The Duke of York returned very abruptly.  The town talks of remittances stopped; but as I know nothing of the matter, and you are not only a minister but have the honour of his good graces, I do not pretend to tell you what to be sure you know better than I do.

Old Sir John Barnard is dead, which he had been to the world for some time; and Mr. Legge.  The latter, who was heartily in the minority, said cheerfully just before he died, “that he was going to the majority.”

Let us talk a little of the north.  Count Poniatowski, with whom I was acquainted when he was here, is King of Poland, and calls himself Stanislaus the Second.  This is the sole instance, I believe, upon record, of a second of a name being on the throne while the first was living without having contributed to dethrone him.[1] Old Stanislaus lives to see a line of successors, like Macbeth in the cave of the witches.  So much for Poland; don’t let us go farther north; we shall find there Alecto herself.  I have almost wept for poor Ivan!  I shall soon begin to believe that Richard III. murdered as many folks as the Lancastrian historians say he did.  I expect that this Fury will poison her son next, lest Semiramis should have the bloody honour of having been more unnatural.  As Voltaire has unpoisoned so many persons of former ages, methinks he ought to do as much for the present time, and assure posterity that there never was such a lamb as Catherine II., and that, so far from assassinating her own husband and Czar Ivan,[2] she wept over every chicken that she had for dinner.  How crimes, like fashions, flit from clime to clime!  Murder reigns under the Pole, while you, who are in the very town where Catherine de’ Medici was born, and within a stone’s throw of Rome, where Borgia and his holy father sent cardinals to the other world by hecatombs, are surprised to hear that there is such an instrument as a stiletto.  The papal is now a mere gouty chair, and the good old souls don’t even waddle out of it to get a bastard.

[Footnote 1:  The first was Stanislaus Leczinski, father of the Queen of France.  He had been driven from Poland by Peter the Great after the overthrow of Charles XII. of Sweden (v. infra, Letter 90).]

[Footnote 2:  Ivan, the Czar who had been deposed by the former Czarina, Elizabeth, had recently been murdered, while trying to escape from the confinement in which he had been so long detained.]

Well, good night!  I have no more monarchs to chat over; all the rest are the most Catholic or most Christian, or most something or other that is divine; and you know one can never talk long about folks that are only excellent.  One can say no more about Stanislaus the first than that he is the best of beings.  I mean, unless they do not deserve it, and then their flatterers can hold forth upon their virtues by the hour.

MADAME DE BOUFFLERS’ WRITINGS—­KING JAMES’S JOURNAL.

TO THE EARL OF HERTFORD.