You will not wonder so much at our earthquakes as at the effects they have had.  All the women in town have taken them up upon the foot of Judgments; and the clergy, who have had no windfalls of a long season, have driven horse and foot into this opinion.  There has been a shower of sermons and exhortations; Secker, the jesuitical Bishop of Oxford, began the mode.  He heard the women were all going out of town to avoid the next shock; and so:  for fear of losing his Easter offerings, he set himself to advise them to await God’s good pleasure in fear and trembling.  But what is more astonishing, Sherlock,(120) who has much better sense, and much less of the Popish confessor has been running a race with him for the old ladies, and has written a pastoral letter, of which ten thousand were sold in two days; and fifty thousand have been subscribed for, since the two first editions.

I told you the women talked of going out of town:  several families are literally gone, and many more going to-day and to-morrow; for what adds to the absurdity, is, that the second shock having happened exactly a month after the former, it prevails that there will be a third on Thursday next, another month, which is to swallow up London.  I am almost ready to burn my letter now I have begun it, lest you should think I am laughing at you:  but it is so true, that Arthur of White’s told me last night, that he should put off the last ridotto, which was to be on Thursday, because he hears nobody would come to it.  I have advised several who are going to keep their next earthquake in the country, to take the bark for it, as it is so periodic.(121) Dick Leveson and Mr. Rigby, who had supped and strived late at Bedford House the other night, knocked at several doors, and in a watchman’s voice cried, “Past four o’clock, and a dreadful earthquake!” But I have done with this ridiculous panic:  two pages were too much to talk of it.

We have had nothing in Parliament but trade-bills, on one of which the Speaker humbled the arrogance of Sir John Barnard, who had reflected upon the proceedings of the House.  It is to break up on Thursday Se’nnight, and the King goes this day fortnight.  He has made Lord Vere Beauclerc a baron,(122) at the solicitation of the Pelhams, as this Lord had resigned upon a pique with Lord Sandwich.  Lord Anson, who is treading in the same path, and leaving the Bedfords to follow his father-in-law, the Chancellor, is made a privy councillor, with Sir Thomas Robinson and Lord Hyndford.  Lord Conway is to be an earl,(123) and Sir John Rawdon(124) (whose follies you remember, and whose boasted loyalty of having been kicked downstairs for not drinking the Pretender’s health, though even that was false, is at last rewarded,) and Sir John Vesey are to be Irish lords; and a Sir William Beauchamp Proctor, and a Mr. Loyd, Knights of the Bath.