cherche rien de tout cela; je suis content du naturel, et de trouver une personne raisonnable, honnete, et de bonne conversation.  She is going to-day for a week or more to Lady Spencer’s at St. Alban’s.  I am sure that it is not there, que je trouverois cette simplicite qui me plait.  But this, till it is time to embark for Isleworth, when I shall have something more interesting to talk of than the perfections of Me de Roncherolles. . . .

(1790, Nov.?) Thursday, Richmond.—­You are so good, when you do not see me or hear of me, to be desirous of having some information of my state of health and existence.  Now I must let you know that I have at this moment every distress, negative and positive, that I can have, et les voici.  My negative one is, being for the moment in an impossibility of going to town to see you, Caroline, and the bambino, and that is enough, for it would be a great pleasure to me, as you must imagine.  Then, I am, in a manner, here with one single servant.  Pierre has left this house to go to his own, where he is very well looked after by his wife, and is (as) comfortably lodged as it is possible to be; but he is, as Mr. Dundas tells me, in a very perilous situation, and yet, by excessive care, may recover.

He has been my doctor lately instead of his own, and given me, daily, powders which he said were the bark, and which I was to take.  No such thing; they were powders of a different sort, which, it is fortunate, have done me no mischief.  They were in the drawer, and so brought to me as bark.  Dundas thought I neglected myself, and rejected the prescription.  I maintained that I had missed taking the bark but one day.  He knew the contrary from his shop book, and to-day only the mystery was cleared up.

My next grievance is, that je peris de froid; j’en mis penetre au pied de la lettre, and the reason is plain, but why I did not discover it myself is hardly to be conceived.  I have no clothes; my stockings are of a fine thin thread, half of them full of holes; I have no flannel waistcoat, which everybody else wears; in short, I have been shivering in the warmest room sans scavoir pourquoi.  But yesterday there was a committee at the Duke’s upon my drapery, and to-day a tailor is sent for.  I am to be flannelled and cottoned, and kept alive if possible; but if that cannot be done, I must be embalmed, with my face, mummy like, only bare, to converse through my cerements.  Then, my other footman, the Bruiser, is that, and all things bad besides; he is not an hour in the day at home, and is gaming at alehouses till 12 at night; so the moment that I can get any servant that is tolerable to supply his place I shall send him out of the house, sans autre forme de proces; but, till he is gone, my whole family lives in terror of him.

It is amazing to what a degree I am become helpless; nothing can account for it but extreme dotage, or extreme infancy.  I wish Barthow had left Lady Caroline, and was here only to dress me in warmer clothes, but she goes from here, I hear, to Lady Ailesford, so that I must not think of lying in and being nursed for some time. . . .