>From town I know nothing; but that on Friday, after the King’s speech, Earl Stanhope made a most frantic speech on the National Assembly and against Calonne’s book, which he wanted to have taken up for high treason.(719) He was every minute interrupted by loud bursts of laughter; which was all the answer he received or deserved.  His suffragan Price has published a short, sneaking equivocal answer to Burke, in which he pretends his triumph over the King of France alluded to July, not to October, though his sermon was preached in November.  Gredat—­but not Judaeus Apella, as Mr. Burke so wittily says of the assignats.(720) Mr. Grenville, the secretary of state, is made a peer, they say to assist the Chancellor in the House of Lords:  yet the papers pretend the Chancellor is out of humour, and will resign the first may be true, the latter probably not.(721)

Richmond, my metropolis, flourishes exceedingly.  The Duke of Clarence arrived at his palace there last night, between eleven and twelve, as I came from Lady Douglas.  His eldest brother and Mrs. Fitzherbert dine there to-day with the Duke Of Queensbury, as his grace, who called here this morning, told me, on the very spot where lived Charles the First, and where are the portraits of his principal courtiers from Cornbury.  Queensbury has taken to that palace at last, and has frequently company and music there in an evening.  I intend to go.

I suppose none of my Florentine acquaintance are still upon earth.  The handsomest woman there, of my days, was a Madame Grifoni, my fair Geraldine:  she would now be a Methusalemess, and much more like a frightful picture I have of her by a one-eyed German painter.  I lived then with Sir Horace Mann, in Casa Mannetti in Via de’ Santi Apostoli, by the Ponte di Trinit`a.  Pray, worship the works of Masaccio, if any remain; though I think the best have been burnt in a church.  Raphael himself borrowed from him.  Fra Bartolomeo, too, is one of my standards for great ideas; and Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus a rival of the antique, though Mrs. Damer will not allow it.  Over against the Perseus is a beautiful small front of a house, with only three windows, designed by Raphael; and another, I think, near the Porta San Gallo, and I believe called Casa Panciatici or Pandolfini.

(719) in the report of Lord Stanbope’s speech, as it is given in the Parliamentary History, there is no expression of a wish that M. Calonne should be ,taken up for high treason.”  What the noble Earl said was, that the assertion that a civil war would meet with the support of all the crowned heads in Europe was a scandalous libel on the King of England, and might endanger the lives of many natives of Scotland and Ireland then residing in France.-E.

(720) “The Assembly made in their speeches a sort of swaggering declaration, something, I rather think, above legislative competence; that is, that there is no difference in value between metallic money and their assignats.  This was a good, stout proof article of faith, pronounced under an anathema, by the venerable fathers of this philosophic synod.  Gredat who will certainly not