esome in filth, for if it were otherwise, I cannot account
for our being alive. Five hundred bodies, in a state of coacervation,
without even a preference for cleanliness, "think of that Master Brook."
All the forenoon the court is a receptacle for cabbage leaves, fish
scales, leeks, &c. &c.--and as a French chambermaid usually prefers the
direct road to circumambulation, the refuse of the kitchen is then washed
away by plentiful inundations from the dressing-room--the passages are
blockaded by foul plates, fragments, and bones; to which if you add the
smell exhaling from hoarded apples and gruyere cheese, you may form some
notion of the sufferings of those whose olfactory nerves are not robust.
Yet this is not all--nearly every female in the house, except myself, is
accompanied even here by her lap-dog, who sleeps in her room, and, not
unfrequently, on her bed; and these Lesbias and Lindamiras increase the
insalubrity of the air, and colonize one's stockings by sending forth
daily emigrations of fleas. For my own part, a few close November days
will make me as captious and splenetic as Matthew Bramble himself.
Nothing keeps me in tolerable good humour at present, but a clear frosty
morning, or a high wind.

Oct. 27.

I thought, when I wrote the above, that the house was really so full as
to be incapable of containing more; but I did not do justice to the
talents of our keeper. The last two nights have brought us an addition
of several waggon loads of nuns, farmers, shopkeepers, &c. from the
neighbouring towns, which he has still contrived to lodge, though much in
the way that he would pack goods in bales. Should another convoy arrive,
it is certain that we must sleep perpendicularly, for even now, when the
beds are all arranged and occupied for the night, no one can make a
diagonal movement without disturbing his neighbour.--This very sociable
manner of sleeping is very far, I assure you, from promoting the harmony
of the day; and I am frequently witness to the reproaches and
recriminations occasioned by nocturnal misdemeanours. Sometimes the
lap-dog of one dowager is accused of hostilities against that of
another, and thereby producing a general chorus of the rest--then a
four-footed favourite strays from the bed of his mistress, and takes
possession of a General's uniform--and there are female somnambules, who
alarm the modesty of a pair of Bishops, and suspended officers, that,
like Richard, warring in t