“I enclosed the above to Lord Ossory, because it was not worth sixpence, and had sent it to the post, and then went to Bedford House, where, lo! enters Lady Shelburne, looking as fresh and ripe as Pomona. N.B. Her windows were not open yesterday, and to-day there was such a mist, ermined with snow, that I could not see. I find it was not a habit-maker that was smitten with your Ladyship as a pig in a poke, but somebody else; but as her Grace’s mouth has lost one tooth, and my ear, I suspect, another, I have not found out who the unfortunate man is.
“Next enters your Ladyship’s letter. I have seen my dignity of Minister to Spain[78]—many a fair castle have I erected in that country, but truly never resided there.… This is long enough for a codicil, in which one has nothing more to give.”
In the same lively mood, he writes about the same time to Mason:
“Berkeley Square, Nov. I don’t know what day.
“If you can be content with anything but news as fresh as mackerel, I will tell you as pretty a story as a gentleman can hear in a winter’s day, though it has not a grain of novelty in it but to those who never heard it, which was my case till yesterday.
“When that philosophic tyrant the Czarina (who murdered two emperors for the good of their people, to the edification of Voltaire, Diderot, and D’Alembert) proposed to give a code of laws that should serve all her subjects as much or as little as she pleased, she ordered her various states to send deputies who should specify their respective wants. Amongst the rest came a representative of the Samoieds; he waited on the marshal of the diet of legislation, who was Archbishop of Novgorod. ‘I am come,’ said the savage, ‘but I do not know for what.’ ‘My clement mistress,’ said his Grace, ‘means to give a body of laws to all her dominions.’—‘Whatever laws the Empress shall give us,’ said the Samoied, ‘we shall obey, but we want no laws.’—‘How,’ said the Prelate, ‘not want laws! why, you are men like the rest of the world, and must have the same passions, and consequently must murder, cheat, steal, rob, plunder,’ &c., &c., &c.
“‘It is true,’ said the savage, ‘we have now and then a bad person among us, but he is sufficiently punished by being shut out of all society.’
“If you love nature in its naturalibus, you will like this tale. I think one might make a pretty ‘Spectator’ by inverting the hint: I would propose a general jail delivery, not only from all prisons, but madhouses, as not sufficiently ample for a quarter of the patients and candidates; and to save trouble, and yet make as impartial distinction, to confine the virtuous and the few that are in their senses. But I am digressing, and have not yet told you the story I intended; at least, only the first part.
“One day Count Orlow, the Czarina’s accomplice in more ways than one, exhibited himself to the Samoied in the robes of the order, and refulgent with diamonds. The savage surveyed him attentively, but silently. ‘May I ask,’ said the favourite, ‘what it is you admire?’—‘Nothing,’ replied the Tartar: ‘I was thinking how ridiculous you are.’—‘Ridiculous,’ cried Orlow, angrily; ‘and pray in what?’—‘Why, you shave your beard to look young, and powder your hair to look old!’
“Well! as you like my stories, I will tell you a third, but it is prodigiously old, yet it is the only new trait that I have found in that ocean Bibliothèque des Romans, which I had almost abandoned; for I am out of patience with novels and sermons, that have nothing new, when the authors may say what they will without contradiction.