a frock coat come chez lui.  Behind the house was a cenotaph for the Princess Elizabeth, a kind of illuminated cradle; the motto, All the honours the dead can receive.  This burying-ground was a strange codicil to a festival, and, what was more strange, about one in the morning, this sarcophagus burst out into crackers and guns.  The Margrave of Anspach began the ball with the Virgin.  The supper was most sumptuous.

You ask, when I propose to be at Park-place.  I ask, shall not you come to the Duke of Richmond’s masquerade, which is the 6th of June?  I cannot well be with you till towards the end of that month.

The enclosed is a letter which I wish you to read attentively, to give me your opinion upon it, and return it.  It is from a sensible friend of mine in Scotland,(292) who has lately corresponded with me on the enclosed subjects, which I little understand; but I promised to communicate his ideas to George Grenville, if he would state them-are they practicable?  I wish much that something could be done for those brave soldiers and sailors, who will all come to the gallows, unless some timely provision can be made for them.  The former part of his letter relates to a Grievance he complains of, that men who have not served are admitted into garrisons, and then into our hospitals, which were designed for meritorious sufferers.  Adieu!

(292) Sir David Dalrymple.  See ant`e, p. 215, letter 154.-E.

Letter 159 To The Hon. H. S. Conway.  Arlington Street, Saturday evening. (May 28, 1763.] (page 223)

No, indeed, I cannot consent to your being a dirty Philander.(293) Pink and white, and white and pink and both as greasy as if you had gnawed a leg of a fowl on the stairs of the Haymarket with a bunter from the Cardigan’s Head!  For Heaven’s sake don’t produce a tight rose-coloured thigh, unless you intend to prevent my Lord Bute’s return from Harrowgate.  Write, the moment you receive this, to your tailor to get you a sober purple domino as I have done, and it will make you a couple of summer-waistcoats.

In the next place, have your ideas a little more correct about us of times past.  We did not furnish ou cottages with chairs of ten guineas apiece.  Ebony for a farmhouse!(294) So, two hundred years hence some man of taste will build a hamlet in the style of George the Third, and beg his cousin Tom Hearne to get him some chairs for it of mahogany gilt, and covered with blue damask.  Adieu!  I have not a minute’s time more.

(293) At the masquerade given by the Duke of Richmond on the 6th of June at his house in Privy-garden.

(294) Mr. Conway was at this time fitting up a little building at Park-place, called the Cottage, for which he had consulted Mr. Walpole on the propriety of ebony chairs.

Letter 160 To George Montagu, Esq.  Huntingdon, May 30, 1763. (page 223)