Matter for a letter, alas! my dear lord, I have none; but about letters I have great news to tell your lordship, only may the goddess of post-offices grant it be true!  A Miss Sayer, of Richmond, who is at Paris, writes to Mrs. Boscawen, that a Baron de ]a Garde (I am sorry there are so many as in the genealogy of my story.) has found in a vieille armoire five hundred more letters of Madame de S`evign`e, and that they will be printed if the expense is not too great.  I am in a taking, lest they should not appear before I set out for the Elysian fields for, though the writer is one of the first personages I should inquire after on my arrival, I question whether St. Peter has taste enough to know where she lodges, she is more likely to be acquainted with St. Catherine of Sienna and St. Undecimillia; and therefore I had rather see the letters themselves.  It is true I have no small doubt of the authenticity of the legend; and nothing will persuade me of its truth so much as the non-appearance of the letters-a melancholy kind of conviction.  But I vehemently suspect some new coinage, like the letters of Ninon de l’Enclos, Pope Ganganelli, and the Princess Palatine.  I have lately been reading some fragments of letters of the Duchess of Orleans, which are certainly genuine, and contain some curious circumstances; for though she was a simple gossiping old gentlewoman, yet many little facts she could not help learning:  and, to give her her due, she was ready to tell all she knew.  To our late Queen she certainly did write often; and her Majesty, then only Princess, was full as ready to pay her in her own coin, and a pretty considerable treaty of commerce for the exchange of scandal was faithfully executed between them; insomuch that I remember to have heard forty years ago, that our gracious sovereign entrusted her Royal Highness of Orleans with an intrigue of one of her women of the bedchamber.  Mrs. Selwyn to wit; and the good Duchess entrusted it to so many other dear friends that at last it got into the Utrecht Gazette, and came over hither, to the signal edification of the court of Leicester-fields.  This is an additional reason, besides the internal evidence, for my believing the letters genuine.  This old dame was mother of the Regent; and when she died, somebody wrote on her tomb, Cy gist l’Oisivet`e.  This came over too; and nobody could expound It, till our then third Princess, Caroline, unravelled it,—­Idleness is the mother of all vice.

I wish well enough to posterity to hope that dowager highnesses will Imitate the practice, and write all the trifles that occupy their royal brains; for the world so at least learns some true history, which their husbands never divulge, especially if they are privy to their own history, which their ministers keep from them as much as possible.  I do not believe the present King of France knows much more of what he, or rather his Queen, is actually doing, than I do.  I rather pity him; for I believe he means well, which is not a common article of my faith.