blishment 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 anything 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 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 yes

terday, 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 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.

* Of 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 was shot through the heart, in the moment of victory, a monument was erected at the public expense.-E».

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. 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 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 connection, 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 everything, true or

*Robert, third son of Francis Earl of Hertford.