e_
so like him? Do you know that I am persuaded, now he is parted, that he
will forget he is married, and propose himself in form to some woman or
other.

[Footnote 1: Mrs. Montagu was the foundress of "The Blue-stocking Club."
She was the authoress of three "Dialogues of the Dead," to which Walpole
is alluding here, and which she published with some others by Lord
Lyttelton.]

When do you come? if it is not soon, you will find a new town. I stared
to-day at Piccadilly like a country squire; there are twenty new stone
houses: at first I concluded that all the grooms, that used to live
there, had got estates, and built palaces. One young gentleman, who was
getting an estate, but was so indiscreet as to step out of his way to
rob a comrade, is convicted, and to be transported; in short, one of the
waiters at Arthur's. George Selwyn says, "What a horrid idea he will
give of us to the people in Newgate!"

I was still more surprised t'other day, than at seeing Piccadilly, by
receiving a letter from the north of Ireland from a clergyman, with
violent encomiums on my "Catalogue of Noble Authors"--and this when I
thought it quite forgot. It puts me in mind of the queen[1] that sunk at
Charing Cross and rose at Queenhithe.

[Footnote 1: Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., who erected the cross at
Charing, and others at the different places where her body had stopped
on the way from the North to Westminster.]

Mr. Chute has got his commission to inquire about your Cutts, but he
thinks the lady is not your grandmother. You are very ungenerous to
hoard tales from me of your ancestry: what relation have I spared? If
your grandfathers were knaves, will your bottling up their bad blood
mend it? Do you only take a cup of it now and then by yourself, and then
come down to your parson, and boast of it, as if it was pure old
metheglin? I sat last night with the Mater Gracchorum--oh! 'tis a Mater
Jagorum; if her descendants taste any of her black blood, they surely
will make as wry faces at it as the servant in Don John does when the
ghost decants a corpse. Good night! I am just returning to Strawberry,
to husband my two last days and to avoid all the pomp of the birthday.
Oh! I had forgot, there is a Miss Wynne coming forth, that is to be
handsomer than my Lady Coventry; but I have known one threatened with
such every summer for these seven years, and they are always addled by
winter!

_HE LIVES AMONGST ROYALTY--COMMOTIONS IN IREL