friend to Dr. Hunter, with the following anecdote.  Her Imperial Majesty proposed to her brother of China to lay waste a large district that separates their two empires, lest it should, as it has been on the point of doing, produce war between them; the two empires being at the two extremities of the world, not being distance enough to keep the peace.  The ill-bred Tartar sent no answer to so humane a project.  On the contrary, he dispersed a letter to the Russian people, in which he tells them that a woman—­he might have said the Minerva of the French literati—­had proposed to him to extirpate all the inhabitants of a certain region belonging to him, but that he knew better what to do with his own country:  however, he could but wonder that the people of all the Russias should still submit to be governed by a creature that had assassinated her husband.—­Oh! if she had pulled the Ottoman by the nose in the midst of Constantinople, as she intended to do, this savage would have been more civilised.  I doubt the same rude monarch is still on the throne, who would not suffer Prince Czernichew to enter his territories, when sent to notify her Majesty’s hereditary succession to her husband; but bade him be told, he would not receive an ambassador from a murderess.  Is it not shocking that the law of nations, and the law of politeness, should not yet have abrogated the laws of justice and good-sense in a nation reckoned so civilised as the Chinese?  What an age do we live in, if there is still a country where the Crown does not take away all defects!  Good night!

DEATH OF LORD CHATHAM—­THURLOW BECOMES LORD CHANCELLOR.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

STRAWBERRY HILL, May 31, 1778.

I am forced to look at the dates I keep of my letters, to see what events I have or have not told you; for at this crisis something happens every day; though nothing very striking since the death of Lord Chatham, with which I closed my last.  No?—­yes, but there has.  All England, which had abandoned him, found out, the moment his eyes were closed, that nothing but Lord Chatham could have preserved them.  How lucky for him that the experiment cannot be made!  Grief is fond, and grief is generous.  The Parliament will bury him; the City begs the honour of being his grave; and the important question is not yet decided, whether he is to lie at Westminster or in St. Paul’s; on which it was well said, that it would be “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”  An annuity of four thousand pounds is settled on the title of Chatham, and twenty thousand pounds allotted to pay his debts.  The Opposition and the Administration disputed zeal; and neither care a straw about him.  He is already as much forgotten as John of Gaunt.

General Burgoyne has succeeded and been the topic, and for two days engrossed the attention of the House of Commons; and probably will be heard of no more.  He was even forgotten for three hours while he was on the tapis, by a violent quarrel between Temple Luttrell (a brother of the Duchess of Cumberland) and Lord George Germaine; but the public has taken affection for neither them nor the General:  being much more disposed at present to hate than to love—­except the dead.  It will be well if the ill-humour, which increases, does not break out into overt acts.