TO LADY HESKETH.
The Lodge, Sept. 4, 1787.
My dearest Coz.—Come, when thou canst come, secure of being always welcome! All that is here is thine, together with the hearts of those who dwell here. I am only sorry that your journey hither is necessarily postponed beyond the time when I did hope to have seen you; sorry too that my uncle's infirmities are the occasion of it. But years will have their course and their effect; they are happiest, so far as this life is concerned, who like him escape those effects the longest, and who do not grow old before their time. Trouble and anguish do that for some, which only longevity does for others. A few months since I was older than your father is now, and, though I have lately recovered, as Falstaff says, some smatch of my youth, I have but little confidence, in truth none, in so flattering a change, but expect, when I least expect it, to wither again. The past is a pledge for the future.
Mr. G. is here, Mrs. Throckmorton's uncle. He is lately arrived from Italy, where he has resided several years, and is so much the gentleman that it is impossible to be more so. Sensible, polite, obliging; slender in his figure, and in manners most engaging—every way worthy to be related to the Throckmortons.[374]
I have read Savary's Travels into Egypt;[375] Memoires du Baron de Tott; Fenn's Original Letters; the Letters of Frederick of Bohemia; and am now reading Memoires d'Henri de Lorraine, Duc de Guise. I have also read Barclay's Argenis, a Latin romance, and the best romance that ever was written—all these, together with Madan's Letters to Priestly, and several pamphlets, within these two months. So I am a great reader.
W. C.