May 31st. I must finish my letter to-night, for I go out of town to-morrow for the summer, and leave the Parliament to give balls or supplies as it pleases. Lord Cornwallis sails to-day to command America, but the fleet is not yet gone. I remember, when I was a boy, hearing that it had been a great joke in Queen Anne's war, that Lord Peterborough* was galloping about in Spain inquiring for his army-Lord Cornwallis will have none to hunt for.

The old Duke of Rutland is dead, at eighty-four. I think he had been Knight of the Garter above fifty years.

The Irish do not grow into better humourt-I know

* Charles Mordaunt, Earl of Peterborough, who, in 1705, took Barcelona, and in the following winter, with only 280 horse and 900 foot, enterprised and accomplished the conquest of Valentia. Walpole, in his Royal and Noble Authors, describes him as having been "gallant as Amadis, and as brave, but a little more expeditious in his journeys; for he is said to have seen more kings and more postilions than any man in Europe." In the latter part of his life he was the intimate friend and companion of Pope

"Know, all the distant din that world can keep
Rolls o'er my Grotto, and but soothes my sleep;
There, my retreat the best companions grace,
Chiefs out of war, and statesmen out of place.
There St. John mingles with my friendly bowl
The feast of reason and the flow of soul;

And HE, whose lightning pierc'd th' Iberian lines,
Now forms my quincunx, and now ranks my vines,
Or tames the Genius of the stubborn plain,
Almost as quickly as he conquer'd Spain."-ED.

In a letter of the 3rd of June to Selwyn, Dr. Warner says, "The increase of secret armed associations throughout Ireland, the non-importation agreement, and the success which attended the intrigues of the American agents in their endeavours to stir up an inflammable and de

nothing that is improved but our climate-so, I hope we shall preserve this part of the island at least.

P.S. Do not expect me to be so assiduous in summer as I have been of late; nay, you may wish I should have no occasion to be so.

LETTER CCCVII.

Strawberry Hill, June 16, 1779.

ALAS! my dear sir, you have been mistaken, and must no more put your trust in the obstinacy of Princes: at least, that of one can surmount that of another. The King of Spain's rescript is arrived and delivered, and the Brest fleet is sailed with both white and red cockades. The declaration is said not to be very injurious; but, after all possible endeavours at pacification, his Catholic Majesty is obliged to take his part, especially as we have made some captures on his subjects. The Ministers were urged even late last night* on the hostility of Spain, but would own nothing. This morning they avow everything; and, to your great surprise probably, the Parliament is to rise tomorrow or next day! As events have not proved the wisdom of measures, one can collect no great confidence from such a step: but I don't pretend to reason on

pressed people, were sufficient to justify the alarm of the ministry and the people at large, and to threaten to add the misfortune of a civil war in Ireland to the hazardous and momentous contests in which England was already engaged with France, Spain, and America."-ED.

In the course of the debate on Mr. Thomas Townshend's motion for an address to the King to defer the prorogation.—ED.

what I do not understand; my business is to tell you facts. In short, the Brest fleet has been sailed many days. The Prince of Beauvau*—if destined for Ireland, we should probably have heard it by this time; if to meet the Spanish fleet, the object might be Gibraltar. †

I shall not boast of having been a better soothsayer than you, when I foretold that the American war would not be of short duration. It is a triste honour to be verified a prophet of woes.

Were I vain of the charac

ter, a Spanish war, added to an American one, were a fine field; but I do not ambition being a Jeremiah, though my countrymen are so like the Jews. Nor does it require inspiration to prophesy, when one has nothing to do but to calculate. Were you here, you would not be alarmed. You would see no panic; you would hear of nothing but diversions. The Ministers affirm the majority of America is with us, and it is credited. Were they to tell us half the Spanish fleet would come over to us, it would be credited too. When it does not, perhaps they will tell us it has.-Well! what is most to be dreaded is the dissipation of our delusion. When the réveil comes, it will be serious indeed!

You see I am not likely to be barren of matter, and you will be sorry that I write oftener than I foresaw. The middle period of our correspondence was the most agreeable. Its early part was the journal of a civil war, and of no glorious one in Flanders. Fifteen years

*He did not go.

The French fleet, consisting of about twenty-eight sail of the line, under the command of M. D'Orvilliers, sailed from Brest on the 4th of June.-ED.

after, I sent you victory upon victory, and conquest upon conquest. For the last five years, my letters have been the records of a mouldering empire. What is now to come I know not: we have, they say, maintained ourselves against France and Spain; true, but with the trifling difference of having America in our scale-now it is in theirs. We had too a Lord Chatham; who does not seem to have been replaced.

I tell you nothing of Parliamentary debates, for I really do not attend to them; especially not to the details of the war, and the conduct of the Generals, who have made a very silly figure. There are far mightier objects in question than speeches and votes, and which I must learn even here, quiet and abstracted as I sit. My consolation is that I have no particular friend responsible for anything that has happened; and, when one's passions are not concerned, an individual of my age must have learnt to look on the great drama of the world with some indifference. My pride, I own, made me pleased when my country was the most splendid in Europe: I did not imagine I was so singular as I find I was, or we should not have run wild after a phantom of absolute power over a country whose liberty was the source of our greatness. A pretty experiment we have made; and, whenever the hour of peace shall arrive, we shall be able to compute what it has cost us not to compass it.

Methinks, if the accounts of all wars were to be stated, it would be worth ambition's while to examine the sum total, and calculate whether the object aimed

at is not ten thousand times too dear. I doubt I must not propose examining the mere cash account. The lives, alas! go for nothing. We have sent fifty thousand men to America, and recruits! How many will ever return? And where are all the children that would have been begotten in six years of and now here is a new account to be opened!

peace? Oh!

These would be called at present the gloomy speculations of a solitary man. Posterity would think there was some sense in them-and yet posterity will perhaps be as foolish on some other point. We condemn the wars of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, and do not conceive what they quarrelled about; yet we, who are at war with France and Spain because we would not be content to let America send us half the wealth of the world in its own way, shall not be deemed very wise hereafter. We not only killed the hen that laid a golden egg every day, but must defend the very shop at home where we sold our eggs.-I have nothing more to say, and three parts of England do not yet think there is a word of sense in what I have said: France and Spain know there is; but I shall not canvass for their approbation.

LETTER CCCVIII.

Strawberry Hill, June 30, 1779.

THIS letter will be of very ancient date when you receive it, and not have one very near it perhaps when it sets out. Your nephew called here two days ago,