Well! I have here set you the example of writing nonsense when one has nothing to say, and shall take it ill if you don't keep up the correspondence on the same foot. Adieu!
REJOICINGS FOR THE PEACE—MASQUERADE AT RANELAGH—MEETING OF THE PRINCES PARTY AND THE JACOBITES—PREVALENCE OF DRINKING AND GAMBLING—WHITEFIELD.
TO SIR HORACE MANN.
STRAWBERRY HILL, May 3, 1749.
I am come hither for a few days, to repose myself after a torrent of diversions, and am writing to you in my charming bow-window with a tranquillity and satisfaction which, I fear, I am grown old enough to prefer to the hurry of amusements, in which the whole world has lived for this last week. We have at last celebrated the Peace, and that as much in extremes as we generally do everything, whether we have reason to be glad or sorry, pleased or angry. Last Tuesday it was proclaimed: the King did not go to St. Paul's, but at night the whole town was illuminated. The next day was what was called "a jubilee-masquerade in the Venetian manner" at Ranelagh: it had nothing Venetian in it, but was by far the best understood and the prettiest spectacle I ever saw: nothing in a fairy tale ever surpassed it. One of the proprietors, who is a German, and belongs to Court, had got my Lady Yarmouth to persuade the King to order it. It began at three o'clock, and, about five, people of fashion began to go. When you entered, you found the whole garden filled with masks and spread with tents, which remained all night very commodely. In one quarter, was a May-pole dressed with garlands, and people dancing round it to a tabor and pipe and rustic music, all masqued, as were all the various bands of music that were disposed in different parts of the garden; some like huntsmen with French horns, some like peasants, and a troop of harlequins and scaramouches in the little open temple on the mount. On the canal was a sort of gondola, adorned with flags and streamers, and filled with music, rowing about. All round the outside of the amphitheatre were shops, filled with Dresden china, japan, &c., and all the shopkeepers in mask. The amphitheatre was illuminated; and in the middle was a circular bower, composed of all kinds of firs in tubs, from twenty to thirty feet high: under them orange-trees, with small lamps in each orange, and below them all sorts of the finest auriculas in pots; and festoons of natural flowers hanging from tree to tree. Between the arches too were firs, and smaller ones in the balconies above. There were booths for tea and wine, gaming-tables and dancing, and about two thousand persons. In short, it pleased me more than anything I ever saw. It is to be once more, and probably finer as to dresses, as there has since been a subscription masquerade, and people will go in their rich habits. The next day were the fireworks, which by no means answered the expense, the length of preparation, and the expectation that had been raised; indeed, for a week before, the town was like a country fair, the streets filled from morning to night, scaffolds building wherever you could or could not see, and coaches arriving from every corner of the kingdom. This hurry and lively scene, with the sight of the immense crowd in the Park and on every house, the guards, and the machine itself, which was very beautiful, was all that was worth seeing. The rockets, and whatever was thrown up into the air, succeeded mighty well; but the wheels, and all that was to compose the principal part, were pitiful and ill-conducted, with no changes of coloured fires and shapes: the illumination was mean, and lighted so slowly that scarce anybody had patience to wait the finishing; and then, what contributed to the awkwardness of the whole, was the right pavilion catching fire, and being burnt down in the middle of the show. The King, the Duke, and Princess Emily saw it from the Library, with their courts: the Prince and Princess, with their children, from Lady Middlesex's; no place being provided for them, nor any invitation given to the library. The Lords and Commons had galleries built for them and the chief citizens along the rails of the Mall: the Lords had four tickets a-piece, and each Commoner, at first, but two, till the Speaker bounced and obtained a third. Very little mischief was done, and but two persons killed: at Paris, there were forty killed and near three hundred wounded, by a dispute between the French and Italians in the management, who, quarrelling for precedence in lighting the fires, both lighted at once and blew up the whole. Our mob was extremely tranquil, and very unlike those I remember in my father's time, when it was a measure in the Opposition to work up everything to mischief, the Excise and the French players, the Convention and the Gin Act. We are as much now in the opposite extreme, and in general so pleased with the peace, that I could not help being struck with a passage I read lately in Pasquier, an old French author, who says, "that in the time of Francis I. the French used to call their creditors 'Des Anglois,' from the facility with which the English gave credit to them in all treaties, though they had broken so many." On Saturday we had a serenta at the Opera-house, called Peace in Europe, but it was a wretched performance. On Monday there was a subscription masquerade, much fuller than that of last year, but not so agreeable or so various in dresses. The King was well disguised in an old-fashioned English habit, and much pleased with somebody who desired him to hold their cup as they were drinking tea. The Duke had a dress of the same kind, but was so immensely corpulent that he looked like Cacofogo, the drunken captain, in "Rule a Wife and have a Wife." The Duchess of Richmond was a Lady Mayoress in the time of James I.; and Lord Delawarr, Queen Elizabeth's porter, from a picture in the guard-chamber at Kensington: they were admirable masks. Lord Rochford, Miss Evelyn, Miss Bishop, Lady Stafford, and Mrs. Pitt, were in vast beauty; particularly the last, who had a red veil, which made her look gloriously handsome. I forgot Lady Kildare. Mr. Conway was the Duke in "Don Quixote," and the finest figure I ever saw. Miss Chudleigh was Iphigenia, but so naked that you would have taken her for Andromeda; and Lady Betty Smithson [Seymour] had such a pyramid of baubles upon her head, that she was exactly the Princess of Babylon in Grammont.
You will conclude that, after all these diversions, people begin to think of going out of town—no such matter: the Parliament continues sitting, and will till the middle of June; Lord Egmont told us we should sit till Michaelmas. There are many private bills, no public ones of any fame. We were to have had some chastisement for Oxford, where, besides the late riots, the famous Dr. King,[1] the Pretender's great agent, made a most violent speech at the opening of the Ratcliffe Library. The ministry denounced judgment, but, in their old style, have grown frightened, and dropped it. However, this menace gave occasion to a meeting and union between the Prince's party and the Jacobites which Lord Egmont has been labouring all the winter. They met at the St. Alban's tavern, near Pall Mall, last Monday morning, a hundred and twelve Lords and Commoners. The Duke of Beaufort opened the assembly with a panegyric on the stand that had been made this winter against so corrupt an administration, and hoped it would continue, and desired harmony. Lord Egmont seconded this strongly, and begged they would come up to Parliament early next winter. Lord Oxford spoke next; and then Potter with great humour, and to the great abashment of the Jacobites, said he was very glad to see this union, and from thence hoped, that if another attack like the last Rebellion should be made on the Royal Family, they would all stand by them. No reply was made to this. Then Sir Watkyn Williams spoke, Sir Francis Dashwood,[2] and Tom Pitt, and the meeting broke up. I don't know what this coalition may produce: it will require time with no better heads than compose it at present, though the great Mr. Dodington had carried to the conference the assistance of his. In France a very favourable event has happened for us, the disgrace of Maurepas,[3] one of our bitterest enemies, and the greatest promoter of their marine. Just at the beginning of the war, in a very critical period, he had obtained a very large sum for that service, but which one of the other factions, lest he should gain glory and credit by it, got to be suddenly given away to the King of Prussia.
[Footnote 1: Dr. King was Principal of St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, and one of the chief supports of the Jacobite party after 1745.]
[Footnote 2: Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1761, through the influence of the Earl of Bute. He was the owner of Medmenham Abbey, on the Thames, and as such, the President of the profligate Club whose doings were made notorious by the proceedings against Wilkes, and who, in compliment to him, called themselves the Franciscans.]
[Footnote 3: The Comte de Maurepas was the grandson of the Chancellor of France, M. de Pontchartrain. When only fourteen years old Louis had made him Secretary of State for the Marine, as a consolation to his grandfather for his dismissal; and he continued in office till the accession of Louis XVI., when he was appointed Prime Minister. He was not a man of any statesmanlike ability; but Lacretelle ascribes to him "les graces d'un esprit aimable et frivole qui avait le don d'amuser un vieillard toujours porté à un elegant badinage" (ii. 53); and in a subsequent letter speaks of him as a man of very lively powers of conversation.]
Sir Charles Williams[1] is appointed envoy to this last King: here is an epigram which he has just sent over on Lord Egmont's opposition to the Mutiny Bill: