We have a new famous Bill,[1] devised by the late Mr. Grenville, that has its first operation now; and what changes it may occasion, nobody can yet foresee.  The first symptoms are not favourable to the Court; the great towns are casting off submission, and declaring for popular members.  London, Westminster, Middlesex, seem to have no monarch but Wilkes, who is at the same time pushing for the Mayoralty of London, with hitherto a majority on the poll.  It is strange how this man, like a phoenix, always revives from his embers!  America, I doubt, is still more unpromising.  There are whispers of their having assembled an armed force, and of earnest supplications arrived for succours of men and ships.  A civil war is no trifle; and how we are to suppress or pursue in such a vast region, with a handful of men, I am not an Alexander to guess; and for the fleet, can we put it upon casters and wheel it from Hudson’s Bay to Florida?  But I am an ignorant soul, and neither pretend to knowledge nor foreknowledge.  All I perceive already is, that our Parliaments are subjected to America and India, and must be influenced by their politics; yet I do not believe our senators are more universal than formerly....

[Footnote 1:  Mr. Grenville’s Act had been passed in 1770; but there had been no General Election since till this year.  It altered the course of proceeding for the trial of election petitions, substituting for the whole House a Select Committee of fifteen members; but after a time it was found that it had not secured any greater purity of decision, but that the votes of the Committee were influenced by considerations of the interest of the dominant party as entirely as they had been in the days of Sir R. Walpole.  And eventually, in the present reign, Mr. D’Israeli induced the House to surrender altogether its privilege of judging of elections, and to submit the investigation of election petitions to the only tribunal sufficiently above suspicion to command and retain the confidence of the nation, namely, the Judges of the High Court of Law.  (See the Editor’s “Constitutional History of England, 1760-1860,” pp. 36-39.)]

In the midst of this combustion, we are in perils by land and water.  It has rained for this month without intermission; there is sea between me and Richmond, and Sunday was se’nnight I was hurried down to Isleworth in the ferry-boat by the violence of the current, and had great difficulty to get to shore.  Our roads are so infested by highwaymen, that it is dangerous stirring out almost by day.  Lady Hertford was attacked on Hounslow Heath at three in the afternoon.  Dr. Eliot was shot at three days ago, without having resisted; and the day before yesterday we were near losing our Prime Minster, Lord North; the robbers shot at the postillion, and wounded the latter.  In short, all the freebooters, that are not in India, have taken to the highway.  The Ladies of the Bedchamber dare not go the Queen at Kew in an evening.  The lane between me and the Thames