Application to business, attended with approbation and success, flatters and animates the mind:  which, in idleness and inaction, stagnates and putrefies.  I could wish that every rational man would, every night when he goes to bed, ask himself this question, What have I done to-day?  Have I done anything that can be of use to myself or others?  Have I employed my time, or have I squandered it?  Have I lived out the day, or have I dozed it away in sloth and laziness?  A thinking being must be pleased or confounded, according as he can answer himself these questions.  I observe that you are in the secret of what is intended, and what Munchausen is gone to Stade to prepare; a bold and dangerous experiment in my mind, and which may probably end in a second volume to the “History of the Palatinate,” in the last century.  His Serene Highness of Brunswick has, in my mind, played a prudent and saving game; and I am apt to believe that the other Serene Highness, at Hamburg, is more likely to follow his example than to embark in the great scheme.

I see no signs of the Duke’s resuming his employments; but on the contrary I am assured that his Majesty is coolly determined to do as well as he can without him.  The Duke of Devonshire and Fox have worked hard to make up matters in the closet, but to no purpose.  People’s self-love is very apt to make them think themselves more necessary than they are:  and I shrewdly suspect, that his Royal Highness has been the dupe of that sentiment, and was taken at his word when he least suspected it; like my predecessor, Lord Harrington, who when he went into the closet to resign the seals, had them not about him:  so sure he thought himself of being pressed to keep them.

The whole talk of London, of this place, and of every place in the whole kingdom, is of our great, expensive, and yet fruitless expedition; I have seen an officer who was there, a very sensible and observing man:  who told me that had we attempted Rochfort, the day after we took the island of Aix, our success had been infallible; but that, after we had sauntered (God knows why) eight or ten days in the island, he thinks the attempt would have been impracticable, because the French had in that time got together all the troops in that neighborhood, to a very considerable number.  In short, there must have been some secret in that whole affair that has not yet transpired; and I cannot help suspecting that it came from Stade.  We had not been successful there; and perhaps we were not desirous that an expedition, in which we had neither been concerned nor consulted, should prove so; M——­t was our creature, and a word to the wise will sometimes go a great way.  M——­t is to have a public trial, from which the public expects great discoveries—­Not I.