you two established at Cliveden.  I shall not reject more if they come; but one must not be presumptuous at seventy-three; and though my eyes, ears, teeth, motion, have still lasted to make life comfortable, I do not know that I should be enchanted if surviving any of them ; and, having no desire to become a philosopher, I had rather be naturally cheerful than affectedly so:  for patience I take to be only a resolution of holding one’s tongue, and not complaining of what one feels-for does one feel or think the less for not owning it?

Though London increases every day, and Mr. Herschell has just discovered a new square or circus somewhere by the New Road in .the Via Lactea, where the cows used to be fed, I believe you will think the town cannot hold all its inhabitants; so prodigiously the population is augmented.  I have twice been going to stop my coach in Piccadilly, (and the same has happened to Lady Ailesbury,) thinking there was a mob; and it was only nymphs and swains sauntering or trudging.  T’other morning, i. e. at two o’clock, I went to see Mrs. Garrick and Miss Hannah More at the Adelphi, and was stopped five times before I reached Northumberland-house; for the tides of coaches, chariots, curricles, phaetons, etc. are endless.  Indeed, the town is so extended, that the breed of chairs is almost lost ; for Hercules and Atlas could not carry any body from one end of this enormous capital to the other.  How magnified would be the error of the young woman at St. Helena, who, some said years ago, to a captain of an Indiaman, “I suppose London is very empty, when the India ships come out.”  Don’t make Me excuses, then, for short letters; nor trouble yourself a moment to lengthen them.  You Compare little towns to quiet times, which do not feed history ; and most justly.  If the vagaries of’ London can be comprised once a week in three or four pages of small quarto paper, and not always that, how should little Pisa furnish an equal export?  When Pisa was at war with the rival republic of Milan, Machiavel was put to it to describe a battle, the slaughter in which amounted to one man slain; and he was trampled to death, by being thrown down and battered in his husk of complete armour; as I remember reading above fifty years ago at Florence.

Eleven at night.

Oh! mercy!  I am just come from Mrs. Buller’s, having left a very pleasant set at Lady Herries’(776)—­and for such a collection Eight or ten women and girls, not one of whom I knew by sight:  a German Count., as stiff and upright as the inflexible Dowager of Beaufort:  a fat Dean and his wife, he speaking Cornish, and of having dined to-day at Lambeth; four young officers, friends of the boy Buller,(777) who played with one of them at tric-trac, while the others made with the Misses a still more noisy commerce; and not a creature but Mrs. Cholmondeley, who went away immediately, and her son, who was speechless with the headache, that I was the least acquainted with:  and, to add to my sufferings, the Count would talk to me of les beaux arts, of which he knows no more than an oyster.  At last, came in Mrs. Blair, whom I knew as little; but she asked so kindly after you two, and was so anxious about your fall and return, that I grew quite fond of her, and beg you would love her for my sake, as I do for yours.  Good night!