You tell me in your letter of November 3d, that the (quarry of granite might be rented at twenty pounds or twenty shillings, I don’t know which, no matter, per annum.  When I can’t get a table out of it, is it very likely you or I should get a fortune out of it?  What signifies the cheapness of the rent?  The cutting and shippage would be articles of some little consequence!  Who should be supervisor?  You, who are so good a manager, so attentive, so diligent, so expeditious, and so accurate?  Don’t you think our quarry would turn to account?  Another article, to which I might apply the same questions, is the project for importation of French wine:  it is odd that a scheme so cheap and so practicable should hitherto have been totally overlooked.  One would think the breed of smugglers was lost, like the true spaniels, or genuine golden pippins!  My dear Sir, you know I never drink three glasses of my wine-can you think I care whether, they are sour or sweet, cheap or dear?—­or do you think that I, who am always taking trouble to reduce my trouble into as compact a volume as I can, would tap such an article as importing my own wine?  But now comes your last proposal about the Gothic paper.  When you made me fix up mine, unpainted, engaging to paint it yourself, and yet could never be persuaded to paint a yard of it, till I was forced to give Bromwich’s man God knows what to do it. would you make me believe that you will paint a room eighteen by fifteen?  But, seriously, if it is possible for you to lay aside visions, don’t be throwing continual discouragements in my way.  I have told you seriously and emphatically that I am labouring your restoration:  the scheme is neither facile nor immediate:-but, for God’s sake! act like a reasonable man.  You have a family to whom you owe serious attention.  Don’t let me think, that if you return, you will set out upon every wildgoose chase, sticking to nothing, and neglecting chiefly the talents and genius which you have in such excellence, to start projects which you have too much honesty and too little application ever to thrive by.  This advice is, perhaps, worded harshly:  but you know the heart from which it proceeds, and you know that, with all my prejudice to it, I can’t even pardon your wit, when it is employed to dress up schemes that I think romantic.  The glasses and Ray’s Proverbs you shall have, and some more gold fish, when I have leisure to go to Strawberry; for you know I don’t suffer any fisheries to be carried on there in my absence.

I am as newsless as in the dead of summer:  the Parliament produces nothing but elections:  there has already been one division- on the Oxfordshire of two hundred and sixty-seven Whigs to ninety-seven Tories:  you may calculate the burial of that election easily from these numbers.(526) The Queen of Prussia is not dead, as I told you in my last.  If you have shed many tears for her, you may set them off to the account of our son-in-law, the Prince of Hesse, who is turned Roman Catholic.  One is in this age so unused to conversions above the rank of a housemaid turned Methodist, that it occasions as much surprise as if one had heard that he had been initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries.  Are not you prodigiously alarmed for the Protestant interest in Germany?