Last week I paid my midsummer offering, of five hundred pounds, to Mr. Larpent, for your use, as I suppose he has informed you.  I am punctual, you must allow.

What account shall I give you of ministerial affairs here?  I protest I do not know:  your own description of them is as exact a one as any I, who am upon the place, can give you.  It is a total dislocation and ‘derangement’; consequently a total inefficiency.  When the Duke of Grafton quitted the seals, he gave that very reason for it, in a speech in the House of Lords:  he declared, “that he had no objection to the persons or the measures of the present Ministers; but that he thought they wanted strength and efficiency to carry on proper measures with success; and that he knew but one man meaning, as you will easily suppose, Mr. Pitt who could give them strength and solidity; that, under this person, he should be willing to serve in any capacity, not only as a General Officer, but as a pioneer; and would take up a spade and a mattock.”  When he quitted the seals, they were offered first to Lord Egmont, then to Lord Hardwicke; who both declined them, probably for the same reasons that made the Duke of Grafton resign them; but after their going a-begging for some time, the Duke of-------begged them, and has them ‘faute de mieux’.  Lord Mountstuart was never thought of for Vienna, where Lord Stormont returns in three months; the former is going to be married to one of the Miss Windsors, a great fortune.  To tell you the speculations, the reasonings, and the conjectures, either of the uninformed, or even of the best-informed public, upon the present wonderful situation of affairs, would take up much more time and paper than either you or I can afford, though we have neither of us a great deal of business at present.

I am in as good health as I could reasonably expect, at my age, and with my shattered carcass; that is, from the waist upward; but downward it is not the same:  for my limbs retain that stiffness and debility of my long rheumatism; I cannot walk half an hour at a time.  As the autumn, and still more as the winter approaches, take care to keep yourself very warm, especially your legs and feet.

Lady Chesterfield sends you her compliments, and triumphs in the success of her plaster.  God bless you!

LETTER CCLXXXVII

Blackheath, July 11, 1766.

My dear friend:  You are a happy mortal, to have your time thus employed between the great and the fair; I hope you do the honors of your country to the latter.  The Emperor, by your account, seems to be very well for an emperor; who, by being above the other monarchs in Europe, may justly be supposed to have had a proportionably worse education.  I find, by your account of him, that he has been trained up to homicide, the only science in which princes