LETTER CCCXLII.

Berkeley Square, Dec. 31, 1780.

I HAVE received, and thank you much for the curious history* of the Count and Countess of Albany; what a wretched conclusion of a wretched family! Surely no royal race was ever so drawn to the dregs! The other Countesst you mention seems to approach still nearer to dissolution. Her death a year or two ago might have prevented the sale of the pictures,-not that I know it would. Who can say what madness in the hands of villany would or would not have done? Now, I think her dying would only put more into the reach of rascals. But I am indifferent what they do; nor, but thus occasionally, shall I throw away a thought on that chapter.

All chance of accommodation with Holland is vanished. Count Welderen and his wife departed this morning. All they who are to gain by privateers and captures are delighted with a new field of plunder. Piracy is more practicable than victory. Not being an admirer of wars, I shall reserve my feux de joie for peace.

My letters, I think, are rather eras than journals. Three days ago commenced another date-the establishment of a family for the Prince of Wales. I do not know all the names, and fewer of the faces that compose it ; nor intend. I, who kissed the hand of George I., have no colt's tooth for the Court of George IV. Nothing is so ridiculous as an antique face in a juvenile drawing-room. I believe that they who have spirits enough to be absurd in their decrepitude, are happy, for they certainly are not sensible of their folly; but I, who have never forgotten what I thought in my youth of such superannuated idiots, dread nothing more than misplacing myself in my old age. In truth, I feel no such appetite; and, excepting the young of my own family, about whom I am interested, I have mighty small satisfaction in the company of posterity; for so the present generation seem to me. I would contribute any thing to their pleasure, but what cannot contribute to it-my own presence. Alas! how many of this age are swept away before me; six thousand have been mowed down at once by the late hurricane at Barbadoes alone! How Europe is paying the debts it owes to America! Were I a poet, I would paint hosts of Mexicans and Peruvians crowding the shores

*The Pretender's wife complaining to the Great-Duke of her husband's beastly behaviour to her, that Prince contrived her escape into a convent, and thence sent her to Rome, where she was protected by the Cardinal of York, and her husband's brother. [After the death of the Pretender in 1788, the Countess of Albany tavelled in Italy and France, and lived with the celebrated Alfieri, to whom she was said to have been privately married. On the breaking out of the French Revolu tion, she took refuge in England. For Walpole's account of his interview with, and description of, her in 1791, see Collective Edition, vol. vi. p. 436.-ED.]

The Countess of Orford. [The Countess died in the following mouth at Pisa.. -ED.

of Styx, and insulting the multitudes of the usurpers of their continent that have been sending themselves thither for these five or six years. The poor Africans, too, have no call to be merciful to European ghosts. Those miserable slaves have just now seen whole crews of men-of-war swallowed by the late hurricane. We do not yet know the extent of our loss. You would think it very slight, if you saw how little impression it makes on a luxurious capital. An overgrown metropolis has less sensibility than marble; nor can it be conceived by those not conversant in one. I remember hearing what diverted me then a young gentlewoman, a native of our rock, St. Helena, and who had never stirred beyond it, being struck with the emotion occasioned there by the arrival of one or two of our China ships, said to the captain," There must be a great solitude in London as often as the China ships come away!" Her imagination could not have compassed the idea, if she had been told that six years of war, the absence of an army of fifty or sixty thousand men and of all our squadrons, and a new debt of many, many millions, would not make an alteration in the receipt at the door of a single theatre in London. I do not boast of, or applaud, this profligate apathy. When pleasure is our business, our business is never our pleasure; and, if four wars cannot awaken us, we shall die in a dream!

LETTER CCCXLIII.

Berkeley Square, Jan. 9, 1781.

THIS can be but a short letter, for I have scarcely time to write it; but as to-day's papers would alarm you, and cannot carry the relief which arrived since they were printed, I cannot leave you for a moment under anxiety-I may say, for me, as I am so much concerned. In short, advice came by daybreak yesterday, that two thousand French (magnified to above four thousand) had landed on Saturday last in Jersey, had seized the lieutenant-governor in his bed, and were masters of the island. Orders were sent to Portsmouth to send what force could be had, and an express to General Conway to bid him repair thither. He came to town on wings of winds, and never

* On this second attempt of the French upon the island of Jersey, the Baron de Rullecourt, who had been next in command to Count Nassau in the former attack upon the island, was the undertaker, and supposed to be the framer. He landed his troops in the night at a place called the Violet Bank, about three miles from St. Helier; and so shamefully remiss were the militia in their duty, that they were seized asleep by the enemy, who were thus for several hours upon the island without the smallest alarm being given. The British troops stationed in the island having assembled from all quarters, under the command of Major Pierson, being required by the French commander to submit, an attack was instantly made with such impetuosity, that the enemy were routed on all sides, the Baron mortally wounded, and the next in command obliged to surrender himself and the whole party, amounting to about eight hundred, prisoners of war. To Major Pierson, who

pulled them off, and in two hours was on the road to Portsmouth. I did not see him, for he never wastes an instant on such occasions. Judge of my anxiety! It was for more than his broken arm. Well, at noon to-day we heard that the troops had rallied, attacked the French, gained a complete victory, pushed four hundred into the sea, and taken twelve hundred. These are the troops that Mr. Conway himself formed last year. To me this battle is worth the day at Blenheim.

LETTER CCCXLIV.

Berkeley Square, Jan. 18, 1781.

I HAVE received your second letter about the Countess of Albany, and her retreat to Rome-or rather her imprisonment there. Are they Jews enough, if the Count should die, to uncanonize the Cardinal and make him raise up issue to his brother, which the brother could not do for himself?

I told you last week of the loss and recovery of Jersey. General Conway, without losing a second, embarked at Portsmouth in the heat of such a storm that a transport with sixty men was lost as he sailed, and the cutter that preceded, to notify his coming, has not been heard of since! He was tempested about for two whole days and nights, in such danger that the captain of the frigate despaired. Though it was a disappointment and vexation, for they knew nothing of the safety of the island, it was fortunate that they could not get out of the channel, or they had probably been lost! With great difficulty they got into Plymouth, where they learnt the good news from the French themselves, who had been made prisoners in Jersey. Mr. Conway arrived at Park-place on Sunday last, but was forced to take to his bed, where he remained till yesterday, when he rose for a few hours. He had caught a cold, rheumatism all over, and a fever: what was worse, and perhaps the cause of his fever, a good-natured sailor, seeing him awkward at getting up the ladder into the frigate, and not knowing, or not considering, that he had a broken arm, gave it such a kind tug that he almost broke it again! In that pain of body and mind he retained all his patience and tranquillity, and astonished even his own nephew Colonel Conway,* who knows him, and who repeated it to me with as much admiration as if he had never seen him before. I flatter myself that he will be able to come to town on Monday.

This is a most interesting chapter to me, and as such I perhaps have dwelt on it too long. But it intercepts nothing else. Not an

was shot through the heart, in the moment of victory, a monument was erected at the public expense.-ED.

* Robert, third son of Francis Earl of Hertford.

event has happened, nor an account arrived of any, since I wrote last week. Tuesday the Parliamentary campaign will open again. I know full as little of what are to be its objects. Sir Joseph Yorke not being returned, makes the conjecturers imagine the reconciliation with Holland is not desperate. They say, too, that the Dutch have not yet issued letters of marque; but on those matters I talk quite in the dark, and with the vulgar. I hold to the world but by few threads; and, when an old man takes no pains to keep up the connexion, the world is not at all solicitous to preserve it. Your nephew, I conclude, will soon be in town, and will be more copious than I am. It is not that I have less inclination than ever to be your journalist, but I now live in so confined a circle, that common occurrences rarely arrive to me till they have been in all the newspapers -and, to give those historians their due, nothing comes amiss to them; and, lest they should defraud their customers, they keep open shop for every thing, true or false, or scandalous, or ever so private, or ever so little relative to the public. Ancient annalists thought nobody game below a monarch, or a general, or a high-priest. Modern intelligencers have no mercy on posterity; and, not considering how enormous the lack of events is grown, contribute all in their power to store the world with the history of every body in it. In truth, this duty has become so extensive, that it has totally given exclusion here to all the rest of the earth where we are not concerned. We know no more of what passes in Europe than in Africa. To make amends, America and Asia are fully discussed. At this moment, I might, if I pleased, be perfectly acquainted with the king of Tanjore and all his affairs; not quite upon his own account, but because there is a contest at the India House about one Mr. Benfield; who, by the way, is believed to be agent for the nabob of Arcot, and to have retained nine members of Parliament in the interest of that petty sovereign*-scandal, to be sure! And perhaps you think I am talking to you out of the Mogul Tales; but I have long told you that you have-can have-no idea of your own country. Well: look into the Roman History just before the fall of the Republic;

* Paul Benfield, the agent of the Nabob of Arcot, had made a claim of 250,000l. on the East India Company, being the alleged proceeds of a crop on the lands of Tanjore, sown by the Nabob and mortgaged to Benfield. The claim was considered to be fraudulent, from the improbability that a private person of little or no property, should have been able to advance so large a sum. Mr. Burke, in his celebrated speech on the Nabob's debts, in 1785, describes Benfield as "the old betrayer, insulter, oppressor, and scourge of India-the grand parliamentary reformer, the reformer to whom the whole choir of reformers bow; and who, amidst his charitable toils for the relief of India, did not forget the poor, rotten constitution of his native country: for he did not disdain to stoop to the trade of a wholesale upholsterer for this House, to furnish it, not with the faded tapestry figures of antiquated merit, such as decorate, and may reproach, some other houses, but with real, solid, living patterns of true, modern virtue." "Paul," he adds, “made (reckoning himself) no fewer than eight members in the last Parliament: what copious streams of pure blood must he not have transfused into the veins of the present!"-ED.

you will find orations for King Deiotarus, and of proconsuls pensioned by tributary sovereigns. In short, you will see how splendid and vile the ruins were of a great empire!

Feb. 2nd.

It is said that more than one surly rescript has been received from Russia, with whom we look to have war. The Parliament is most courtly: yesterday, indeed, there were a hundred and forty-nine for a censure on the preferment of Sir Hugh Palliser to Greenwich Hospital, but above two hundred admired the choice.*

On Monday is to begin the trial of Lord George Gordon, which will at least occupy every body for some days. I should be inclined to leave that subject to your nephew, but I do not know whether he is in town at least I have not seen him, nor heard his name this winter. The East Indian fleet, of vast value, is safe arrived in Ireland. Sir Thomas Rumbold is on board it, and his value is estimated at a million. I do not wonder that a nabob can afford to buy a gang of members of Parliament.

LETTER CCCXLV.

Berkeley Square, Feb. 6, 1781. LAST night when I came home, I found your two letters of January13th and 16th; the one to prepare me for, and the second to announce, Lady Orford's death. It has been reported here for a fortnight that she was dead so, perhaps, some body sent a courier to her son, or to Sharpe her lawyer; or, more probably, her heir might send one to Hoare. I have nothing to do with all that; but I have this minute written to her son, and sent him the individual copy of her will that I have received from you, and the few particulars you have told me.t

My first reflection naturally is, that, had my lord had patience but for a year, he would have had no occasion to sell his pictures; supposing which, I do not think that, without his mother's death, he would have had that occasion. My own opinion is, that the wretches

* The motion, which was made by Mr. Fox, was for a censure on the appointment of Sir Hugh Palliser to the government of Greenwich Hospital. Sir Hugh, who had just taken his seat for Huntingdon, through the interest of the Earl of Sandwich, defended himself at considerable length. The numbers on the division were 149 for, and 214 against the motion.-ED.

+ In 1779, Sir Thomas Rumbold had been appointed Covernor of Madras, and

created a baronet.-ED.

Walpole, in a letter to the Rev. Mr. Cole, of the 7th, says, " She has left every thing in her power to her friend Cavalier Mozzi, at Florence, but her son comes into her large estate, besides her great jointure." See Collective Edition, vol. i. p. 170, and vol. vi. p. 110.-ED.