(613) Miss Conway’s nurse.

277 Letter 150
To Sir Horace Mann. 
Arlington Street, Sept. 29, 1755.

It is not that I am perjured for not writing to you oftener, as I promised; the war is forsworn.  We do all we can; we take, from men-of-war and Domingo-men, down to colliers and cock-boats, and from California into the very Bay of Calais.  The French have taken but one ship from us, the Blandford, and that they have restored—­but I don’t like this drowsy civil lion; it will put out a talon and give us a cursed scratch before we are aware.  Monsieur de seychelles, who grows into power, is labouring at their finances and marine:  they have struck off their sous-fermiers, and by a reform in what they call the King’s pleasures, have already saved 1,200,000 pounds sterling a year.  Don’t go and imagine that 1,200,000 pounds was all stink in the gulf of Madame Pompadour, or even in suppers and hunting; under the word the King’s pleasures, they really comprehended his civil list; and in that light I don’t know why our civil list might not be called another King’s pleasures(614) too, though it is not all entirely squandered.  In short, the single article of coffee for the Mesdames(615) amounted to 3000 pounds sterling a year—­to what must their rouge have amounted?—­but it is high time to tell you of other wars, than the old story of France and England.  You must know, not in your ministerial capacity, for I suppose that is directed by such old geographers as Sanson and De Lisle, who imagined that Herenhausen was a town in Germany, but according to the latest discoveries, there is such a county in England as Hanover, which lying very much exposed to the incursions of the French and Prussians (the latter are certain hussars in the French army), it has been thought necessary to hire Russians, and Hessians, and all the troops that lie nearest to the aforesaid weak part of Great Britain called Hanover, in order to cover this frontier from any invasion.  The expedience of this measure was obvious; yet many People who could not get over the prejudice of education, or who having got over these prejudices have for certain reasons returned to them, these Ptolemaic geographers Will not be persuaded that there is any such county in England as Hanover, and not finding it in their old maps, or having burnt their new ones in a passion—­(Mr. Legge, indeed, tore his at the treasury board the day that the warrant for the Hessian subsidy came thither)—­they determined that England had no occasion for these mercenaries.  Besides Legge, the Duke of Devonshire, the Speaker, Sir George Lee, and one mr. William Pitt, a man formerly remarkable for disputing the new geography, declared strongly against the system of treaties.(616) Copernicus no sooner returned from Germany, than the Duke of Newcastle, who had taken the alarm, frightened him out of his wits.  In short, they found that they should have no Professor to defend the new system in Parliament.  Every