Tuesday, June 5.

This is the season of opening my cake-house.  I have chosen a bad spot, if I meant to retire; and calculated ill, when I made it a puppet-show.  Last week we had two or three mastiff-days; for they were fiercer than our common dog-days.  It is cooled again; but rain is as great a rarity as in Egypt; and father Thames is so far from being a Nile, that he is dying for thirst himself.  But it would be prudent to reserve paragraphs of weather till people are gone out of town; for then I can have little to send you else from hence.

Berkeley Square, June 6.

As soon as I came to town to-day Le Texier called on me, and told me he has miscarried of Pygmalion.  The expense would have mounted to 150 pounds and he could get but sixty subscribers at a guinea apiece.  I am glad his experience and success have taught him thrift.  I did not expect it.  Sheridan had a heavier miscarriage last night.  The two Vestris had imagined a f`ete; and, concluding that whatever they designed would captivate the town and its purses, were at the expense of 1200 pounds and, distributing tickets at two guineas apiece, disposed of not two hundred.  It ended in a bad opera, that began three hours later than usual, and at quadruple the price.  There were bushels of dead flowers, lamps, country dances—­and a cold supper.  Yet they are not abused as poor Le Texier was last year.

June 8.

I conclude my letter, and I hope our present correspondence, very agreeably; for your brother told me last night, that you have written to Lord Hillsborough for leave to return.  If all our governors could leave their dominions in as good plight, it were lucky.  Your brother owned, what the Gazette with all its circumstances cannot conceal, that Lord Cornwallis’s triumphs have but increased our losses, without leaving any hopes.  I am told that his army, which when he parted from Clinton amounted to seventeen thousand men, does not now contain above as many hundred, except the detachments.  The Gazette, to my sorrow and your greater sorrow, speaks of Colonel O’Hara having received two dangerous wounds.  Princess Amelia was at Marlborough-house last night, and played at faro till twelve o’clock.  There ends the winter campaign!  I go to Strawberry-hill to-morrow; and I hope, a l’Irlandaise, that the next letter I write to you will be not to write to you any more.

(430) Lord George Seymour Conway, seventh son of Francis, first Earl and Marquis of Hertford; born 1763.-E.

(431) The young William Pitt,” afterwards, as Walpole anticipated, the proud rival of Charles Fox, and for so long a period the prime-minister of England, delivered his maiden speech in the House of Commons, on the 26th of February, in favour of Mr. Burke’s bill for an economical reform in the civil list.  “Never,” says his preceptor, Bishop Tomline, “were higher expectations formed of any person upon his first coming into Parliament, and never were