As soon as I came to town to-day Le Texier called on me, and told me he has miscarried of Pygmalion. The expense would have mounted to 150 pounds and he could get but sixty subscribers at a guinea apiece. I am glad his experience and success have taught him thrift. I did not expect it. Sheridan had a heavier miscarriage last night. The two Vestris had imagined a f`ete; and, concluding that whatever they designed would captivate the town and its purses, were at the expense of 1200 pounds and, distributing tickets at two guineas apiece, disposed of not two hundred. It ended in a bad opera, that began three hours later than usual, and at quadruple the price. There were bushels of dead flowers, lamps, country dances—and a cold supper. Yet they are not abused as poor Le Texier was last year.
June 8.
I conclude my letter, and I hope our present correspondence, very agreeably; for your brother told me last night, that you have written to Lord Hillsborough for leave to return. If all our governors could leave their dominions in as good plight, it were lucky. Your brother owned, what the Gazette with all its circumstances cannot conceal, that Lord Cornwallis's triumphs have but increased our losses, without leaving any hopes. I am told that his army, which when he parted from Clinton amounted to seventeen thousand men, does not now contain above as many hundred, except the detachments. The Gazette, to my sorrow and your greater sorrow, speaks of Colonel O'Hara having received two dangerous wounds. Princess Amelia was at Marlborough-house last night, and played at faro till twelve o'clock. There ends the winter campaign! I go to Strawberry-hill to-morrow; and I hope, a l'Irlandaise, that the next letter I write to you will be not to write to you any more.
(430) Lord George Seymour Conway, seventh son of Francis, first Earl and Marquis of Hertford; born 1763.-E.
(431) The young William Pitt," afterwards, as Walpole anticipated, the proud rival of Charles Fox, and for so long a period the prime-minister of England, delivered his maiden speech in the House of Commons, on the 26th of February, in favour of Mr. Burke's bill for an economical reform in the civil list. "Never," says his preceptor, Bishop Tomline, "were higher expectations formed of any person upon his first coming into Parliament, and never were expectations more completely answered. They were, indeed, much more than answered; such were the fluency and accuracy of language, such the perspicuity of arrangement, and such the closeness of reasoning, and manly and dignified elocution,—generally, even in a much less degree, the fruits of long habit and experience,—that it could scarcely be believed to be the first speech of a young man not yet two-and-twenty. On the following day, knowing my anxiety upon every subject which related to him, Mr. Pitt, with his accustomed kindness, wrote to me at Cambridge, to inform me that 'he had heard his own voice in the House of Commons,' and modestly expressed his satisfaction at the manner in which his first attempt at parliamentary speaking had been received."-E.
(432) Henry Bankes, Esq. of Kingston Hall. He represented Corfe-Castle from 1780 to 1826, and the county of Dorset from that time until 1831. In 1818, he published "The Civil and Constitutional History of Rome, from the Foundation to the Age of Augustus," in two volumes, 8vo; and died in 1834.-E.
(433) Mr. Wilberforce, in a letter to a friend, of the 9th of June, says—"The papers will have informed you how Mr. William Pitt, second son of the late Lord Chatham has distinguished himself: he comes out as his father did, a ready-made orator, and I doubt not but that I shall one day or other, see him the first man in the country." Life, vol. 1. p. 22.-E.
Letter 220 To The Earl Of Strafford.
Strawberry Hill, June 13, 1781. (PAGE 281)
It was very kind, my dear lord, to recollect me so soon: I wish I Could return it by amusing you; but here I know nothing, and suppose it is owing to age that even in town I do not find the transactions of the world very entertaining. One must sit up all night to see or hear any thing; and if the town intends to do any thing, they never begin to do it till next day. Mr. Conway will certainly be here the end of this month, having thoroughly secured his island from surprise, and it is not liable to be taken any other way. I wish he was governor of this bigger one too, which does not seem quite so well guaranteed.
Your lordship will wonder at a visit I had yesterday: it was from Mr. Storer, who has passed a day and night here. It was not from my being a fellow-scholar of Vestris, but from his being turned antiquary; the last passion I should have thought a macaroni would have taken. I am as proud of such a disciple as of having converted Dicky Bateman from a Chinese to a Goth. Though he was the founder of the Sharawadgi taste in England, I preached so effectually that his every pagoda took the veil. The Methodists say, one must have been very wicked before one can be of the elect—yet is that extreme more distant from the ton, which avows knowing and liking nothing but the fashion of the instant, to studying what were the modes of five hundred years ago? I hope this conversion will not ruin Mr. Storer's fortune under the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. How his Irish majesty will be shocked when he asks how large Prince Boothby's shoe-buckles are grown, to be answered, he does not know, but that Charles Brandon's cod-piece at the last birthday had three yards of velvet in it! and that the Duchess of Buckingham thrust out her chin two inches farther than ever in admiration of it! and that the Marchioness of Dorset had put out her jaw by endeavouring to imitate her!