341 Letter 196 To George Montagu, Esq.  Strawberry Hill, Oct. 14, 1756.

I shall certainly not bid for the chariot for you; do you estimate an old dowager’s new machine but at ten pounds?  You could scarce have valued herself at less! it is appraised here at fifty.  There are no family pictures but such as you might buy at any sale, that is, there are three portraits without names.  If you had offered ten pounds for a set of Pelhams, perhaps I should not have thought you had underpriced them.

You bid me give you some account of myself; I can in a very few words:  I am quite alone; in the morning I view a new pond I am making for gold fish, and stick in a few shrubs or trees, wherever I can find a space, which is very rare:  in the evening I scribble a little; all this is mixed with reading; that is, I can’t say I read much, but I pick up a good deal of reading.  The only thing I have done that can compose a paragraph, and which I think you are Whig enough to forgive me, is, that on each side of my bed I have hung Magna Charta, and the warrant for King Charles’s execution, on which I have written Major Charta; and I believe, without the latter, the former by this time would be of very little importance.  You will ask where Mr. Bentley is; confined with five sick infants, who live in spite of the epidemic distemper, as if they were infantas, and in bed himself with a fever and the same sore throat, though he sends me word he mends.

The King of Prussia has sent us over a victory, which is very kind, as we are not likely to get any of our own-not even by the secret Expedition, which you apprehend, and which I believe still less than I did the invasion-perhaps indeed there may be another port on the coast of France which we hope to discover, as we did one in the last war.  By degrees, and somehow or other, I believe, we shall be fully acquainted with France.  I saw the German letter you mention, think it very mischievous, and very well written for the purpose.

You talk of being better than you have been for many months; pray, which months were they, and what was the matter with you?  Don’t send me your fancies; I shall neither pity nor comfort you.  You are perfectly well, and always were ever since I knew you, which is now—­I won’t say how long, but within this century.  Thank God you have good health, and don’t call it names.

John and I are just going to Garrick’s with a grove of cypresses in our hands, like the Kentish men at the Conquest.  He has built a temple to his master Shakspeare, and I am going to adorn the outside, since his modesty would not let me decorate it within, as I proposed, with these mottoes: 

“Quod spiro et placeo, si placeo, tuum est. 
That I spirit have and nature,
That sense breathes in ev’ry feature,
That I please, if please I do,
Shakspeare, all I owe to you.”

342 Letter 197
To George Montagu, Esq. 
Twickenham, Monday.