Nothing is talked of here, as you may imagine, but the invasion—­yet I don’t grow more credulous.  Their ridiculous lists of fifty thousand men don’t contribute to frighten me—­ nay, though they specify the numbers of apothecaries and chaplains that are to attend.  Fifty thousand men cannot easily steal a march over the sea.  Sir Edward Hawke will take care of them till winter, and by that time we shall have a great force at land.  The very militia is considerable:  the spirit, or at least the fashion of it, catches every day.  We are growing such ancient Britons, that I don’t know whether I must not mount some popguns upon the battlements of my castle, lest I should not be thought hero enough in these West-Saxon times.  Lord Pulteney has done handsomely, and what is more surprising, so has his father.  The former has offered to raise a regiment, and to be only lieutenant-colonel, provided the command is given to a Colonel Crawford, an old soldier, long postponed—­ Lord Bath is at the expense, which will be five thousand pounds.  All the country squires are in regimentals —­a pedestal is making for little Lord Mountford, that he may be placed at the head of the Cambridgeshire militia.  In short, we have two sorts of armies, and I hope neither will be necessary—­what the consequences of this militia may be hereafter, I don’t know.  Indifferent I think it cannot be.  A great force upon an old plan, exploded since modern improvements, must make some confusion.  If they do not become ridiculous, which the real officers are disposed to make them, the crown or the disaffected will draw considerable consequences, I think, from an establishment popular by being constitutional, and of great weight from the property it will contain.

If the French pursue their vivacity in Germany, they will send us more defenders; our eight thousand men there seem of very little use.  Both sides seem in all parts weary of the war; at least are grown so cautious, that a battle will be as great a curiosity in a campaign as in the midst of peace.  For the Russians, they quite make one smile; they hover every summer over the north of Germany, get cut to pieces by September, disappear, have a general disgraced, and in winter out comes a memorial of the Czarina’s steadiness to her engagements, and of the mighty things she will do in spring.  The Swedes follow them like Sancho Panza, and are rejoiced at not being bound by the laws of chivalry to be thrashed too.

We have an evil that threatens us more nearly than the French.  The heat of the weather has produced a contagious sore-throat in London.  Mr. Yorke, the solicitor-general, has lost his wife, his daughter, and a servant.  The young Lady Essex(1047) died of it in two days.  Two servants are dead in Newcastle-house, and the Duke has left it; any body else would be pitied, but his terrors are sure of being a joke.(1048) My niece, Lady Waldegrave, has done her part for repairing this calamity, and is breeding.