(890) Lord Bute thus bewails the fate of the bill, in a letter to Mr. Pitt of the same day:  “What a terrible proof was Friday, in the House of Lords, of the total loss of public spirit, and the most supreme indifference to those valuable rights, for the obtaining which our ancestors freely risked both life and fortune!  These are dreadful clouds that hang over the future accession, and damp the hopes I should otherwise entertain of that important day.”  Chatham Correspondence, vol. i. p. 317.-E.

(891) The expedition against St. Maloes.

(892) All these gentlemen had been volunteers on successive expeditions to the coast of France.

(893) The portrait of ninon de l’Enclos.

(894) Madame de S`evign`e, in her letters to her daughter, reports that Ninon thus expressed herself relative to her son, the Marquis de Sevign`e, who was one of her lovers.

424 Letter 263 To Dr. Ducarel.  June, 1758.

I am very much obliged to you for the remarks and hints you sent me on my Catalogue.  They will be of use to me; and any observations of my friends I shall be very thankful for, and disposed to employ, to make my book, what it is extremely far from being, more perfect.  I was very glad to hear, Sir, that the present Lord Archbishop of Canterbury has continued you in an employment for which nobody is so fit, and in which nobody would be so useful.  I wish all manner of success to, as well as continuance of, your labours; and am, etc. etc.

425 Letter 264 To Sir Horace Mann.  Arlington Street, Sunday morning, June 11, 1758.

This will not depart till to-morrow, by which time probably there will be more news, but I am obliged to go into the country to-day, and would not let so much history set out, without my saying a word of it, as I know you trust to no gazette but mine.  Last Thursday se’nnight our great expedition departed from Portsmouth—­and soon separated; lord Anson with the great ships to lie before Brest, and Commodore Howe,(895) our naval hero, with the transports and a million of small fry on the secret enterprise.  At one o’clock on Thursday night, alias Friday morning a cutter brought advice that on Sunday night the transports had made land in Concalle Bay, near St. Maloes, had disembarked with no opposition or loss, except of a boatswain and two sailors, killed from a little fort, to which Howe was near enough to advise them not to resist.  However, some peasants in it fired and then ran away.  Some prisoners have assured our troops that there is no force within twenty leagues.  This may be apocryphal, a word which, as I am left at liberty, I always interpret false.  It is plain, however, that we were not expected at St. Maloes at least.  We are in violent impatience to hear the consequences—­especially whether we have taken the town, in which there is but one battalion, many old houses of wood, and the water easily to be cut off.