In the middle of all these principalities and powers was the Duchess of Queensbury, in her forlorn trim, a white apron and a white hood, and would make the Duke swallow all her undress.  T’other day she drove post to Lady Sophia Thomas, at Parsons-green, and told her that she was come to tell her something of importance. " What is it!” “Why take a couple of beef-steaks, clap them together as if they were for a dumpling, and eat them with pepper and salt; it is the best thing you ever tasted:  I could not help coming to tell you this:”  and away she drove back to town.  Don’t a course of folly for forty years make one very sick?

The weather is so hot, and the roads so dusty, that I can’t get to Strawberry; but I shall begin negotiating with you now about your coming.  You must not expect to find it in beauty.  I hope to get my bill finished in ten days; I have scrambled it through the lords; but altogether, with the many difficulties and plagues, I am a good deal out of humour; my purchases hitch, and new proprietors start out of the ground, like the crop of soldiers in the Metamorphosis.  I expect but an unpleasant summer; my indolence and inattention are not made to wade through leases and deeds.  Mrs. Chenevix brought me one yesterday to sign, and her sister Bertrand, the toy-woman of Bath, for a witness.  I showed them my cabinet of enamels instead of treating them with white wine.  The Bertrand said, “Sir, I hope you don’t trust all sorts of ladies with this cabinet!” What an entertaining assumption of dignity!  I must tell you an anecdote that I found t’other day in an old French author, which is a great drawback on beaux sentiments and romantic ideas.  Pasquier, in his “Recherches de la France,” is giving an account of the Queen of Scots’ execution; he says, the night before, knowing her body must be stripped for her shroud, she would have her feet washed, because she used ointment to one of them which was sore.  I believe I have told you, that in a very old trial of her, which I bought from Lord Oxford’s collection, it is said that she was a large lame woman.  Take sentiments out of their pantoufles, and reduce them to the infirmities of mortality, what a falling off there is!  I could not help laughing in myself t’other day, as I went through Holborn in a very hot day, at the dignity of human nature; all those foul old-clothes women panting without handkerchiefs, and mopping themselves all the way down within their loose jumps.  Rigby gave me a strong picture of human nature; he and Peter Bathurst t’other night carried a servant of the latter’s, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding; who, to all his other vocations, has, by the grace of Mr. Lyttelton, added that of Middlesex justice.  He sent them word he was at supper, that they must come next morning.  They did not understand that freedom, and ran up, where they found him banqueting with a blind man,(41) a whore, and three on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in One dish, and the dirtiest cloth.  He never stirred nor asked them to sit.  Rigby, who had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and Bathurst, at whose father’s he had lived for victual,,, understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs; on which he civilized.(42)