return from their little senate.  Yet without dress and equipage ’tis as dear living here for a stranger, as in places where one is obliged to both, from the price of all sort of provision, which they are forced to buy from their neighbours, having almost no land of their own.”  How much more agreeable, from Lady Mary’s point of view, was Chambery:  “Here is the most profound peace and unbounded plenty that is to be found in any corner of the universe; but not one rag of money.  For my part, I think it amounts to the same thing, whether one is obliged to give several pence for bread, or can have a great deal of bread for a penny, since the Savoyard nobility here keep as good tables, without money, as those in London, who spend in a week what would be here a considerable yearly revenue.  Wine, which is equal to the best burgundy, is sold for a penny a quart, and I have a cook for very small wages, that is capable of rivalling Chloe.”

“My girl gives me great prospect of satisfaction, but my young rogue of a son is the most ungovernable little rake that ever played truant,” Lady Mary wrote to Lady Mar in July, 1727, when the boy was fourteen and the girl nine years old.

It has already been mentioned that young Edward, who was placed at Westminster School at the early age of five, ran away.  In fact, he ran away more than once.  “My blessed offspring has already made a great noise in the world,” his mother told Lady Mar in July, 1726.  “That young rake, my son, took to his heels t’other day and transported his person to Oxford; being in his own opinion thoroughly qualified for the University.  After a good deal of search we found and reduced him, much against his will, to the humble condition of a schoolboy.  It happens very luckily that the sobriety and discretion is of my daughter’s side; I am sorry the ugliness is so too, for my son grows extremely handsome.”  The lad was incorrigible.  In the following year he disappeared for some months, to be found selling fish at Blackwall.

“My cousin is going to Paris, and I will not let her go without a letter for you, my dear sister, though I was never in a worse humour for writing” (the anxious mother wrote to her sister).  “I am vexed to the blood by my young rogue of a son; who has contrived at his age to make himself the talk of the whole nation.  He is gone knight-erranting, God knows where; and hitherto ’tis impossible to find him.  You may judge of my uneasiness by what your own would be if dear Lady Fanny was lost.  Nothing that ever happened to me has troubled me so much; I can hardly speak or write of it with tolerable temper, and I own it has changed mine to that degree I have a mind to cross the water, to try what effect a new heaven and a new earth will have upon my spirit.”

Later, Edward ran away again, joining the crew of a ship going to Oporto, and was not discovered in that city until a considerable period had elapsed since his flight.