MINISTERIAL DIFFICULTIES—­THE AFFAIR OF THE NECKLACE IN PARIS—­FLUCTUATING UNPOPULARITY OF STATESMEN—­FALLACIES OF HISTORY.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

STRAWBERRY HILL, Aug. 26, 1785.

Though I am delighted to see your handwriting, I beg you will indulge me no more with it.  It fatigues you, and that gives me more pain than your letters can give me satisfaction.  Dictate a few words on your health to your secretary; it will suffice.  I don’t care a straw about the King and Queen of Naples, nor whether they visit your little Great Duke and Duchess.  I am glad when monarchs are playing with one another, instead of scratching:  it is better they should be idle than mischievous.  As I desire you not to write, I cannot be alarmed at a strange hand.

Your philosophic account of yourself is worthy of you.  Still, I am convinced you are better than you seem to think.  A cough is vexatious, but in old persons is a great preservative.  It is one of the forms in which the gout appears, and exercises and clears the lungs.  I know actually two persons, no chickens, who are always very ill if they have no annual cough.  You may imagine that I have made observations in plenty on the gout:  yes, yes, I know its ways and its jesuitic evasions.  I beg its pardon, it is a better soul than it appears to be; it is we that misuse it:  if it does not appear with all its credentials, we take it for something else, and attempt to cure it.  Being a remedy, and not a disease, it will not be cured; and it is better to let it have its way.  If it is content to act the personage of a cough, pray humour it:  it will prolong your life, if you do not contradict it and fling it somewhere else.

The Administration has received a total defeat in Ireland, which has probably saved us another civil war.[1] Don’t wonder that I am continually recollecting my father’s Quieta non movere.  I have never seen that maxim violated with impunity.  They say, that in town a change in the Ministry is expected.  I am not of that opinion; but, indeed, nobody can be more ignorant than I. I see nobody here but people attached to the Court, and who, however, know no more than I do; and if I did see any of the other side, they would not be able to give me better information; nor am I curious.

[Footnote 1:  In the session of 1785 Grattan opposed a body of “resolutions” calculated to relieve the distress of the Irish manufacturers, and altogether to emancipate the trade and commerce of Ireland from many mischievous restrictions which had hitherto restrained their progress.  Lord Stanhope, in his “Life of Pitt,” i. 273, quotes a description of Grattan’s speech as “a display of perhaps the most beautiful eloquence ever heard, but seditious and inflammatory to a degree hardly credible;” and he so far prevailed, that in the Irish House of Commons the resolutions were only carried by a majority of twenty-nine—­one so small, that the Duke of Rutland, the Lord-Lieutenant, felt it safer to withdraw them.]