You must wait a month longer, for the warm weather; otherwise, the transition may be too great for Sir William.

We are anxiously waiting for the Maltese deputies to return from Palermo.  The inhabitants are critically situated; but, I hope, all will end well.  Good news from you will determine it.

I find, that you fascinate all the navy as much at Palermo as you did at Naples.  If we had many such advocates, every body would be a candidate for our profession.

God bless, and protect, you and Sir William.  May prosperous gales attend you!  May you live a thousand years!

Believe me, with sincere respect and esteem, my dear Madam, your Ladyship’s most devoted and obliged servant,

ALEXANDER JOHN BALL.

23d February 1799.

Letters

FROM THE

EARL OF BRISTOL,

Bishop of Derry, in Ireland,

TO

LADY HAMILTON.

Letters OF THE EARL OF BRISTOL, Bishop of Derry, &c.

I.

  Naples, Sunday Morning,
  [1795.]

I return you the inclosed, my Dearest Emma, which does equal honour to the excellent head and heart of the writer.  I shall begin, for the first time of my life, to have a good opinion of myself, after such honourable testimonials.

In the mean time, I send you an extraordinary piece of news, just written me from Ratisbon—­a courier from the Elector of Mentz, desiring the Empire to make a separate peace with France.

Couriers have been sent from the Diet to Sweden and Denmark, desiring their mediation:  “and it is clear,” says my letter, “Somebody is at the bottom of all this; the Elector of Mentz only lends his name.”

The suburbs of Warsaw taken; the capitulation of the city daily expected.

The King of Prussia totally retired beyond Potsdam, and supposed to be at the eve of madness.

  Oh!  Emma, who’d ever be wise,
  If madness be loving of thee.

  B.

II.

  Munich, 14th July 1795.

Dearest Emma,

Here is great news from England.  My letters of the 26th June assure me, seven thousand men are embarked for St. Pol de Leon, together with an immense number of emigres—­that, the week before, a bishop, and sixty priests, were most prosperously landed at the same place, and received with the greatest acclamations—­that six sail of the line from Russia, were in sight, and the pilots gone to conduct them—­that, in Amsterdam, and other towns of Holland, there is the greatest insurrections in favour of that fool the Stadtholder.  All this, however, can only tend to facilitate peace, but not at all to restore that despicable, odious family of Bourbons—­the head of which is now at Verona, where we left him eating two capons a day; (’tis a pity the whole family are not capons!) and, what is more, dressing them himself in a superb kitchen—­the true chapel of a Bourbon Prince.