lived long enough to learn that the reparation
generally proved a second evil of the same sort, I am content now to
skin over such wounds with amusements, which at least leave no scars. It
is true, amusements do not always amuse when we bid them. I find it so
here; nothing strikes me; everything I do is indifferent to me. I like
the people very well, and their way of life very well; but as neither
were my object, I should not much care if they were any other people, or
it was any other way of life. I am out of England, and my purpose is
answered.

Nothing can be more obliging than the reception I meet with everywhere.
It may not be more sincere (and why should it?) than our cold and bare
civility; but it is better dressed, and looks natural; one asks no
more. I have begun to sup in French houses, and as Lady Hertford has
left Paris to-day, shall increase my intimacies. There are swarms of
English here, but most of them are going, to my great satisfaction. As
the greatest part are very young, they can no more be entertaining to me
than I to them, and it certainly was not my countrymen that I came to
live with. Suppers please me extremely; I love to rise and breakfast
late, and to trifle away the day as I like. There are sights enough to
answer that end, and shops you know are an endless field for me. The
city appears much worse to me than I thought I remembered it. The French
music as shocking as I knew it was. The French stage is fallen off,
though in the only part I have seen Le Kain I admire him extremely. He
is very ugly and ill made, and yet has an heroic dignity which Garrick
wants, and great fire. The Dumenil I have not seen yet, but shall in a
day or two. It is a mortification that I cannot compare her with the
Clairon, who has left the stage. Grandval I saw through a whole play
without suspecting it was he. Alas! four-and-twenty years make strange
havoc with us mortals! You cannot imagine how this struck me! The
Italian comedy, now united with their _opera comique_, is their most
perfect diversion; but alas! harlequin, my dear favourite harlequin, my
passion, makes me more melancholy than cheerful. Instead of laughing, I
sit silently reflecting how everything loses charms when one's own youth
does not lend it gilding! When we are divested of that eagerness and
illusion with which our youth presents objects to us, we are but the
_caput mortuum_ of pleasure.

Grave as these ideas are, they do not unfit me for Fr