[Footnote 1: In 1759 M. Bertin was Finance Minister—the fourth who had held that office in four years; and among his expedients for raising money he had been compelled to have recourse to the measure of stopping the payment of the interest on a large portion of the National Debt.]
[Footnote 2: "Chevert est le vainqueur." He was one of the most brilliant officers in the French army. It was he who, under the orders of Saxe, surprised Prague in 1744, and it was to him that Maréchal d'Estrées was principally indebted for his victory of Hastenbeck.]
Lady Meadows has left nine thousand pounds in reversion after her husband to Lord Sandwich's daughter. Apropos to my Lady Meadows's maiden name, a name I believe you have sometimes heard; I was diverted t'other day with a story of a lady of that name,[1] and a lord, whose initial is no farther from hers than he himself is sometimes supposed to be. Her postillion, a lad of sixteen, said, "I am not such a child but I can guess something: whenever my Lord Lyttelton comes to my lady, she orders the porter to let in nobody else, and then they call for a pen and ink, and say they are going to write history." Is not this finesse so like him? Do you know that I am persuaded, now he is parted, that he will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to some woman or other.
[Footnote 1: Mrs. Montagu was the foundress of "The Blue-stocking Club."
She was the authoress of three "Dialogues of the Dead," to which Walpole
is alluding here, and which she published with some others by Lord
Lyttelton.]
When do you come? if it is not soon, you will find a new town. I stared to-day at Piccadilly like a country squire; there are twenty new stone houses: at first I concluded that all the grooms, that used to live there, had got estates, and built palaces. One young gentleman, who was getting an estate, but was so indiscreet as to step out of his way to rob a comrade, is convicted, and to be transported; in short, one of the waiters at Arthur's. George Selwyn says, "What a horrid idea he will give of us to the people in Newgate!"
I was still more surprised t'other day, than at seeing Piccadilly, by receiving a letter from the north of Ireland from a clergyman, with violent encomiums on my "Catalogue of Noble Authors"—and this when I thought it quite forgot. It puts me in mind of the queen[1] that sunk at Charing Cross and rose at Queenhithe.
[Footnote 1: Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., who erected the cross at Charing, and others at the different places where her body had stopped on the way from the North to Westminster.]
Mr. Chute has got his commission to inquire about your Cutts, but he thinks the lady is not your grandmother. You are very ungenerous to hoard tales from me of your ancestry: what relation have I spared? If your grandfathers were knaves, will your bottling up their bad blood mend it? Do you only take a cup of it now and then by yourself, and then come down to your parson, and boast of it, as if it was pure old metheglin? I sat last night with the Mater Gracchorum—oh! 'tis a Mater Jagorum; if her descendants taste any of her black blood, they surely will make as wry faces at it as the servant in Don John does when the ghost decants a corpse. Good night! I am just returning to Strawberry, to husband my two last days and to avoid all the pomp of the birthday. Oh! I had forgot, there is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be handsomer than my Lady Coventry; but I have known one threatened with such every summer for these seven years, and they are always addled by winter!