I heard the D. say nothing of his affairs in Scotland, of those in France, or indeed hardly of anything else, and I, for my part, am afraid of broaching any subject whatever, because upon all there is some string that jars, and to preserve a perfect unison, I think it best to wait than to seek occasions of offering my poor sentiments.  He is going again to Newmarket, to survey his works there I suppose, so that he holds out to us but an uncertain prospect of seeing him much here.  Je l’attens a la remise, as Me de Sevigne says, and there, after the multiplicity of his rounds and courses, I might expect to see him, if the number of princes, foreign and domestic, were not so great.  Dieu merci, je n’ai pas cette Princimanie, but can find comfort in a much inferior region.

At Bushy are Mr. Williams, Mr. Storer, and Sir G. Cooper, and in their rides they call upon me, but besides the Harridans of this neighbourhood, the Greenwich’s, the Langdales, &c., I have in the Onslows and Darrels an inexhaustible fund of small talk, and, what is best of all, I have made an intimacy, which will last at least for some months, with my own fireside, to which, perhaps, in the course of the next winter I may admit that very popular man, Mr. Thomas Jones, of whom I shall like, when I know him better, to talk with your Ladyship.

I am now going to share with Mrs. Webb a new entertainment, for I am made to expect a great deal from it.  It is Dr. White’s Bampton Lectures, which they say contain the most agreeable account imaginable of our Religion compared with that of Mahomet.  Mrs. W. reads them to go to Heaven, and I to go into companies where, when the conversation upon French Politics is at a stand, it engrosses the chief of what we have to say.  I have a design upon Botany Bay and Cibber’s Apology for his own life, which everybody has read, and which I should have read myself forty years ago, if I had not preferred the reading of men so much to that of books.

I expect you in London on Wednesday sevennight, and there and in Grosvenor Place will you find me, en descendant de votre carrosse.  I shall then begin to renew my attentions to the Boufflers, Birons, etc., and so prepare my thoughts and language for the ensuing winter; but I shall not remove the household from hence till after Christmas.  Till then, if you allow me only to pass two or three days in a week with you, I shall be, for the present, contented.

I am glad that this last mail from France brought nothing so horrible as what I was made to expect.  Yet I am not at all at ease, in respect to that poor unfortunate family at the Louvre, which, I protest, I think not much more so than that of Galas.(281) Of all those whom I wish to have hanged, I will be so free as to own that I am more disposed in favour of the M. de la Fayette than of any other, because in him I do not see, what is almost universal in those who have pretensions to patriotism, an exclusive consideration