I stayed at Matson, I will not say as long as it was good, but before it became very bad, which I believe it did before we had left the place two hours.  The storm was brewing in the vale, but upon the hills we bade it defiance.  I am very glad to be at a place where I can be stationary for a considerable time; and it is what is very requisite for my present state of health, which requires attention and regularity of living.  If these are observed, I am as(su)red that after a time I shall be well, and that my lease for ten or twenty years seems as yet a good one.  As for the labour and sorrow which his Majesty K(ing) D(avid) speaks of, I know of no age that is quite exempt from them, and have no fear of their being more severe in my caducity than they were in the flower of my age, when I had not more things to please me than I have now, although they might vary in their kind.  When I see you and Lord C. with your children about you, and all of you in perfect health and spirits, my sensations of pleasure are greater than in the most joyous hours of my youth.  It is no solitude, this place.  We have got Onslows and Jeffreyes’s, Mr. Walpole, &c., &c., and if Mr. Cambridge would permit it, I could be sometimes, as I wish to be, alone.

On Monday Mie Mie and I shall go to town for one night.  I am to meet Me de Bouflers(270) at Lady Lucan’s.  I think that if this next winter does not make a perfect Frenchman of me, I shall give it up.  I hope, more, that it will afford Mie Mie also an opportunity of improving herself in a language which will be of more use to her, in all probability, than it can ever hereafter be to me.  I am not disgusted with the language by the abhorrence which I have at present of the country.  But these calamities, at times, happen in all climes, as well as in France.  Man is a most savage animal when uncontrolled.

The last accounts brought from France fill me with more horror than any former ones.  The King is to be moved only by the fear of some approaching danger to his person.  The Queen is agitated by all the alarming and distressing thoughts imaginable.  Her health is visibly altered; she cries continually, and is, as Polinitz says of K(ing) James’s Queen, une Arethuse.  Her danger has been imminent; and the K(ing) left his capital, and her in it, as he was advised to do, il eut ete fait d’elle; she would have been, probably, dragged to the Hotel de Ville, et auroit fini ses jours en Greve.  She holds out her children, which are called les enfans de la Reine exclusivement, as beggars in the streets do theirs, to move compassion.  Behold, how low they have reduced a Queen!  But as yet she is not ripe for tragedy, so John St. John may employ his muse upon other subjects for a time.  To speak the truth, all these representations of the miseries of the French nation do not seem to me (very decent) proper subjects for our evening spectacles, and it is not, in my apprehension, quite decent that Mr. Hughes, Mr. Astley, or Mr. St. John should be making a profit by Iron Masques, and Toupets stuck upon Poles.