you may amuse your readers with an account of the rise of the Nile, some feats of the-Mamelukes, and finish your work with doleful tales of the robberies of the wild Arabs.  One benefit does arise from travelling:  it cures one of liking what is worth seeing especially if what you have seen is bigger than what you do see.  Thus, Mr. Gilpin, having visited all the lakes, could find no beauty in Richmond-hill.  If he would look through Mr. Herschell’s telescope at the profusion of worlds, perhaps he would find out that Mount Atlas is an ant-hill; and that the sublime and beautiful may exist separately.

(827) Mr. Walpole numbered all the letters written by him to the Miss Berrys during their residence abroad.-E.

(828) The first volume of “Ionian Antiquities,” in imperial folio edited by R. Chandler, N. Revett, and W. Pais, was published in 1769; a second, edited by the Society of Dilettanti, appeared in 1797.-E.

Letter 392 To The Hon. H. S. Conway.  Strawberry Hill, Sept. 27, 1791. (page 522)

Your letter was most welcome, as yours always are; and I answer it immediately, though our post comes in so late that this will not go away till to-morrow.  Nay, I write, though I shall see you on Sunday, and have not a tittle to tell you.  I lead so insipid a life, that, though I am content with it, it can furnish me with nothing but repetitions.  I scarce ever stir from home in a morning; and most evenings go and play at loto with the French at Richmond, where I am heartily tired of hearing of nothing but their absurd countrymen, -absurd, both democrates and aristocrates.  Calonne sends them gross lies, that raise their hopes to the skies — and in two days they hear of nothing but horrors and disappointments; and the poor souls! they are in despair.  I can say nothing to comfort them, but what I firmly believe, which is, total anarchy must come on rapidly.  Nobody pays the taxes that are laid; and which, intended to produce eighty millions a month, do not bring in six.  The new Assembly will fall on the old,(829) probably plunder the richest, and certainly disapprove of much they have done; for can eight hundred new ignorants approve of what has been done by twelve hundred almost as Ignorant, and who were far from half agreeing?  And then their immortal constitution (which, besides, is to be mightily mended nine years hence) will die before it has cut any of its teeth but its grinders.  The exiles are enraged at their poor King for saving his own life by a forced acceptance:(830) and yet I know no obligation he has to his noblesse, who all ran away to save their own lives; not a gentleman, but the two poor gendarmes at Versailles, having lost their lives in his defence.  I suppose La Fayette, Barnave,(831) the Lameths, etc. will run away too,(832) when the new tinkers and cobblers, of whom the present elect are and will be composed, proceed on the levelling system taught them by their predecessors,