(1018) It was afterwards written in five volumes in quarto, from authentic documents furnished by the Great-Duke himself. It was published in Florence in 1781, and was entitled "Istoria del Gran Ducato di Toscana sotto il Governo delta Casa Medici, per Riguccio Galuzzi."-E.
(1019) Mr. Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo do' Medici appeared in 1796, and his Life and Pontificate of Leo the Tenth in 1805.-E.
(1020) See vol. i. p. 393, letter 151.
484 Letter 311 To Sir Horace Mann. Arlington Street, April 11, 1759.
I have waited and waited, in hopes of sending you the rest of Martinico or Guadaloupe; nothing else, as you guessed, has happened, or I should -have told you. But at present I can stay no longer, for I, who am a little more expeditious than a squadron, have made a conquest myself, and in less than a month since the first thought started. I hurry to tell you, lest you should go and consult the map of Middlesex, to see -whether I have any dispute about boundaries with the neighbouring Prince of Isleworth, or am likely to have fitted out a secret expedition upon Hounslow Heath—in short, I have married, that is, am marrying, my niece Maria,(1021) my brother's second daughter, to Lord Waldegrave.(1022) What say you? A month ago I was told he liked her.—does he? I jumbled them together, and he has Already proposed. For character and credit, he is the first match in England-for beauty, I think she is. She has not a fault in her face and person, and the detail is charming. A warm complexion tending to brown, fine eyes, brown hair, fine teeth, and infinite wit and vivacity. Two things are odd in this match; he seems to have been doomed to a Maria Walpole—if his father had lived, he had married my sister;(1023) and this is the second of my brother's daughters that has married into the house of Stuart. Mr. Keppel(1024) comes from Charles, Lord Waldegrave from James II. My brother has luckily been tractable, and left the whole management to me. My family don't lose any rank or advantage, when they let me dispose of them—a knight of the garter for my niece; 150,000 pounds for my Lord Orford if he would have taken her;(1025) these are not trifling establishments.
It were miserable after this to tell you that Prince Ferdinand has cut to pieces two or three squadrons of Austrians. I frame to myself that if I was commander-in-chief. I should on a sudden appear in the middle of Vienna, and oblige the Empress to give an Archduchess with half a dozen provinces to some infant prince or other, and make a peace before the bread wagons were come up. Difficulties are nothing; all depends on the sphere in which one is placed.
You must excuse my altitudes I feel myself very impertinent just now, but as I know it, I trust I shall not be more so than is becoming.
The Dutch cloud is a little dispersed; the privy council have squeezed out some rays of sunshine by restoring One Of' their ships, and by adjudging that we captors should prove the affirmative of contraband goods, instead of the goods proving themselves so: just as if one was ordered to believe that if a blackamoor is christened Thomas, he is a white. These distinctions are not quite adapted to the meridian of a flippant English privateer's comprehensions: however, the murmur is not great yet. I don't know what may betide if the minister should order the mob to be angry with the Ministry, nor whether Mr. Pitt or the mob will speak first. He is laid up with the gout, and it is as much as the rest of the administration can do to prevent his flying out. I am sorry, after you have been laying in such bales of Grotius and Puffendorf, that you must be forced to correct the text by a Dutch comment. You shall have the pamphlet you desire, and Lord Mansfield's famous answer to the Prussian manifesto, (I don't know whether it is in French,) but you must now read Hardwickius usum Batavorum.(1026)
We think we have lost Fort St. David, but have some scanty hopes of a victorious codicil, as our fleet there seems to have had the superiority. The King of Spain is certainly not dead, and the Italian war in appearance is blown over. This summer, I think, must finish all war, for who will have men, who will have money to furnish another campaign? Adieu!
P. S. Mr. Conway has got the first regiment of dragoons on
Hawley's death.