He said: “We are sent like sacrifices to the altar.” That ancient ram! say I. He told her she would never see him again.
I wish you luck of your new General. He is touchy, punctilious, of a stiff mind, and has had forty years in the Guards. I do not think he was eager to leave Anne Bellamy and the clubs, for the man is a favourite; but he has little money, and it will be at least agreeable to spend the king’s guineas.
If you were a woman I should tell you the new fashions. The beaux now carry their watches in their muffs, and the women are taking, more and more, to what Charles S——y calls undress uniform, so that soon Madame Eve will be the fashionable maker of gowns!—but I must not nourish your provincial blushes. Lord R. tells me that your General is a sad brute, for when his sister—a pretty thing she was—spent all her money at cards and hanged herself, the man said: “Poor Fanny, I always thought she would play till she would be forced to tuck herself up.” Horace Walpole says, when she meant to die, she wrote with a diamond on the window-pane this out of Garth’s “Dispensary”:
“To die is landing on some silent shore,
Where billows never break nor tempests roar.”
But why should the woman die when she had a diamond left to gamble with?
However, the Duke of Cumberland is his patron, and that is enough. F——x lost the other night at White’s, they say, £1000 and—
I looked up and said: “The rest does not seem to be of interest or to say more of the general.”
“No, but always look at the postscript of a lady’s letter. There is more about your general.”
It was true, for I read: