Your nephew will be sorry to hear that the Duke of Montrose’s third grandson, Master William Douglas, died yesterday of a fever.  These poor Montroses are most unfortunate persons!  They had the comfort this spring of seeing Lord Graham marry:  the Duchess said, “I thought I should die of grief, and now I am ready to die of joy.”  Lady Graham soon proved with child, but soon miscarried; and the Duke and Duchess may not live to have the consolation of seeing an heir—­for we must hope and make visions to the last! I am asking for samples of Ginori’s porcelain at sixty-eight!  Well! are not heirs to great names and families as frail foundations of happiness? and what signifies what baubles we pursue?  Philosophers make systems, and we simpletons collections:  and we are as wise as they—­wiser perhaps, for we know that in a few years our rarities will be dispersed at an auction; and they flatter themselves that their reveries will be immortal, which has happened to no system yet.  A curiosity may rise in value; a system is exploded.

Such reflections are applicable to politics, and make me look on them as equally nugatory.  Last year Mr. Fox was burnt in effigy; now Mr. Pitt is.  Oh! my dear Sir, it is all a farce!  On this day, about a hundred years ago (look at my date), was born the wisest man I have seen.[1] He kept this country in peace for twenty years, and it flourished accordingly.  He injured no man; was benevolent, good-humoured, and did nothing but the common necessary business of the State.  Yet was he burnt in effigy too; and so traduced, that his name is not purified yet!—­Ask why his memory is not in veneration?  You will be told, from libels and trash, that he was the Grand Corruptor.—­What! did he corrupt the nation to make it happy, rich, and peaceable?  Who was oppressed during his administration?  Those saints Bolingbroke and Pulteney were kept out of the Paradise of the Court; ay, and the Pretender was kept out and was kept quiet.  Sir Robert fell:  a Rebellion ensued in four years, and the crown shook on the King’s head.  The nation, too, which had been tolerably corrupted before his time, and which, with all its experience and with its eyes opened, has not cured itself of being corrupt, is not quite so prosperous as in the day of that man, who, it seems, poisoned its morals.  Formerly it was the most virtuous nation on the earth!

[Footnote 1:  He means his own father, the Prime Minister from 1720 to 1741.]

Under Henry VIII. and his children there was no persecution, no fluctuation of religion:  their Ministers shifted their faith four times, and were sincere honest men!  There was no servility, no flattery, no contempt of the nation abroad, under James I. No tyranny under Charles I. and Laud; no factions, no civil war!  Charles II., however, brought back all the virtues and morality, which, somehow or other, were missing!  His brother’s was a still more blessed reign, though in a different way!  King William was disturbed