My dear friend:  Yesterday I received your letter from Ratisbon, where I am glad that you are arrived safe.  You are, I find, over head and ears engaged in ceremony and etiquette.  You must not yield in anything essential, where your public character may suffer; but I advise you, at the same time, to distinguish carefully what may, and what may not affect it, and to despise some German ‘minutiae’; such as one step lower or higher upon the stairs, a bow more or less, and such sort of trifles.

By what I see in Cressener’s letter to you, the cheapness of wine compensates the quantity, as the cheapness of servants compensates the number that you must make use of.

Write to your mother often, if it be but three words, to prove your existence; for, when she does not hear from you, she knows to a demonstration that you are dead, if not buried.

The inclosed is a letter of the utmost consequence, which I was desired to forward, with care and speed, to the most Serene louis.

My head is not well to-day.  So God bless you!

LETTER CCLVII

Blackheath, August 1, 1763.

My dear friend:  I hope that by this time you are pretty well settled at Ratisbon, at least as to the important points of the ceremonial; so that you may know, to precision, to whom you must give, and from whom you must require the ‘seine Excellentz’.  Those formalities are, no doubt, ridiculous enough in themselves; but yet they are necessary for manners, and sometimes for business; and both would suffer by laying them quite aside.

I have lately had an attack of a new complaint, which I have long suspected that I had in my body, ‘in actu primo’, as the pedants call it, but which I never felt in ‘actu secundo’ till last week, and that is a fit of the stone or gravel.  It was, thank God, but a slight one; but it was ‘dans toutes les formes’; for it was preceded by a pain in my loins, which I at first took for some remains of my rheumatism; but was soon convinced of my mistake, by making water much blacker than coffee, with a prodigious sediment of gravel.  I am now perfectly easy again, and have no more indications of this complaint.

God keep you from that and deafness!  Other complaints are the common, and almost the inevitable lot of human nature, but admit of some mitigation.  God bless you!

LETTER CCLVIII

Blackheath, August 22, 1763

My dear friend:  You will, by this post, hear from others that Lord Egremont died two days ago of an apoplexy; which, from his figure, and the constant plethora he lived in, was reasonably to be expected.  You will ask me, who is to be Secretary in his room:  To which I answer, that I do not know.  I should guess Lord Sandwich, to be succeeded in the Admiralty by Charles Townshend; unless the Duke of Bedford, who seems to have taken to himself the department of Europe, should have a mind to it.  This event may perhaps produce others; but, till this happened, everything was in a state of inaction, and absolutely nothing was done.  Before the next session, this chaos must necessarily take some form, either by a new jumble of its own atoms, or by mixing them with the more efficient ones of the opposition.