none, as I really know none.(703) The clamour is extreme, and I believe how to reply in Parliament will be the chief business that will employ our ministry for the rest of the summer—­perhaps some such home and personal considerations were occupying their thoughts in the winter, when they ought to have been thinking of the Mediterranean.  We are still in the dark; we have nothing but the French account of the surrender of St. Philip’s:  we are humbled, disgraced, angry.  We know as little of Byng, but hear that he sailed with the reinforcement before his successor reached Gibraltar. if shame, despair, or any human considerations can give courage, he will surely contrive to achieve some great action, or to be knocked on the head—­a cannon-ball must be a pleasant quietus. compared to being torn to pieces by an English mob or a House of Commons.  I know no other alternative, but withdrawing to the Queen of Hungary, who would fare little better if she were obliged to come hither—­ we are extremely disposed to massacre somebody or other, to show we have any courage left.  You will be pleased with a cool, sensible speech of Lord Granville to Coloredo, the Austrian minister, who went to make a visit of excuses.  My Lord Granville interrupted him, and said, “Sir, this is not necessary; I understand that the treaty is only of neutrality; but what grieves me is, that our people will not understand it so; and the prejudice will be so great, that when it shall become necessary Again, as it will do, for us to support your mistress, nobody will then dare to be a Lord Granville.”

I think all our present hopes lie in Admiral Boscawen’s intercepting the great Martinico fleet of a hundred and fifty sail, convoyed by five men-of-war Boscawen has twenty.  I see our old friend Prince Beauvau behaved well at Mahon.  Our old diversion, the Countess,(704) has exhibited herself lately to the public exactly in a style you would guess.  Having purchased and given her lord’s collection of statues to the University of Oxford, she has been there at the public act to receive adoration.  A box was built for her near the Vice-Chancellor, where she sat three days together for four hours at a time to hear verses and speeches, to hear herself called Minerva; nay, the public orator had prepared an encomium on her beauty, but being struck with her appearance, had enough presence of mind to whisk his compliments to the beauties of her mind.  Do but figure her; her dress had all the tawdry poverty and frippery with which you remember her, and I dare swear her tympany, scarce covered with ticking, produced itself through the slit of her scowered damask robe.  It is amazing that she did not mash a few words of Latin, as she used to fricasee French and Italian! or that she did not torture some learned simile, like her comparing the tour of Sicily, the surrounding the triangle, to squaring the circle; or as when she said it was as difficult to get into an Italian coach, as for Caesar to take Attica, which she meant for Utica.  Adieu!  I trust by his and other accounts that your brother mends.