Princess Amelia told me t’other night, and bade me tell you, that she has seen Lady Massarene(542) at Bath, who is warm in praise of you, and said that you had spent two thousand pounds out of friendship, to support her son in an election.  She told the Princess too, that she had found a rent-roll of your estate in a farmhouse, and that it is fourteen thousand a-year.  This I was ordered, I know not why, to tell you.  The Duchess of Bedford has not been asked to the loo-parties at Cavendish-house(543) this winter, and only once to whisk there, and that was one Friday when she is at home herself.  We have nothing at the Princess’s but silver-loo, and her Bath and Tunbridge acquaintance.  The trade at our gold-loo is as contraband as ever.  I cannot help saying, that the Duchess of Bedford would mend our silver-loo, and that I wish every body played like her at the gold.

Arlington Street, Tuesday.

You thank me, my dear lord, for my gazettes (in your letter of the 8th) more than they deserve.  There is no trouble in sending you news; as you excuse the careless manner in which I write any thing I hear.  Don’t think yourself obliged to be punctual in answering me:  it would be paying too dear for such idle and trifling despatches.  Your picture of the attention paid to Madame Pompadour’s illness, and of the ridicule attached to the mission of that homage, is very striking.  It would be still more so by comparison.  Think if the Duke of Cumberland was to set up with my Lord Bute!

The East India Company, yesterday, elected Lord Clive—­Great Mogul; that is, they have made him governor-general of Bengal, and restored his Jaghire.(544) I dare say he will put it out of their power ever to take it away again.  We have had a deluge of disputes and pamphlets on the late events in that distant province of our empire, the Indies.  The novelty of the manners divert me:  our governors there, I think, have learned more of their treachery and injustice, than they have taught them of our discipline.

Monsieur Helvetius(545 arrived yesterday.  I will take care to inform the Princess, that you could not do otherwise than you did about her trees.  My compliments to all your hotel.

(532) The event took place on the 6th of March.-E.

(533) For High steward of the university, between Lord Sandwich and the new Lord Hardwicke.  Gray, in a letter of the 21st of February, written from Cambridge, says, “This silly dirty place has had all its thoughts taken up with choosing a new high steward; and had not Lord Hardwicke surprisingly, and to the shame of the faculty, recovered by a quack medicine, I believe in my conscience the noble Earl of Sandwich had been chosen, though, (let me do them the justice to say) not without a considerable opposition.”  Works, vol. iv. p. 29.-E.

(534) Catharine Hyde, the granddaughter of the great Lord Clarendon; herself remarkable for some oddities of character, dress, and manners, to which the world became less indulgent as she ceased to be young and handsome.-C.