P. S. I just hear that your cousin Halifax has resigned, on Pitt’s not letting him be secretary of state for the West Indies.

330 Letter 189 To Sir Horace Mann.  Strawberry Hill, July 11, 1756.

I receive with great satisfaction all your thanks for my anxiety about your brother:  I love you both so much, that nothing can flatter me more, than to find I please the one by having behaved as I ought to the other—­oh, yes!  I could be much more rejoiced, if this brother ceased to want my attentions.  Bristol began to be of service to him. but he has caught cold there, and been out of order again:  he assures me it is over.  I will give you a kind of happiness:  since he was there, he tells me, that if he does not find all the benefit he expects, he thinks of going abroad.  I press this most eagerly, and shall drive it on, for I own if he stays another winter in England, I shall fear his disorder will fix irremovably.  I will give you a commission, which, for his sake, I am sure, you will be attentive to execute in the perfectest manner.  Mr. Fox wants four vases of the Volterra alabaster, of four feet high each.  I choose to make over any merit in it to you, and though I hate putting you to expense, at which you always catch so greedily, when it is to oblige, yet you shall present these.  Choose the most beautiful patterns, look to the execution, and send them with rapidity, with such a letter as your turn for doing civil things immediately dictates.

There is no describing the rage against Byng; for one day we believed him a real Mediterranean Byng.(701) He has not escaped a sentence of abuse, by having involved so many officers in his disgrace and his councils of war:  one talks coolly of their being broke, and that is all.  If we may believe report, the siege is cooled’ into a blockade, and we may still save Minorca, and, what I think still more of dear old Blakeney.(702) What else we shall save or lose I know not.  The French, we hear, are embarked at Dunkirk—­rashly, if to come hither; if to Jersey or Guernsey, uncertain of success if to Ireland, ora pro vobis!  The Guards are going to encamp.  I am sorry to say, that with so much serious war about our ears, we can’t help playing with crackers.  Well, if the French do come, we shall at least have something for all the money we have laid out on Hanoverians and Hessians!  The latter, on their arrival. asked bonnement where the French camp was.  They could not conceive being sent for if it was no nearer than Calais.

The difficulties in settling the Prince’s family are far from surmounted; the council met on Wednesday night to put the last hand to it, but left it as unsettled as ever.

Pray do dare to tell me what French and Austrians say of their treaty:  we are angry—­but when did subsidies purchase gratitude!  I don’t think we have always found that they even purchased temporary assistance.  France declared, Sweden and Denmark allied to France, Holland and Austria neuter, Spain not quite to be depended on, Prussia—­how sincerely reconciled!  Would not one think we were menaced with a league of Cambray?  When this kind of situation was new to me, I did not like it-I have lived long enough, and have seen enough, to consider all political events as mere history, and shall go and see the camps with as unthinking curiosity as if I were a simpleton or a new general.  Adieu!