Letter 311 To The Hon. H. S. Conway.
Strawberry Hill, June 17, 1787. (page 393)
I have very little to tell you since we met but disappointments, and those of no great consequence. On Friday night Lady Pembroke wrote to me that Princess Lubomirski was to dine with her the next day, and desired to come in the morning to see Strawberry. Well, my castle put on its robes, breakfast was prepared, and I shoved another company out of the house, who had a ticket for seeing it. The sun shone, my hay was cocked, we looked divinely; and at half an hour after two, nobody came but a servant to Lady Pembroke, to say her Polish altitude had sent her word she had another engagement in town that would keep her too late:-so Lady Pembroke's dinner was addled; and we had nothing to do, but, like good Christians, if we chose it, to compel every body on the road, whether they chose it or not, to come in and eat our soup and biscuits. Methinks this liberum veto was rather impertinent, and I begin to think that the partition of Poland was very right.
Your brother has sent me a card for a ball on Monday, but I have excused myself. I have not yet compassed the whole circuit of my own garden, and I have had an inflammation in one of my eyes, and don't think I look as well as my house and my verdure; and had rather see my haycocks, than the Duchess of Polignac and Madame Lubomirski. "The Way to Keep Him" had the way to get me, and I could crawl to it because I had an inclination; but I have a great command of myself when I have no mind to do any thing. Lady Constant was worth an hundred ars and irskis. Let me hear of you when you have nothing else to do; though I suppose you have as little to tell as you see I had.
Letter 312 To The Earl Of Strafford.
Strawberry Hill, July 28, 1787. (page 394)
St. Swithun is no friend to correspondence, my dear lord. There is not only a great sameness in his own proceedings, but he makes every body else dull-I mean in the country, where one frets at its raining every day and all day. In town he is no more minded than the proclamation against vice and immorality. Still, though he has all the honours of the quarantine, I believe it often rained for forty days long before St. Swithun was born, if ever born he was; and the proverb was coined and put under his patronage, because people observed that it frequently does rain for forty days together at this season. I remember Lady Suffolk telling me, that Lord Dysart's great meadow had never been mowed but once in forty years without rain. I said, "All that that proved was, that rain was good for hay," as I am persuaded the climate of a country and its productions are suited to each other. Nay, rain is good for haymakers too, who get more employment the oftener the hay is made over again. I do not know who is the saint that presides over thunder; but he has made an unusual quantity in this chill summer, and done a great deal of serious mischief, though not a fiftieth part of what Lord George Gordon did seven years ago, and happily he is fled.
Our little part of the world has been quiet as usual. The Duke of Queensberry has given a sumptuous dinner to the Princess de Lamballe(599)—et voil`a tout. I never saw her, not even in France. I have no particular penchant for sterling princes and princesses, much less for those of French plate.
The only entertaining thing I can tell your lordship from our district is, that old Madam French, who lives close by the bridge at Hampton-court, where, between her and the Thames, she had nothing but one grass-plot of the width of her house, has paved that whole plot with black and white marble in diamonds, exactly like the floor of a church; and this curious metamorphosis of a garden into a pavement has cost her three hundred and forty pounds:-a tarpaulin she might have had for some shillings, which would have looked as well, and might easily have been removed. To be sure, this exploit, and Lord Dudley's obelisk below a hedge, with his canal at right angles with the Thames, and a sham bridge no broader than that of a violin, and parallel to the river, are not preferable to the monsters in clipt yews of our ancestors;
Bad taste expellas fursa tamen usque recurret.
On the contrary, Mrs. Walsingham is making her house at Ditton (now baptized Boyle-farm) very orthodox. Her daughter Miss Boyle(600) who has real genius, has carved three tablets in marble with buoys, designed by herself. Those sculptures are for a chimney-piece; and she is painting panels in grotesque for the library, with pilasters of glass in black and gold. Miss Crewe, who has taste too, has decorated a room for her mother's house at Richmond, which was Lady Margaret Compton's in a very pretty manner. How much more amiable the old women of the next age will be, than most of those we remember, who used to tumble at once from gallantry to devout scandal and cards! and revenge on the young of their own sex the desertion of ours. Now they are ingenious, they will not want amusement. Adieu, my dear lord!
(599) Sister to the Prince de Carignan, of the royal house of Sardinia, and wife of the Prince de Lamballe, only son to the Duc de Penthi`evre. She was sur-intendante de la maison de la Reine, and, from her attachment to Marie Antoinette, was one of the first females who fell a victim to the fury of the French revolution. The peculiar circumstances of horror which attended her death, and the indignities offered to her remains, are in the memory of every one who has read the accounts of that heart.rending event.-E.