I have often desired, but in vain, the favor of being admitted into your
private apartment at, Hamburg, and of being informed of your private life
there. Your mornings, I hope and believe, are employed in business; but
give me an account of the remainder of the day, which I suppose is, and
ought to be, appropriated to amusements and pleasures. In what houses are
you domestic? Who are so in yours? In short, let me in, and do not be
denied to me.

Here I am, as usual, seeing few people, and hearing fewer; drinking the
waters regularly to a minute, and am something the better for them. I
read a great deal, and vary occasionally my dead company. I converse with
grave folios in the morning, while my head is clearest and my attention
strongest: I take up less severe quartos after dinner; and at night I
choose the mixed company and amusing chit-chat of octavos and duodecimos.
'Ye tire parti de tout ce gue je puis'; that is my philosophy; and I
mitigate, as much as I can, my physical ills by diverting my attention to
other objects.

Here is a report that Admiral Holborne's fleet is destroyed, in a manner,
by a storm: I hope it is not true, in the full extent of the report; but
I believe it has suffered. This would fill up the measure of our
misfortunes. Adieu.

LETTER CCXIII

BATH, November 20, 1757

MY DEAR FRIEND: I write to you now, because I love to write to you; and
hope that my letters are welcome to you; for otherwise I have very little
to inform you of. The King of Prussia's late victory you are better
informed, of than we are here. It has given infinite joy to the
unthinking public, who are not aware that it comes too late in the year
and too late in the war, to be attended with any very great consequences.
There are six or seven thousand of the human species less than there were
a month ago, and that seems to me to be all. However, I am glad of it,
upon account of the pleasure and the glory which it gives the King of
Prussia, to whom I wish well as a man, more than as a king. And surely he
is so great a man, that had he lived seventeen or eighteen hundred years
ago, and his life been transmitted to us in a language that we could not
very well understand--I mean either Greek or Latin--we should have talked
of him as we do now of your Alexanders, your Caesars, and others; with
whom, I believe, we have but a very slight acquaintance. 'Au reste', I do
not see that his affairs are much mended by this victory.