256.
To his Stepmother.
July the 3rd, 1775.
Dear Madam,
I wish you would believe, what is really the case, that before I received your letter I intended to have written this very post. It is true that I had the same intention for many posts before, and that the glorious spirit of procrastination always told me that the next would do just as well: I do not mean as to your franks, for those I must confess I had absolutely and irrecoverably forgotten. *Deyverdun had left me just before your letter arrived, which I shall soon have an opportunity of conveying to him. Though, I flatter myself, he broke from me with some degree of uneasiness, the engagement could not be declined. At the end of the four years he has an annuity of £100 for Life, and may, for the remainder of his days, enjoy a decent independence in that Country, which a Philosopher would perhaps prefer to the rest of Europe. For my own part, after the hurry of the town and of Parliament, I am now retired to my Villa in Bentinck Street, which I begin to find a very pleasing Solitude, at least as well as if it were two hundred miles from London; because when I am tired of the Roman Empire, I can laugh away the Evening at Foote's Theatre, which I could not do in Hampshire or Cornwall.* You know I am not a writer of news, but I cannot forbear telling you that the Dutchess of Bedford made regular proposals of marriage to the young Earl Cholmondely, and was as regularly refused. Poor as he was (he replied to Mr. Fitzpatrick the Embassador) he was not quite poor enough to accept them.
I am, Dear Madam,
Most truly Yours,
E. Gibbon.