(1040) The letter of Voltaire, to which the above is a reply, contained the following opinion of Walpole’s Historical Doubts:- -"Avant le d`epart de ma lettre, j’ai eu le tems, Monsieur, de lire votre Richard Trois.  Vous seriez un excellent attornei general; vous pesez toutes les probabilit`es; mais il paroit que vous avez une inclination secrette pour ce bossu.  Vous voulez qu’il ait `et`e beau gar`con, et m`eme galant homme.  Le b`en`edictin Calmet a fait une dissertation pour prouver que Jesus Christ avait un fort beau visage.  Je veux croire avec vous, que Richard Trois n’`etait ni si laid, ni si m`echant, qu’on le dit; mais je n’aurais pas voulu avoir affaire `a lui.  Votre rose blanche et votre rose rouge avaient de terribles `epines pour la nation.

“Those gracious kings are all a pack of rogues.  En lisant l’histoire des York et des Lancastre, et de bien d’autres, on croit lire l’histoire des voleurs de grand chemin.  Pour votre Henri Sept, il n’`etait que coupeur de bourses.  Be a minister or an anti-minister, a lord or a philosopher, I will be, with an equal respect, Sir, etc."-E.

Letter 348 To The Hon. H. S. Conway.  Strawberry Hill, August 9, 1768. (page 527)

You are very kind, or else you saw into my mind, and knew that I have been thinking of writing to you, but had not a penfull of matter.  True, I have been in town, but I am more likely to learn news here; where at least we have it like fish, that could not find vent in London.  I saw nothing there but the ruins of loo, Lady Hertford’s cribbage, and Lord Botetourt, like patience on a monument, smiling in grief.  He is totally ruined, and quite charmed.  Yet I heartily pity him.  To Virginia he cannot be indifferent:  he must turn their heads somehow or other.  If his graces do not captivate them, he will enrage them to fury; for I take all his douceur to be enamelled on iron.

My life is most uniform and void of events, and has nothing worth repeating.  I have not had a soul with me, but accidental company now and then at dinner.  Lady Holderness,.  Lady Ancram, Lady Mary Coke, Mrs. Ann Pitt, and Mr. Hume, dined here the day before yesterday.  They were but just gone, when George Selwyn, Lord Bolingbroke, and Sir William Musgrave, who had been at Hampton-court, came in, at nine at night, to drink tea.  They told me, what I was very glad to hear, and what I could not doubt, as they had it from the Duke of Grafton himself, that Bishop Cornwallis(1041) goes to Canterbury.  I feared it would be ****; but it seems he had secured all the backstairs, and not the great stairs.  As the last head of the church had been in the midwife line, I supposed Goody Lyttelton(1042) had hopes; and as he had been president of an atheistical club, to be Sure Warburton did not despair.  I was thinking it would make a good article in the papers, that three bishops had supped with Nancy Parsons at Vauxhall, in their way to Lambeth.  I am sure ****, would have been of the number; and **** who told the Duke of Newcastle, that if his grace had commanded the Blues at Minden, they would have behaved better, would make no scruple to cry up her chastity.