Parliamentary and subsidiary politics are in great ferment.  I could tell you much if I saw you; but I will not while you stay there—­yet, as I am a true friend and not to be changed by prosperity, I can’t neglect offering you my services when I am cens`e to be well with a minister.  It is so long since I was, and I believe so little a while that I shall be so,, (to be sure, I mean that he will be minister,) that I must faire valoir my interest, while I have any-in short, shall I get you one of these new independent companies ?-Hush! don’t tell Mr. Muntz how powerful I am:  his warlike spirit will want to coincide with my ministerial one; and it would be very inconvenient to the Lords Castlecomers to have him knocked on the head before he had finished all the strawberries and vines that we lust after.

I had a note from Gray, who is still at Stoke; and he desired I would tell you, that he has continued pretty well.  Do come.  Adieu!

Lottery tickets rise:  subsidiary treaties under par—­I don’t say, no price.  Lord Robert Bertie, with a company of the Guards, has thrown himself into Dover castle; don’t they sound very war-full?

(626) Now first printed.

285 Letter 156
To Sir Horace Mann. 
Strawberry Hill, Oct. 27, 1755.

When the newspapers swarm with our military preparations at home, with encampments, fire-ships, floating castles at the mouths of the great rivers, etc. in short, when we expect an invasion, you would chide, or be disposed to chide me, if I were quite silent-and yet, what can I tell you more than that an invasion is threatened? that sixteen thousand men are about Dunkirk, and that they are assembling great quantities of flat-bottomed boats!  Perhaps they will attempt some landing; they are certainly full of resentment; they broke the peace, took our forts and built others on our boundaries; we did not bear it patiently; we retook two forts, attacked or have been going to attack others, and have taken vast numbers of their ships:  this is the state of the provocation—­what is more provoking, for once we have not sent twenty or thirty thousand men to Flanders on whom they might vent their revenge.  Well! then they must come here, and perhaps invite the Pretender to be of the party; not in a very popular light for him, to be brought by the French in revenge of a national war.  You will ask me, if we are alarmed? the people not at all so:  a minister or two, who are subject to alarms, are—­and that is no bad circumstances We are as much an island as ever, and I think a much less exposed one than we have been for many years.  Our fleet is vast; our army at home, and ready, and two-thirds stronger than when we were threatened in 1744; the season has been the wettest that ever has been known, consequently the roads not very invade-able:  and there is the additional little circumstance of the late rebellion defeated; I believe I may reckon too, Marshal Saxe dead.  You see our situation is not desperate:  in short, we escaped in ’44, and when the rebels were at Derby in ’45; we must have bad luck indeed, if we fall now.