“Give but Cupid’s dart to me,
Another Cupid I shall be: 
No more distinguish’d from the other,
Than Venus would be from my mother.”

Scandal says, Hedges thought the two last very like; and it says too, that she was not his enemy for thinking so.

Adieu!  Gray and I return to Lyons in three days.  Harry stays here.  Perhaps at our return we may find a letter from you:  it ought to be very full of excuses, for you have been a lazy creature:  I hope you have, for I would not owe your silence to any other reason.  Yours ever.

(168) It was on revisiting it, when returning to England after his unfortunate quarrel with Walpole, that Gray inscribed his beautiful “Alcaic Ode” in the album of the fathers of this monastery.  Gray’s account of this grand scene, where “not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry,” will be found in his letter to West, dated Turin, Nov. 16, N. S. 1739.  Works, vol. ii. p. 69.-E.

(169) Francis Lord Brooke, advanced to the dignity of Earl Brooke in 1746.-E.

(170) Thomas Lord Mansell, who died in 1743, without issue.  He was succeeded in the title by his uncles Christopher and Bussy; and, On the death of the latter in 1744, it became extinct.-E.

(171) George William Hervey, who succeeded his grandfather as Earl of Bristol in 1751, and died Unmarried in 1775.-E.

138 Letter 14 To Richard West, Esq.  Turin, Nov. 11, 1739, N. S.

So, as the song says, we are in fair Italy!  I wonder we are; for on the very highest precipice of Mount Cenis, the devil of discord, in the similitude of sour wine, had got amongst our Alpine savages, and set them a-fighting with Gray and me in the chairs:  they rushed him by me on a crag, where there was scarce room for a cloven foot.  The least slip had tumbled us into such a fog, and such an eternity, as we should never have found our way out of again.  We were eight days in coming hither from Lyons; the four last in crossing the Alps.  Such uncouth rocks, and such uncomely inhabitants!  My dear West, I hope I shall never see them again!  At the foot of Mount Cenis we were obliged to quit our chaise, which was taken all to pieces and loaded on mules; and we were carried in low arm-chairs on poles, swathed in beaver bonnets, beaver gloves, beaver stockings, muffs, and bear-skins.  When we came to the top, behold the snows fallen! and such quantities, and conducted by such heavy clouds that hung glouting, that I thought we could never have waded through them.  The descent is two leagues, but steep and rough as O * * * * father’s face, over which, you know, the devil walked with hobnails in his shoes.  But the dexterity and nimbleness of the mountaineers are inconceivable:  they run with you down steeps and frozen precipices, where no man, as men are now, could possibly walk.  We had twelve men and nine mules to carry us, our servants, and baggage, and were above five hours in this agreeable