I am writing to you in an inn on the road to London. What a paradise should I have thought this when I was in the Italian inns in a wide barn with four ample windows, which had nothing more like glass than shutters and iron bars ' no tester to the bed, and the saddles and portmanteaus heaped on me to keep off the cold. What a paradise did I think the inn at Dover when I came back! and what magnificence Were twopenny prints, saltcellars, and boxes to hold the knives: but the summum bonum was small-beer and the newspaper.
"I bless'd my stars, and called it luxury!"
Who was the Neapolitan ambassadress (858) that could not live at Paris, because there was no maccaroni? Now am I relapsed into all the dissatisfied repinement of a true English grumbling voluptuary. I could find in my heart to write a Craftsman against the Government, because I am not quite so much at my ease as on my own sofa. I could persuade myself that it is my Lord Carteret's fault that I am only sitting in a common arm-chair, when I would be lolling in a p`ech`e-mortel. How dismal, how solitary, how scrub does this town look and yet it has actually a street of houses better than Parma or Modena. Nay, the houses of the people of fashion, who come hither for the races, are palaces to what houses in London itself were fifteen years ago. People do begin to live again now, and I suppose in a term we shall revert to York Houses, Clarendon Houses, etc. But from that grandeur all the nobility had contracted themselves to live in coops of a dining-room, a dark back-room, with one eye in a corner, and a closet. Think what London would be, if the chief houses were in it, as in the cities in other countries, and not dispersed like great rarity-plums in a vast pudding of country. Well, it is a tolerable place as it is! Were I a physician, I would prescribe nothing but recipe, CCCLXV drachm. Linden. Would you know why I like London so much? Why if the world must consist of so many fools as it does, I choose to take them in the gross, and not made into separate pills, as they are prepared in the country. Besides, there is no being alone but in a metropolis: the worst place in the world to find solitude is in the country: questions grow there, and that unpleasant Christian commodity, neighbours. Oh! they are all good Samaritans, and do so pour balms and nostrums upon one, if one has but the toothache, or a journey to take, that they break one's head. A journey to take-ay! they talk over the miles to you, and tell you, you will be late and My Lord Lovel says, John always goes two hours in the dark in the morning, to avoid being One hour in the dark in the evening. I was pressed to set out to-day before seven: I did before nine; and here am I arrived at a quarter past five, for the rest of the night.
I am more convinced every day, that there is not only no knowledge of the world out of a great city, but no decency, no practicable society-I had almost said, not a virtue. I will only instance in modesty, which all old Englishmen are persuaded cannot exist within the atmosphere of Middlesex. Lady Mary has a remarkable taste and knowledge of music, and can sing; I don't say, like your sister, but I am sure she would be ready to die if obliged to sing before three people, or before One with whom she is not intimate. The other day there came to see her a Norfolk heiress: the young gentlewoman had not been three hours in the house, and that for the first time of her life, before she notified her talent for singing, and invited herself up-stairs, to Lady Mary's harpsichord; where, with a voice like thunder, and with as little harmony, she sang to nine or ten people for an hour. "Was ever nymph like Rossvmonde?"-no, d'honneur. We told her, she had a very strong voice. "Lord, Sir! my master says it is nothing to what it was." My dear child, she brags abominably; if it had been a thousandth degree louder, you must have heard it at Florence.
I did not write to you last post, being overwhelmed with this sort of people - I will be more punctual in London. Patapan is in my lap: I had him wormed lately, which he took famously: I made it up with him by tying a collar of rainbow-riband about his neck, for a token that he is never to be wormed any more.
I had your long letter of two sheets of Sept. 17th, and wonder at your perseverance in telling me so much as you always do, when I, dull creature, find so little for you. I can only tell you that the more you write, the happier you make me; and I assure you, the more details the better: I so often lay schemes for returning to you, that I am persuaded I shall, and would keep up my stock of Florentine ideas.
I honour Matthew's punctilious observance of his Holiness's dignity. How incomprehensible Englishmen are! I should have sworn that he would have piqued himself on calling the Pope the w- of Babylon, and have begun his remonstrance, with "you old d-d-." What extremes of absurdities! to flounder from Pope Joan to his Holiness! I like your reflection, "that every body can bully the Pope." There was a humourist called Sir James of the Peak, who had been beat by a felony, who afterwards underwent the same operation from a third hand. "Zound," said Sir James, "that I did not know this fellow would take a beating!" Nay, my dear child, I don't know that Matthews would!
You know I always thought the Tesi comique, pendant que `ca devroit, `etre tragique. I am happy that my sovereign lady expressed my opinion so well-by the way, is De Sade still with you? Is he still in pawn by the proxy of his clothes? has the Princess as constant retirements to her bedchamber with the colique and Amenori? Oh! I was struck the other day with a resemblance of mine hostess at Brandon to old Sarah. You must know, the ladies of Norfolk universally wear periwigs, and affirm that it is the fashion at London. "lord! Mrs. White, have you been ill, that you have shaved your head?" Mrs. White, in all the days of my acquaintance with her, had a professed head of red hair: to-day, she had no hair at all before, and at a distance above her ears, I descried a smart brown bob, from beneath which had escaped some long strands of original scarlet—so like old Sarazin at two in the morning, when she has been losing at Pharoah, and clawed her wig aside, and her old trunk is shaded with the venerable white ivy of her own locks.
i agree with you, that it would be too troublesome to send me the things now the quarantine exists, except the gun-barrels for Lord Conway, the length of which I know nothing about, being, as you conceive, no sportsman. I must send you, with the Life of Theodore, a vast pamphlet (859) in defence of' the new administration, which makes the greatest noise. It is written, as supposed, by Dr. Pearse,(860) of St. Martin's, whom Lord Bath lately made a dean; the matter furnished by him. There is a good deal of useful ]Knowledge of the famous change to be found in it, and much more impudence. Some parts are extremely fine; in particular, the answer to the Hanoverian pamphlets, where he has collected the flower of all that was said in defence of that measure.(861) Had you those pamphlets? I will make up a parcel: tell me what other books you would have: I will send you nothing else, for if I give you the least bauble, it puts you to infinite expense, which I can't forgive, and indeed will never bear again: you would ruin yourself, and there is nothing I wish so much as the contrary.
Here is a good Ode, written on the supposition of that new book being Lord Bath's; I believe by the same hand as those charming ones which I sent you last year: the author is not yet known.(862)