of a suspension of action:  and in the very middle of that I came to the knowledge of a cruel piece of flattery which he paid to his protector.  He had made interest for these two years for one Parry, a poor clergyman, schoolfellow and friend of his, to be fellow of Eton, and had secured a majority for him.  A Fellow died:  another wrote to Sandwich to know if he was not to vote for Parry according to his engagement,—­“No, he must vote for one who had been tutor to the Duke of Bedford,” who by that means has carried it.  My Lady Lincoln was not suffered to go to a ball which Sandwich made the other night for the Duke, who tumbled down in the middle of a country dance; they imagined he had beat his nose flat, but he lay like a tortoise on the topshell, his face could not touch the ground by some feet.  My Lady Anson was there, who insisted on dancing minuets, though against the rule of the night, with as much eagerness as you remember in my Lady Granville.  Then she proposed herself for a Louvre; all the men vowed they had never heard of such a dance, upon which she dragged out Lady Leveson,(102) and made her dance one with her.

At the last ball at the same house, a great dispute of precedence, which the Duchess of Norfolk had set on foot but has dropped, came to trial.  Lord Sandwich contrived to be on the outside of the door to hand down to supper whatever lady came out first.  Madame de Mirepoix and the Duchess of Bedford were the rival queens; the latter made a faint offer to the ambassadress to go first; she returned it, and the other briskly accepted it; upon which the ambassadress, with great cleverness, made all the other women go before her, and then asked the Duke of Bedford if he would not go too.  However, though they continue to visit, the wound is incurable:  you don’t imagine that a widow(103) of the House of Lorraine, and a daughter of Princess Craon, can digest such an affront.  It certainly was very absurd, as she is not only an ambassadress but a stranger; and consequently all English women, as being at home, should give her place.  King George the Second and I don’t agree in our explication of this text of ceremony; he approves the Duchess-so he does Miss Chudleigh, in a point where ceremony is out of the question.  He opened the trenches before her a fortnight ago, at the masquerade- but at the last she had the gout, and could not come; he went away flat, cross.  His son is not so fickle.  My Lady Middlesex has been miscarrying; he attends as incessantly as Mrs. Cannon.(104) The other morning the Princess came to call him to go to Kew; he made her wait in her coach above half an hour at the door.  You will be delighted with a bon-mot of a chair-maker, whom he has discarded for voting for Lord Trentham; one of his black-caps was sent to tell this Vaughan that the Prince would employ him no more:  “I am going to bid another person make his Royal Highness a chair.”—­“With all my heart,” said the chair-maker; “I don’t care what they make him, so they don’t make him a throne.”