believe I mentioned having made a kind of armoury:  my upper servant, who is full as dull as his predecessor, whom you knew, Tom Barney, has had his head so filled with arms, that the other day, when a man brought home an old chimney-back, which I had bought for having belonged to Harry VII, he came running in, and said, “Sir, Sir! here is a man has brought some more armour!”