her Admiralty to take particular care of the marvellous yacht that bore
Messalina and her fortune. Pray mind that I bestow the latter Empress's
name on the Duchess, only because she married a second husband in the
lifetime of the first. Amongst other benevolences, the Czarina lent her
Grace a courier to despatch to England--I suppose to acquaint Lord
Bristol that he is not a widower. That courier brought a letter from a
friend to Dr. Hunter, with the following anecdote. Her Imperial Majesty
proposed to her brother of China to lay waste a large district that
separates their two empires, lest it should, as it has been on the point
of doing, produce war between them; the two empires being at the two
extremities of the world, not being distance enough to keep the peace.
The ill-bred Tartar sent no answer to so humane a project. On the
contrary, he dispersed a letter to the Russian people, in which he tells
them that a woman--he might have said the Minerva of the French
_literati_--had proposed to him to extirpate all the inhabitants of a
certain region belonging to him, but that he knew better what to do with
his own country: however, he could but wonder that the people of all the
Russias should still submit to be governed by a creature that had
assassinated her husband.--Oh! if she had pulled the Ottoman by the nose
in the midst of Constantinople, as she intended to do, this savage would
have been more civilised. I doubt the same rude monarch is still on the
throne, who would not suffer Prince Czernichew to enter his territories,
when sent to notify her Majesty's _hereditary_ succession to her
husband; but bade him be told, he would not receive an ambassador from a
murderess. Is it not shocking that the law of nations, and the law of
politeness, should not yet have abrogated the laws of justice and
good-sense in a nation reckoned so civilised as the Chinese? What an age
do we live in, if there is still a country where the Crown does not take
away all defects! Good night!

_DEATH OF LORD CHATHAM--THURLOW BECOMES LORD CHANCELLOR._

TO SIR HORACE MANN.

STRAWBERRY HILL, _May_ 31, 1778.

I am forced to look at the dates I keep of my letters, to see what
events I have or have not told you; for at this crisis something happens
every day; though nothing very striking since the death of Lord Chatham,
with which I closed my last. No?--yes, but there has. All England, which
had abandoned him, found out, the moment his eyes were