a—­I don’t know what the word is for it; he must get his uncle the Archbishop to christen it; there is no name for it in any Pagan vocabulary.  I suppose it will have a patent for being called Necessity.  Well! there ends another volume of the American war.  It looks a little as if the history of it would be all we should have for it, except forty millions[2] of debt, and three other wars that have grown out of it, and that do not seem so near to a conclusion.  They say that Monsieur de Maurepas, who is dying, being told that the Duc de Lauzun had brought the news of Lord Cornwallis’s surrender, said, from Racine’s “Mithridate” I think:—­

     Mes derniers regards out vu fuir les Romains.

How Lord Chatham will frown when they meet! for, since I began my letter, the papers say that Maurepas is dead.  The Duc de Nivernois, it is said, is likely to succeed him as Minister; which is probable, as they were brothers-in-law and friends, and the one would naturally recommend the other.  Perhaps, not for long, as the Queen’s influence gains ground.

[Footnote 1:  The capitulation of Burgoyne at Saratoga has been mentioned in a previous letter; and in October, 1781, Lord Cornwallis, whose army was reduced to seven thousand men, was induced to surrender to Washington, who, with eighteen thousand, had blockaded him at a village called Yorktown; and it was the news of this disaster which at last compelled the King to consent to relinquish the war.]

[Footnote 2:  “Forty millions.” Burke, in one of his speeches, asserted the expense to have been L70,000,000, “besides one hundred thousand men.”]

The warmth in the House of Commons is prodigiously rekindled; but Lord Cornwallis’s fate has cost the Administration no ground there.  The names of most eclat in the Opposition are two names to which those walls have been much accustomed at the same period—­CHARLES FOX and WILLIAM PITT, second son of Lord Chatham.[1] Eloquence is the only one of our brilliant qualities that does not seem to have degenerated rapidly—­but I shall leave debates to your nephew, now an ear-witness:  I could only re-echo newspapers.  Is it not another odd coincidence of events, that while the father Laurens is prisoner to Lord Cornwallis as Constable of the Tower, the son Laurens signed the capitulation by which Lord Cornwallis became prisoner?  It is said too, I don’t know if truly, that this capitulation and that of Saratoga were signed on the same anniversary.  These are certainly the speculations of an idle man, and the more trifling when one considers the moment.  But alas! what would my most grave speculations avail?  From the hour that fatal egg, the Stamp Act, was laid, I disliked it and all the vipers hatched from it.  I now hear many curse it, who fed the vermin with poisonous weeds.  Yet the guilty and the innocent rue it equally hitherto!  I would not answer for what is to come!  Seven years of miscarriages may sour the sweetest tempers, and the