ews of Lord Cornwallis's surrender, said, from Racine's
"Mithridate" I think:--

Mes derniers regards out vu fuir les Romains.

How Lord Chatham will frown when they meet! for, since I began my
letter, the papers say that Maurepas is dead. The Duc de Nivernois, it
is said, is likely to succeed him as Minister; which is probable, as
they were brothers-in-law and friends, and the one would naturally
recommend the other. Perhaps, not for long, as the Queen's influence
gains ground.

[Footnote 1: The capitulation of Burgoyne at Saratoga has been mentioned
in a previous letter; and in October, 1781, Lord Cornwallis, whose army
was reduced to seven thousand men, was induced to surrender to
Washington, who, with eighteen thousand, had blockaded him at a village
called Yorktown; and it was the news of this disaster which at last
compelled the King to consent to relinquish the war.]

[Footnote 2: "_Forty millions._" Burke, in one of his speeches, asserted
the expense to have been L70,000,000, "besides one hundred thousand
men."]

The warmth in the House of Commons is prodigiously rekindled; but Lord
Cornwallis's fate has cost the Administration no ground _there_. The
names of most _eclat_ in the Opposition are two names to which those
walls have been much accustomed at the same period--CHARLES FOX and
WILLIAM PITT, second son of Lord Chatham.[1] Eloquence is the only one
of our brilliant qualities that does not seem to have degenerated
rapidly--but I shall leave debates to your nephew, now an ear-witness: I
could only re-echo newspapers. Is it not another odd coincidence of
events, that while the father Laurens is prisoner to Lord Cornwallis as
Constable of the Tower, the son Laurens signed the capitulation by which
Lord Cornwallis became prisoner? It is said too, I don't know if truly,
that this capitulation and that of Saratoga were signed on the same
anniversary. These are certainly the speculations of an idle man, and
the more trifling when one considers the moment. But alas! what would
_my_ most grave speculations avail? From the hour that fatal egg, the
Stamp Act, was laid, I disliked it and all the vipers hatched from it. I
now hear many curse it, who fed the vermin with poisonous weeds. Yet the
guilty and the innocent rue it equally hitherto! I would not answer for
what is to come! Seven years of miscarriages may sour the sweetest
tempers, and the most sweetened. Oh! where is the Dove with the
olive-branch? Lo