ires of a night (ay, & a day too) several times even in
June: but don't go & take advantage of this, for it was the most
untoward year that ever I remember.

Your Friend Rousseau (I doubt) grows tired of M^r Davenport and
Derbyshire. He has picked a quarrel with David Hume & writes him letters
of 14 pages Folio upbraiding him of all his _noirceurs_. Take one only
as a specimen, he says, that at Calais they chanced to sleep in the same
room together, & that he overheard David talking in his sleep, and
saying, _Ah! Je le tiens, ce Jean-Jacques la._ In short (I fear) for
want of persecution & admiration (for these are real complaints) he will
go back to the Continent.

What shall I say to you about the Ministry? I am as angry as a
Common-council Man of London about my L^d Chatham: but a little more
patient, & will hold my tongue till the end of the year. In the mean
time I do mutter in secret & to you, that to quit the house of Commons,
his natural strength; to sap his own popularity & grandeur (which no one
but himself could have done) by assuming a foolish title; & to hope that
he could win by it and attach to him a Court, that hate him, & will
dismiss him, as soon as ever they dare, was the weakest thing, that ever
was done by so great a Man. Had it not been for this, I should have
rejoiced at the breach between him & L^d Temple, & at the union between
him & the D: of Grafton & M^r Conway: but patience! we shall see!
St:[108] perhaps is in the country (for he hoped for a month's leave of
absence) and if you see him, you will learn more than I can tell you.

Mason is at Aston. He is no longer so anxious about his wife's health,
as he was, tho' I find she still has a cough, & moreover I find she is
not with child: but he made such a bragging, how could one choose but
believe him.

When I was in town, I mark'd in my pocket-book the utmost limits &
divisions of the two columns in your Thermometer, and asked Mr. Ayscough
the Instrument-Maker on Ludgate Hill, what scales they were. He
immediately assured me, that one was Fahrenheit's, & shew'd me one
exactly so divided. The other he took for Reaumur's, but, as he said
there were different scales of his contrivance, he could not exactly
tell, w^ch of them it was. Your Brother told me, you wanted to know,
who wrote Duke Wharton's life in the Biography: I think, it is chiefly
borrowed from a silly book enough call'd _Memoirs of that Duke_: but who
put it together there, no o