Your nephew has sent me word that he will breakfast with me to-morrow, but shall not have time to dine.  I have nothing to add to the foregoing general picture.  We have been bidden even by proclamation to expect an invasion, and troops and provisions have for this week said to have been embarked.  Still I do not much expect a serious descent.  The French, I think, have better chances with less risk.  They may ruin us in detail.  The fleet is at present at home or very near, and very strong; nor do I think that the French plan is activity:—­but it is idle to talk of the present moment, when it will be some time before you receive this.  I am infinitely in more pain about Mr. Conway, who is in the midst of the storm in a nutshell, and I know will defend himself as if he was in the strongest fortification in Flanders—­and, which is as bad, I believe the Court would sacrifice the island to sacrifice him.  They played that infamous game last year on Keppel, when ten thousand times more was at stake.  They look at the biggest objects through the diminishing end of every telescope; and, the higher they who look, the more malignant and mean the eye....

Adieu! my dear Sir.  In what manner we are to be undone, I do not guess; but I see no way by which we can escape happily out of this crisis—­I mean, preserve the country and recover the Constitution.  I thought for four years that calamity would bring us to our senses:  but alas! we have none left to be brought to.  We shall now suffer a greal deal, submit at last to a humiliating peace, and people will be content.—­So adieu, England! it will be more or less a province or kind of province to France, and its viceroy will be, in what does not concern France, its despot—­and will be content too!  I shall not pity the country; I shall feel only for those who grieve with me at its abject state; or for posterity, if they do not, like other degraded nations, grow callously reconciled to their ignominy.

ERUPTION OF VESUVIUS—­DEATH OF LORD TEMPLE.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

Sept. 16, 1779.

I have received your letter by Colonel Floyd, and shall be surprised indeed if Caesar does not find his own purple a little rumpled, as well as his brother’s mantle.  But how astonished was I at finding that you did not mention the dreadful eruption of Vesuvius.  Surely you had not heard of it!  What are kings and their popguns to that wrath of Nature!  How Sesostris, at the head of an army of nations, would have fallen prostrate to earth before a column of blazing embers eleven thousand feet high!  I am impatient to hear more, as you are of the little conflict of us pigmies.  Three days after my last set out, we received accounts of D’Estaing’s success against Byron and Barrington, and of the capture of Grenada.  I do not love to send first reports, which are rarely authentic.  The subsequent narrative of the engagement is more favourable.  It allows the victory to the enemy, but makes their loss of