I once begged you to send me a book in three volumes, called “Essais sur les Moeurs;” forgive me if I put you in mind of it, and request you to send me that, or any other new book.  I am wofully in want of reading, and sick to death of all our political stuff; which, as the Parliament is happily at the distance of three months, I would fain forget till I cannot help hearing of it.  I am reduced to Guicciardin, and though the evenings are so long, I cannot get through one of his periods between dinner and supper.  They tell me Mr. Hume has had sight of King James’s journal:(674) I Wish I could see all the trifling passages that he will not deign to admit into history.  I do not love great folks till they have pulled off their buskins and put on their slippers, because I do not care sixpence for what they would be thought, but for what they are.

Mr. Elliot brings us woful accounts of the French ladies, of the decency of their conversation, and the nastiness of their behaviour.

Nobody is dead, married, or gone mad, since my last.  Adieu!

P. S. I enclose an epitaph on Lord Waldegrave, written by my brother,(675) which I think you will like, both for the composition and the strict truth of it.

Arlington Street, Friday evening.

I was getting into my postchaise this morning with this letter in my pocket, and Coming to town for a day or two, when I heard the Duke of Cumberland was dead:  I find it is not so. he had two fits yesterday at Newmarket, whither he would go.  The Princess Amelia, who had observed great alteration in his speech, entreated him against it.  He has had too some touches of the gout, but they were gone off, or might have prevented this attack.  I hear since the fits yesterday, which are said to have been but slight, that his leg is broken out, and they hope will save him.  Still, I think, one cannot but expect the worst.

The letters yesterday, from Spa, give a melancholy account of the poor Duke of Devonshire as he cannot drink the waters they think of removing him; I suppose, to the baths at Aix-la-Chapelle; but I look on his case as a lost one.  There’s a chapter for moralizing! but five-and-forty, with forty thousand pounds a-year and happiness wherever he turned him!  My reflection is, that it is folly to be unhappy at any thing, when felicity itself is such a phantom.

(673) Of the Duke and Duchess of Grafton.-E.

(674) Since published, under the generous patronage of George the Third, by Dr. Clarke, his Majesty’s librarian.  The work is, however, not what Mr. Walpole contemplated:  it is not a journal of private feelings, interests, and actions, but a relation rather of public affairs; and though the notes of James ii. were undoubtedly the foundation of the work, it was, in truth, written by another hand, and that too a hand the least likely to have given us the kind of memoirs which Mr. Walpole justly thinks would have