for she looks well always with top-knots of ultramarine and vermilion, which modern goddesses do not for half so long as they think they do.  As Providence showers so many blessings on us, I wish the peace may confirm them!  Necessary I am sure it was; and when it cannot restore us, where should we have been had the war continued?  Of our situation and prospect I confess my opinion is melancholy, not from present politics but from past.  We flung away the most brilliant position, I doubt, for a long season!  With politics I have totally done.  I wish the present ministers may last; for I think better of their principles than of those of their opponents (with a few salvos on both sides,) and so I do of their abilities.  But it would be folly in me to concern myself about new generations.  How little a way can I see of their progress!

I am rather surprised at the new Countess of Denbigh.  How could a woman be ambitious of resembling Prometheus, to be pawed and clawed and gnawed by a vulture?(498) I beg your earldom’s pardon; but I could not conceive that a coronet was so very tempting!

Lady Browne is quite recovered, unless she relapses from what we suffer at Twickenham-park from a Lord Northesk,(499) an old seaman, who is come to Richmond on a visit to the Duke of Montrose.  I think the poor man must be out of his senses, at least he talks us out of ours.  It is the most incessant and incoherent rhapsody that ever was heard.  He sits by the card-table, and pours on Mrs. N * * * all that ever happened in his voyages or his memory.  He details the ship’s allowance, and talks to her as if she was his first-mate.  Then in the mornings he carries his daughter to town to see St. Paul’s, and the Tower, and Westminster Abbey; and at night disgorges all he has seen, till we don’t know the ace of spades from Queen Elizabeth’s pocket-pistol in the armoury.  Mercy on us!  And mercy on your lordship too!  Why should you be stunned with that alarum?  Have you had your earthquake, my lord?  Many have had theirs.  I assure you I have had mine.  Above a week ago, when broad awake, the doors of the cabinet by my bedside rattled, without a breath of wind.  I imagined somebody was walking on the leads, or had broken into the room under me.  It was between four and five in the morning.  I rang my bell.  Before my servant could come it happened again; and was exactly like the horizontal tremor I felt from the earthquake some years ago.  As I had rung once, it is plain I was awake.  I rang again; but heard nothing more.  I am quite persuaded there was some commotion; nor is it surprising that the dreadful eruptions of fire on the coasts of Italy and Sicily(500) should have occasioned some alteration that has extended faintly, hither, and contributed to the heats and mists that have been so extraordinary.  George Montagu said of our last earthquake, that it was so tame you might have stroked it.  It is comfortable to live where one can reason on them