I arrived at Paris towards the end of July, 1715.  You will observe that all I was charged with, and all by consequence that I am answerable for, was to solicit this Court and to dispose them to grant us the succours necessary to make the attempt as soon as we should know certainly from England in what it was desired that these succours should consist and whither they should be sent.  Here I found a multitude of people at work, and every one doing what seemed good in his own eyes; no subordination, no order, no concert.  Persons concerned in the management of these affairs upon former occasions have assured me this is always the case.  It might be so to some degree, but I believe never so much as now.  The Jacobites had wrought one another up to look on the success of the present designs as infallible.  Every meeting-house which the populace demolished, every little drunken riot which happened, served to confirm them in these sanguine expectations; and there was hardly one amongst them who would lose the air of contributing by his intrigues to the Restoration, which, he took it for granted, would be brought about, without him, in a very few weeks.

Care and hope sat on every busy Irish face.  Those who could write and read had letters to show; and those who had not arrived to this pitch of erudition had their secrets to whisper.  No sex was excluded from this Ministry.  Fanny Oglethorpe, whom you must have seen in England, kept her corner in it, and Olive Trant was the great wheel of our machine.

I imagine that this picture, the lines of which are not in the least too strong, would serve to represent what passed on your side of the water at the same time.  The letters which came from thence seemed to me to contain rather such things as the writers wished might be true, than such as they knew to be so:  and the accounts which were sent from hence were of the same kind.  The vanity of some and the credulity of others supported this ridiculous correspondence; and I question not but very many persons, some such I have known, did the same thing from a principle which they took to be a very wise one:  they imagined that they helped by these means to maintain and to increase the spirit of the party in England and France.  They acted like Thoas, that turbulent AEtolian, who brought Antiochus into Greece:  “quibus mendaciis de rege, multiplicando verbis copias ejus, erexerat multorum in Graecia animos; iisdem et regis spem inflabat, omnium votis eum arcessi.”  Thus were numbers of people employed under a notion of advancing the business, or from an affectation of importance, in amusing and flattering one another and in sounding the alarm in the ears of an enemy whom it was their interest to surprise.  The Government of England was put on its guard:  and the necessity of acting, or of laying aside with some disadvantage all thoughts of acting for the present, was precipitated before any measures necessary to enable you to act had been prepared, or almost thought of.