Your brother, your Wetenhalls, and the ancient Baron and Baroness Dacre of the South, are to dine with me at Strawberry Hill next Sunday.  Divers have been the negotiations about it:  your sister, you know, is often impeded by a prescription or a prayer; and I, on the other hand, who never rise in the morning, have two balls on my hands this week to keep me in bed the next day till dinner-time.  Well, it is charming to be so young! the follies of the town are so much more agreeable than the wisdom of my brethren the authors, that I think for the future I shall never write beyond a card, nor print beyond Mrs. Clive’s benefit tickets.  Our great match approaches; I dine at Lord Waldegrave’s presently, and suppose I shall then hear the day.  I have quite reconciled my Lady Townshend to the match (saving her abusing us all), by desiring her to choose my wedding clothes; but I am to pay the additional price of being ridiculous. to which I submit; she has chosen me a white ground with green flowers.  I represented that, however young my spirits may be, my bloom is rather past; but the moment I declared against juvenile colours, I found it was determined I should have nothing else:  so be it.  T’other night I had an uncomfortable situation with the duchess of Bedford:  we had played late at loo at Lady Joan Scot’s; I came down stairs with their two graces of Bedford and Grafton:  there was no chair for me:  I said I will walk till I meet one.  “Oh!” said the Duchess of Grafton, “the Duchess of Bedford will set you down:”  there were we charmingly awkward and complimenting:  however, she was forced to press it, and I to accept it; in a minute she spied a hackney chair—­“Oh! there is a chair,-but I beg your pardon, it looks as if I wanted to get rid of you, but indeed I don’t; only I am afraid the Duke will want his supper.”  You may imagine how much I was afraid of making him wait.  The ball at Bedford-house, on Monday, was very numerous and magnificent.  The two Princes were there, deep hazard, and the Dutch deputies, who are a proverb for their dulness:  they have brought with them a young Dutchman, who is the richest man of Amsterdam.  I am amazed Mr. Yorke has not married him!  But the delightful part of the night was the appearance of the Duke of Newcastle, who is veering round again, as it is time to betray Mr. Pitt.  The Duchess(1027) was at the very upper end of the gallery, and though some of the Pelham court were there too, yet they showed so little cordiality to this revival of connexion, that Newcastle had nobody to attend him but Sir Edward Montagu, who kept pushing him all up the gallery.  From thence he went into the hazard-room, and wriggle(], and shuffled, and lisped, and winked, and spied, till he got behind the Duke of Cumberland, the Duke of Bedford, and Rigby; the first of whom did not deign to notice him; but he must come to it.  You would have died to see Newcastle’s pitiful and distressed figure,—­nobody went near him:  he tried to flatter people, that