Your herb-snuff and the four glasses are lying in my warehouse, but I can hear of no ship going to Paris.  You are now at Fontainbleau, but not thinking of Francis I., the Queen of Sweden, and Monaldelschi.  It is terrible that one cannot go to Courts that are gone!  You have supped with the Chevalier de Boufflers:  did he act everything in the world and sing everything in the world?  Has Madame de Cambis sung to you “Sans depit, sans legerete?"[1] Has Lord Cholmondeley delivered my pacquet?  I hear I have hopes of Madame d’Olonne.  Gout or no gout, I shall be little in town till after Christmas.  My elbow makes me bless myself that I am not in Paris.  Old age is no such uncomfortable thing, if one gives oneself up to it with a good grace, and don’t drag it about

    To midnight dances and the public show.

[Footnote 1:  The first words of a favourite French air.—­WALPOLE.]

If one stays quietly in one’s own house in the country, and cares for nothing but oneself, scolds one’s servants, condemns everything that is new, and recollects how charming a thousand things were formerly that were very disagreeable, one gets over the winters very well, and the summers get over themselves.

DEATH OF LORD CLIVE—­RESTORATION OF THE FRENCH PARLIAMENT—­PREDICTION OF GREAT MEN TO ARISE IN AMERICA—­THE KING’S SPEECH.

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

STRAWBERRY HILL, Nov. 24, 1774.

...  A great event happened two days ago—­a political and moral event; the sudden death of that second Kouli Khan, Lord Clive.[1] There was certainly illness in the case; the world thinks more than illness.  His constitution was exceedingly broken and disordered, and grown subject to violent pains and convulsions.  He came unexpectedly to town last Monday, and they say, ill.  On Tuesday his physician gave him a dose of laudanum, which had not the desired effect.  On the rest, there are two stories; one, that the physician repeated the dose; the other, that he doubled it himself, contrary to advice.  In short, he has terminated at fifty a life of so much glory, reproach, art, wealth, and ostentation!  He had just named ten members for the new Parliament.

[Footnote 1:  Lord Clive had committed suicide in his house in Berkeley Square.  As he was passing through his library his niece, who was writing a letter, asked him to mend a pen for her.  He did it, and, passing on into the next room, cut his throat with the same knife he had just used.  It is remarkable that, when little more than a youth, he had once tried to destroy himself.  In a fit, apparently of constitutional melancholy, he had put a pistol to his head, but it did not go off.  He pulled the trigger more than once; always with the same result.  Anxious to see whether there was any defect in the weapon or the loading, he aimed at the door of the room, and the pistol went off, the bullet going through the door; and from that day he conceived himself reserved by Providence for great things, though in his most sanguine confidence he could never have anticipated such glory as he was destined to win.]