I don’t doubt but you will conclude that this letter, written so soon after my last, comes to notify a great sea-victory, or defeat; or that the French are landed in Ireland, and have taken and fortified Cork; that they have been joined by all the wild Irish, who have proclaimed the Pretender, and are charmed with the prospect of being governed by a true descendant of the Mac-na-O’s; or that the King of Prussia, like an unnatural nephew, has seized his uncle and Schutz in a post-chaise, and obliged them to hear the rehearsal of a French opera of his own composing—­No such thing!  If you will be guessing, you will guess wrong—­all I mean to tell you is, that thirteen gold fish, caparisoned in coats of mail, as rich as if Mademoiselle Scuderi had invented their armour, embarked last Friday on a secret expedition; which, as Mr. Weekes(562) and the wisest politicians of Twickenham concluded, was designed against the island of Jersey-but to their consummate mortification, Captain Chevalier is detained by a law-suit, and the poor Chinese adventurers are now frying under deck below bridge.  In short, if your governor is to have any gold fish, you must come and manage their transport yourself.  Did you receive my last letter?  If you did, you will not think it impossible that you should preside at such an embarkation.

The war is quite gone out of fashion, and seems adjourned to America:  though I am disappointed, I am not surprised.  You know my despair about this eventless age!  How pleasant to have lived in times when one could have been sure every week of being able to write such a paragraph as this!—­“We hear that the Christians who were on their voyage for the recovery of the Holy Land, have been massacred in Cyprus by the natives, who were provoked at a rape and murder committed in a church by some young noblemen belonging to the Nuncio”—­; or—­ “Private letters from Rome attribute the death of his Holiness to poison, which they pretend was given to him in the sacrament, by the Cardinal of St. Cecilia, whose mistress he had debauched.  The same letters add, that this Cardinal stands the fairest for succeeding to the Papal tiara; though a natural son of the late Pope is supported by the whole interest of Arragon and Naples.”  Well! since neither the Pope nor the most Christian King, will play the devil, I must condescend to tell you flippancies of less dignity.  There is a young Frenchman here, called Monsieur Herault.  Lady Harrington carried him and his governor to sup with her and Miss Ashe at a tavern t’other night.  I have long said that the French were relapsed into barbarity, and quite ignorant of the world.  You shall judge:  in the first place, the young man was bashful:  in the next, the governor, so ignorant as not to have heard of women of fashion carrying men to a tavern, thought it incumbent upon him to do the honours for his pupil, who was as modest and as much in a state of nature as the ladies themselves, and hazarded some familiarities with Lady Harrington.  The consequence was, that the next morning she sent a card-to both, to desire they would not come to her ball that evening, to which she had invited them, and to beg the favour of them never to come into her house again.  Adieu!  I am prodigal of my letters, as I hope not to write you many more.