I have not yet been able to look into the French harangues you sent me.  Voltaire’s verses to Robert Covelle are not only very bad, but very contemptible.

I am delighted with all the honours you receive, and with all the amusements they procure you, which is the best part of honours.  For the glorious part, I am always like the man in Pope’s Donne,

“Then happy he who shows the tombs, said I.”

That is, they are least troublesome there.  The serenissime(173) you met at Montmorency is one of the least to my taste; we quarrelled about Rousseau, and I never went near him after my first journey.  Madame du Deffand will tell you the story, if she has not forgotten it.

It is supposed here, that the new proceedings of the French Parliament will produce great effects:  I don’t suppose any such thing.  What America will produce I know still less; but certainly something very serious.  The merchants have summoned a meeting for the second of next month, and the petition from the Congress to the King is arrived.  The heads have been shown to Lord Dartmouth; but I hear one of the agents is again presenting it; yet it is thought it will be delivered, and then be ordered to be laid before Parliament.  The whole affair has already been talked of there on the army and navy-days; and Burke, they say, has shone with amazing Wit and ridicule on the late inactivity of Gage, and his losing his cannon and straw; on his being entrenched in a town with an army of observation; with that army being, as Sir William Meredith had said, an asylum for magistrates, and to secure the port.  Burke said, he had heard of an asylum for debtors and whores, never for magistrates; and of ships never of armies securing a port.  This is all there has been in Parliament, but elections.  Charles Fox’s place did not come into question.  Mr. * * *, who is one of the new elect, has opened, but with no success.  There is a seaman, Luttrell,(174) that promises much better.

I am glad you like the Duchess de Lauzun:(175) she is one of my favourites.  The H`otel du Chatelet promised to be very fine, but was not finished when I was last at Paris.  I was much pleased with the person that slept against St. Lambert’s poem:  I wish I had thought of the nostrum, when Mr. Seward, a thousand years ago, at Lyons, would read an epic poem to me just as I had received a dozen letters from England.  St. Lambert is a great Jackanapes, and a very tiny genius:  I suppose the poem was The Seasons, which is four fans spun out into a Georgic.  If I had not been too ill, I should have thought of bidding you hear midnight mass on Christmas-eve in Madame du Deffand’s tribune, as I used to do.  To be sure, you know that her apartment was part of Madame du Montespan’s, whose arms are on the back of the grate in Madame du Deffand’s own bedchamber.  Apropos, ask her to show you Madame de Prie’s pinture, M. le Duc’s mistress—­I am very fond of it—­and make her tell you her history.(176)