Letter 296 To The Rev. Mr. Cole.  Paris, Feb. 28, 1766. (page 470)

Dear sir, As you cannot, I believe, get a copy of the letter to Rousseau, and are impatient for it, I send it you:  though the brevity of it will not answer your expectation.  It is no answer to any of his works, and is only a laugh at his affectations.  I hear he does not succeed in England, where his singularities are no curiosity.  Yet he must stay there, or give up all his pretensions.  To quit a country where he may live at ease, and unpersecuted, will be owning that tranquillity is not what he seeks.  If he again seeks persecution, who will pity him?  I should think even bigots would let him alone out of contempt.

I have executed your commission in a way that I hope will please you.  As you tell me you have a blue cup and saucer, and a red one, and would have them completed to six, without being all alike, I have bought one other blue, one other red, and two sprigged, in the same manner, with colours; so you will have just three pair, which seems preferable to six odd ones; and which, indeed, at nineteen livres a-piece, I think I could not have found.

I shall keep very near the time I proposed returning; though I am a little tempted to wait for the appearance of’ leaves.  As I may never come hither again, I am disposed to see a little of their villas and gardens, though it will vex me to lose spring and lilac-tide at Strawberry.  The weather has been so bad, and continues so cold, that I have not yet seen all I intended in Paris.  To-day, I have been to the Plaine de Sablon, by the Bois de Boulogne, to see a horserace rid in person by the Count Lauragais and Lord Forbes.(944) All Paris was in motion by nine o’clock this morning, and the coaches and crowds were innumerable at so novel a sight.  Would you believe it, that there was an Englishman to whom it was quite as new?  That Englishman was I:  though I live within two miles of Hounslow, have been fifty times in my life at Newmarket, and have passed through it at the time of the races, I never before saw a complete one.  I once went from Cambridge on purpose; saw the beginning, was tired, and went away.  If there was to be a review in Lapland, perhaps I might see a review, too; which yet I have never seen.  Lauragais was distanced at the second circuit.  What added to the singularity was, that at the same instant his brother was gone to church to be married.  But, as Lauragais is at variance with his father and wife, he chose this expedient to show he was not at the wedding.  Adieu!

(944) James, sixteenth Baron, who married, in 1760, Catherine, only daughter of Sir Robert Innes, Bart. of orton.  He was Deputy-governor of Fort William, and died there in 1804.-E.

Letter 297 To George Montagu, Esq.  Paris, March 3, 1766. (page 471)