Mr. Conway resigns the day after to-morrow.  I hope in a week to tell you something more positive than the uncertainties in this letter.  Good-night.

DEATH OF CHARLES TOWNSHEND AND OF THE DUKE OF YORK—­WHIST THE NEW FASHION IN FRANCE.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

PARIS, Sept. 27, 1767.

Since you insist on my writing from hence, I will; I intended to defer it a few days longer, as I shall set out on my return this day se’nnight.

Within the five weeks of my being here, there have happened three deaths, which certainly nobody expected six weeks ago.  Yet, though the persons were all considerable, their loss will make little impression on the state of any affairs.

Monsieur de Guerchy returned from his embassy with us about a month before my arrival.  He had been out of order some time, and had taken waters, yet seeing him so often I had perceived no change, till I was made to remark it, and then I did not think it considerable.  On my arrival, I was shocked at the precipitate alteration.  He was emaciated, yellow, and scarcely able to support himself.  A fever came on in ten days, mortification ensued, and carried him off.  It is said that he had concealed and tampered indiscreetly with an old complaint, acquired before his marriage.  This was his radical death; I doubt, vexation and disappointment fermented the wound.  Instead of the duchy he hoped, his reception was freezing.  He was a frank, gallant gentleman; universally beloved with us; hated I believe by nobody, and by no means inferior in understanding to many who affected to despise his abilities.

But our comet is set too!  Charles Townshend[1] is dead.  All those parts and fire are extinguished; those volatile salts are evaporated; that first eloquence of the world is dumb! that duplicity is fixed, that cowardice terminated heroically.  He joked on death as naturally as he used to do on the living, and not with the affectation of philosophers, who wind up their works with sayings which they hope to have remembered.  With a robust person he had always a menacing constitution.  He had had a fever the whole summer, recovered as it was thought, relapsed, was neglected, and it turned to an incurable putrid fever.

[Footnote 1:  Mr. Townshend was Chancellor of the Exchequer; and he might have been added by Lord Macaulay to his list of men whom their eloquence had caused to be placed in offices for which they were totally unfit; for he had not only no special knowledge of finance, but he was one of the most careless and incautious of mankind, even in his oratory.  In that, however, after the retirement of Lord Chatham, he seems to have had no rival in either house but Mr. Burke.  It was to his heedless resumption of Grenville’s plan of taxing our colonies in North America that our loss of them was owing.  In his “Memoirs of the Reign of George III.”  Walpole gives the following description of him: