London, Oct. 9, 1712.

I have left Windsor these ten days, and am deep in pills with asafoetida, and a steel bitter drink; and I find my head much better than it was.  I was very much discouraged; for I used to be ill for three or four days together, ready to totter as I walked.  I take eight pills a day, and have taken, I believe, a hundred and fifty already.  The Queen, Lord Treasurer, Lady Masham, and I, were all ill together, but are now all better; only Lady Masham expects every day to lie in at Kensington.  There was never such a lump of lies spread about the town together as now.  I doubt not but you will have them in Dublin before this comes to you, and all without the least grounds of truth.  I have been mightily put backward in something I am writing by my illness, but hope to fetch it up, so as to be ready when the Parliament meets.  Lord Treasurer has had an ugly fit of the rheumatism, but is now near quite well.  I was playing at one-and-thirty with him and his family t’other night.  He gave us all twelvepence apiece to begin with:  it put me in mind of Sir William Temple.[2] I asked both him and Lady Masham seriously whether the Queen were at all inclined to a dropsy, and they positively assured me she was not:  so did her physician Arbuthnot, who always attends her.  Yet these devils have spread that she has holes in her legs, and runs at her navel, and I know not what.  Arbuthnot has sent me from Windsor a pretty Discourse upon Lying, and I have ordered the printer to come for it.  It is a proposal for publishing a curious piece, called The Art of Political Lying, in two volumes, etc.  And then there is an abstract of the first volume, just like those pamphlets which they call The Works of the Learned.[3] Pray get it when it comes out.  The Queen has a little of the gout in one of her hands.  I believe she will stay a month still at Windsor.  Lord Treasurer showed me the kindest letter from her in the world, by which I picked out one secret, that there will be soon made some Knights of the Garter.  You know another is fallen by Lord Godolphin’s death:  he will be buried in a day or two at Westminster Abbey.  I saw Tom Leigh[4] in town once.  The Bishop of Clogher has taken his lodging for the winter; they are all well.  I hear there are in town abundance of people from Ireland; half a dozen bishops at least.  The poor old Bishop of London,[5] at past fourscore, fell down backward going upstairs, and I think broke or cracked his skull; yet is now recovering.  The town is as empty as at midsummer; and if I had not occasion for physic, I would be at Windsor still.  Did I tell you of Lord Rivers’s will?  He has left legacies to about twenty paltry old whores by name, and not a farthing to any friend, dependent, or relation:  he has left from his only child, Lady Barrymore,[6] her mother’s estate, and given the whole to his heir-male, a popish priest, a second cousin, who is now Earl Rivers, and whom he used in