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.

Do you visit Soltikow, the Russian Minister, whose house, I am told, is the great scene of pleasures at Hamburg?  His mistress, I take for granted, is by this time dead, and he wears some other body’s shackles.  Her death comes with regard to the King of Prussia, ’comme la moutarde apres diner’.  I am curious to see what tyrant will succeed her, not by divine, but by military right; for, barbarous as they are now, and still more barbarous as they have been formerly, they have had very little regard to the more barbarous notion of divine, indefeasible, hereditary right.

The Praetorian bands, that is, the guards, I presume, have been engaged in the interests of the Imperial Prince; but still I think that little John of Archangel will be heard upon this occasion, unless prevented by a quieting draught of hemlock or nightshade; for I suppose they are not arrived to the politer and genteeler poisons of Acqua Tufana,—­[Acqua Tufana, a Neapolitan slow poison, resembling clear water, and invented by a woman at Naples, of the name of Tufana.]—­sugar-plums, etc.

Lord Halifax has accepted his old employment, with the honorary addition of the Cabinet Council.  And so we heartily wish you a goodnight.