I am just come from Cambridge's, where I have not been in an evening, time out of mind. Major Dixon, alias "the Charming man,"(676) is there; but I heard nothing of the Emperor's rickets:(677) a great deal, and many horrid stories, of the violences in France; for his brother, the Chevalier Jerningham, is Just arrived from Paris. You have heard of the destruction of thirty-two chateaus in Burgundy, at the instigation of a demon, who has since been broken on the racks. There is now assembled near Paris a body of sixteen thousand deserters, daily increasing; who, they fear, will encamp and dictate to the capital, in spite of their militia of twenty thousand bourgeois. It will soon, I suppose, ripen to several armies, and a civil war; a fine acheminement to liberty!
My poor niece is still alive, though weaker every day, and pronounced irrecoverable: yet it is possible she may live some weeks; which, however, is neither to be expected nor wished, for she eats little and sleeps less. Still she is calm, and behaves with the patience of a martyr.
You may perceive, by the former part of my letter, that I have been dipping into Spenser again, though he is no passion of mine - there I lighted upon two lines that, at first sight, reminded me of Mademoiselle d'Eon,
"Now, when Marfisa had put off her beaver,
To be a woman every one perceive her!"
but I do not think that is so perceptible in the Chevali`ere. She looked more feminine, as I remember her, in regimentals, than she does now. She is at best a heri-dragoon, or an Herculean hostess. I wonder she does not make a campaign in her own country, and offer her sword to the almost dethroned monarch, as a second Joan of Arc.(678) Adieu! for three weeks I shall say, Sancte Michael, ora pro nobis! You seem to have relinquished your plan of sea-coasting. I shall be sorry for that; it would do you good.
(671) The Prince of Wales and the Duke of York were going to receive a great entertainment at Wentworth House.-M.B.
(672) The Duke of Gloucester.
(673) Lady Greenwich.
(674) The " little Daniel" of the Pursuits of Literature, brother of Samuel Lysons, the learned antiquary, and author of "The Environs, twelve miles round London," in four volumes quarto—
"Nay once, for Purer air o'er rural ground,
With little Daniel went his twelve miles round."-E.