made as magnificent a coffin and pall for him as the time and place would admit, and in the evening of the 17th the body was embarked on board an English ship, which received the corpse with military honours, the cannon of the town saluting it with the same discharge as is paid to a Marshal of France.  St. John and Morrison embarked with the body, and Colonel Wrottesley passed through here with the news.  The poor lad was in tears the whole time he stayed....

[Footnote 1:  The Duke of York was the King’s younger brother.]

You tell me of the French playing at whist;[1] why, I found it established when I was last here.  I told them they were very good to imitate us in anything, but that they had adopted the two dullest things we have, Whist and Richardson’s Novels.

[Footnote 1:  Walpole here speaks of whist as a game of but new introduction in Paris, though it had been for some time established with us.  And the great authority on that scientific and beautiful game, the late Mr. James Clay, writing about twenty years ago, fixes “thirty or more years” before that date as the time when first “we began to hear of the great Paris players.  There was,” he says, “a wide difference between their system and our own,” the special distinction being that “the English player of the old school never thought of winning the game until he saw that it was saved; the French player never thought of saving the game until he saw that he could not win it;” and “if forced to take his choice between these systems carried to their extremes.”  Mr. Clay “would, without hesitation, prefer the game of rash attack” (that is, the French system) “to that of over-cautious defence.”  And he assigns to a French player, M. Des Chapelles, “the credit of being the finest whist-player, beyond any comparison, the world has ever seen.”]

So you and the Pope are going to have the Emperor!  Times are a little altered; no Guelphs and Ghibellines[1] now.  I do not think the Caesar of the day will hold his Holiness’s stirrup[2] while he mounts his palfrey.  Adieu!

[Footnote 1:  “Guelfs and Ghibellines.” These two names were first heard in the latter part of the twelfth century, to distinguish the partisans of the Emperor and the Pope.  “The Guelfs or Welfs were the ancestors of Henry the Proud, who, through his mother, represented the ancient Dukes of Saxony.  The word Ghibelin is derived from Wibelung, a town in Franconia, from which the emperors of that time are said to nave sprung.  The house of Swabia were considered in Germany as representing that of Franconia” (Hallam, “Middle Ages,” ii. p. 101).]

[Footnote 2:  “His Holiness’s stirrup.” This refers to the humiliation imposed on the Emperor Frederic Barbarossa by Pope Alexander III., as related by Byron in his note on “Childe Harold,” c. iv. st. 12.]

SOME NEW POEMS OF GRAY—­WALPOLE’S “HISTORIC DOUBTS”—­BOSWELL’S “CORSICA."

TO MR. GRAY.