Will it be presuming, too much upon your friendship and indulgence, if I hint another point to you, which, I own, seems to me right to mention to you?  You know how eagerly the ministry have laboured to deprive Mr. Thomas Walpole of the French commerce of tobacco.  His correspondent sends him word, that you was so persuaded it was taken away, that you had recommended another person.  You know enough, my dear lord, of the little connexion I have With that part of my family,(812) though we do visit again; and therefore will, I hope, be convinced, that it is for your sake I principally mention it.  If Mr. Walpole loses this vast branch of trade, he and sir Joshua Vanneck must shut up shop.  Judge the noise that would make in the city!  Mr. Walpole’s(813) alliance with the Cavendishes (for I will say nothing of our family) would interest them deeply in his cause, and I think you would be sorry to have them think you instrumental to his ruin.  Your brother knows of my writing to you and giving this information, and we are both solicitous that your name should not appear in this transaction.  This letter goes to you by a private hand, or I would not have spoken so plainly throughout.  Whenever you please to recall your positive order, that I should always tell you whatever I hear that relates to you, I shall willingly forbear, for I am sensible this is not the most agreeable province of friendship; yet, as it is certainly due whenever demanded, I don’t consider myself, but sacrifice the more agreeable task of pleasing you to that of serving you, that I may show myself Yours most sincerely, H. W.

(806) It was certainly the result of his Majesty’s own good sense, directed to the subject by his late serious indisposition; but the details, and the mismanagement of these details, were, no doubt, the acts of the ministers.-C.

(807) The King,’s uncle and brothers.-E.

(808) These hints as to the modes by which the extraordinary prejudices and clamours which disturbed the first years of the reign of George iii. were excited and maintained at the pleasure of a faction, are very valuable:  and the spirit of the times was in nothing more evident than in the intrigues and violence which marked the progress of so simple and necessary a measure as the Regency-bill.-C.

(809) This opinion of the Chancellor’s appears to have been considered by Mr. Walpole as very absurd, and he seems inclined to come to the same conclusion which Sterne has treated with such admirable ridicule in the case of the Duchess of Suffolk, viz. that “the mother was not of kin to her own child.”  See Tristram Shandy, part 4.  Nothing in the debate of Didius and Triptolemus at the visitation dinner, is more absurd than this grave discussion in the House of Lords, whether the King’s mother is one of the Royal Family.-C.

(810) This was Mr. Pitt’s expression on not finding Lord Anson’s name in the list of the ministry formed in 1757.  Mr. Walpole, disliked Lord Anson, and on more than one occasion amuses himself with allusions to this phrase.-C.