Tuesday, February 7, four o’clock.

I tremble whilst I continue my letter, having just heard such a dreadful story!  A captain of a vessel has made oath before the Lord Mayor, this morning, that he saw one of the yachts sunk on the coast of Holland; and it is believed to be the one in which the Prince was.  The city is in an uproar; nor need one point out all such an accident may produce, if true; which I most fervently hope it is not.  My long letter will help you to comments enough, which will be made on this occasion.  I wish you may know, at this moment, that our fears are ill placed.  The Princess was not in the same yacht with her husband.  Poor Fanshawe,(472) as clerk of the green cloth, with his wife and sister, was in one of them.

Here is more of the Duc de Pecquigny’s episode.  An officer was sent yesterday to put Virette under arrest.  His servant disputed with the officer on his orders, till his master made his escape.  Virette sent a friend, whom he ordered to deliver his letter in person, and see it read, with a challenge, appointing the Duc to meet him at an hour after seven this morning, at Buckingham-gate, where he waited till ten to no purpose, though the Duc had not been put under arrest.  Virette absconds, and has sent M. de Pecquigny word, that he shall abscond till he can find a proper opportunity of fighting him.  Your discretion will naturally prevent your talking of this; but I thought you would like to be prepared, if this affair should any how happen to become your business, though your late discussion With the Duc de Chaulnes will add to your disinclination from meddling with it.

I must send this to the post before I go to the Opera, and therefore shall not be able to tell you more of the Prince of Brunswick by this post.

(461) The “Maccaroni” of 1764 was nearly synonymous with the term “dandy” at present in vogue, and even become classical by the use of it by Lord Byron; who, in his story of Beppo, written in 1817, speaks of

——­“the dynasty of Dandies, now
Perchance succeeded by some other class
Of imitated imitators:—­how
Irreparably soon decline, alas! 
The demagogues of fashion:  all below
Is frail; how easily the world is lost
By love, or war, and now and then by frost!"-E.

(462) A bill, passed in the last session, for an additional duty on cider and perry, which was violently opposed by the cider counties, and taken up as a general opposition question.  This measure was considered as a great error on the part of Lord Bute, and the unpopularity consequent upon it is said to have contributed to his resignation.

(463) On a motion for a committee on the Cider-bill on the 24th of January.  Mr. James Grenville, in a letter to his sister, Lady Chatham, speaking of this debate says, “I should make you as old a woman as either Sandys or Rushout, if I were to state all the jargon that arose in this debate.  It was plain the Court meant to preclude any repeal of the bill; the cider people coldly wished to obtain it.  Sir Richard Bamfylde, at the head of them, spoke, not his own sentiments, as he declared, but those which the instructions and petitions of his constituents forced him to maintain.  We divided 127 with us:  against us, 167.”  Chatham Correspondence, vol. ii. p. 282.-E.