them before Charles the means of extricating yourself from these engagements.  Let him hear what they say, and what they would advise you to do, as guardian to your children; for there is the point de vue, in which I am touched the most sensibly; and whatever Charles has to offer by way of expedient, by way of correcting their ideas, whatever hopes he can give, which are rationally founded, let him lay them before these people in your presence.

Why I wish this is, the [that] he must then have something to combat with, and that is, truth and reason.  Without that, and you two together only, or Hare, what will follow?  There will be flux de bouche, which to me is totally incomprehensible, as Sir G. M(’Cartney) told me that it was to him.  Il fondera en larmes, and then you will be told afterwards, whenever a measure of any vigour is proposed, that you had acquiesced, because you had been disarmed, confounded.  This happened no longer ago than last Saturday, with Foley,(98) who related the whole conference to me, and the manner in which it was carried on.  “However,” says Foley, “I carried two points out of four, but I was obliged to leave him, not being able [to] resist the force of sensibility.”

I confess that, had it been my case, I should have been tempted to have made use of Me de Maintenon’s words to the Princesse de Conti—­ “Pleurez, pleurez, Madame, car c’est un grand malheur que de n’avoir pas le coeur bon.”  I do not think that of Charles so much as the rest of the world does, and to which he has undoubtedly given some reason by his behaviour to his father, and to his friends.  I attribute it all to a vanity that has, by the foolish admiration of his acquaintance, been worked up into a kind of phrensy, I shall be very unwilling to believe that he ever intended to distress a friend whom he loved as much as I believe that he has done you.

But really this is being very candid to him, and yet I cannot help it.  For I have passed two evenings with him at supper at Almack’s, ou nous avons ete lie en conversation, and never was anybody more agreeable and the more so for his having no pretensions to it, which is what has offended more people than even what Lady H(ollan)d is so good as to call his misconduct.  I do assure you, my dear Lord, that notwithstanding all that I have been obliged by my friendship and confidence in you to say, I very sincerely love him, although I blame him so much, that I dare not own it; and it will give me the greatest pleasure in the world to see him take that turn which he professes to take.  But what hopes can we have of it?

Vernon said yesterday after dinner, that he and some others—­Bully, I think, among the rest—­had been driven by the rain up into Charles’s room; and when they had lugged him out of his bed, they attacked him so violently upon what he did at the Bath, that he was obliged to have recourse, as he did last year, to an absolute denial of the fact.  The imagination of the blacklegs at the Billiard Table that he was gone over to Long Leate to borrow the money of Lord W(eymouth?) had in it something truly ridiculous, and serves only to shew that his Lordship had been never trusted by them.