There are still two months to London; if you could discover your own mind for any three or four days of that space, I will either go with you to the Tigers or be glad to see you here; but I positively will ask you neither one nor t’other any more.  I have raised seven-and-twenty bantams from the patriarchs you sent me.  Adieu!

(1464) Daughter of Washington, Earl Ferrers.

(1465) Lord Bolingbroke, in a letter to the Earl of Marchmont of the 1st of November, says, “I hope you heard from me by myself, as well of me by Mr. Whitfield.  This apostolical person preached some time ago at Lady Huntingdon’s, and I should have been curious to hear him.  Nothing kept me from going, but an imagination that there was to be a select auditory.  That saint, our friend Chesterfield, was there; and I hear from him an extreme good account of the sermon.”  Marchmont Papers, vol. ii. p. 377.-E.

(1466) Dr. Beattie says, in a letter to Sir W. Forbes, “Gray’s letters very much resemble what his conversation was:  he had none of the airs of either a scholar or a poet; and though on those and all other subjects he spoke to me with the utmost freedom, and without any reserve, he was in general company much more silent than one could have wished."-E.

565 Letter 261 To Sir Horace Mann.  Strawberry Hill, Sept. 18, 1748.

I have two letters of yours to account for, and nothing to plead but my old insolvency.  Oh! yes, I have to scold you, which you find is an inexhaustible fund with me.  You sent me your d`em`el`e(1467) with the whole city of Florence, and charged me to keep it secret-and the first person I saw was my Lord Hobart, who was full of the account he had received from you.  You might as well have told a woman an improper secret, and expected to have it kept! but you may be very easy, for unless it reaches my Lady Pomfret or my Lady Orford, I dare say it will never get back to Florence; and for those two ladies, I don’t think it likely that they should hear it, for the first is in a manner retired from the world, and the world is retired from the second.  Now I have vented my anger, I am seriously sorry for you, to be exposed to the impertinence of those silly Florentine women:  they deserve a worse term than silly, since they pretend to any characters.  How could you act with so much temper?  If they had treated me in this manner, I should have avowed ten times more than they pretended you had done; but you are an absolute minister!

I am much obliged to Prince Beauvau for remembering me, and should be extremely pleased to show him all manner of attentions here:  you know I profess great attachment to that family for their civilities to me.  But how gracious the Princess has been to you!  I am quite jealous of her dining with you:  I remember what a rout there was to get her for half of half a quarter of an hour to your assembly.

The Bishop of London is dead; having luckily for his family, as it proves, refused the archbishopric.*1468) We owe him the justice to say, that though he had broke with my father, he always expressed himself most handsomely about him, and without any resentment or ingratitude.