the juniors burst into the Senate-house, elected a fictitious Lord Hardwicke, and chaired him.  The indecent arts and applications which had been used by the Twitcherites (as they are called, from Lord Sandwich’s nickname, Jemmy Twitcher,) had provoked this rage.  I will give you but one instance:-A voter, who was blooded on purpose that morning, was brought out of a madhouse with his keeper.  This is the great and wise nation, which the philosopher Helvetius is come to study!  When he says of us C’est un furieux pais! he does not know that the literal translation is the true description of us.

I don’t know whether I did not tell you some lies in my last; very likely:  I tell you what I hear, and do not answer for truth but when I tell you what I know.  How should I know any thing?  I am in no confidence; I think of both sides alike; I care for neither; I ask few questions.  The King’s journey to Hanover is contradicted.  The return of Lord Bute is still a mystery.  The zealous say, he declares for the administration; but some of the latter do not trust too much to that security; and, perhaps, they are in the right:  I know what I think and why I think it; yet some, who do not go on ill grounds, have a middle opinion, that is not very reconcilable to mine.  You will not wonder that there is a mystery, doubt, or irresolotion.  The scene will be opened further before I get to Paris.

Lord Lyttelton and Lord Temple have dined with each other, and the reconciliation of the former with Mr. Pitt is concluded.  It is well that enmities are as frail as friendships.

The Archbishops and Bishops, who -are so eager against Dr. Pearse’s divorce from his see, not as illegal, but improper, and of bad example, have determined the King, who left it to them, not to consent to it, though the Bishop himself still insists on it.  As this decision disappoints Bishop Newton, Lord Bath has obtained a consolatory promise for him of the mitre of London, to the great discomfort of Terrick and Warburton.  You see Lord Bath(575 does not hobble up the back-stairs for nothing.  Oh, he is an excellent courtier!  The Prince of Wales shoots him with plaything arrows, he falls down dead; and the child kisses him to life again.  Melancholy ambition I heard him, t’other night, propose himself to Lady Townshend as a rich widow.  Such spirits at fourscore are pleasing; but when one has lost all one’s children, to be flattering those of Kings!

The Bishop of Carlisle told me, that t’other day in the House of Lords, Warburton said to another of the bench, “I was invited by my Lord Mansfield to dine with that Helvetius, but he is a professed patron of atheism, a rascal, and a scoundrel, and I would not countenance him; besides, I should have worked him, and that Lord Mansfield would not have liked.”  No, in good truth:  who can like such vulgarism!  His French, too, I suppose, is equal to his wit and his piety.