you will commend me no more: it is very
ruinous; and praise, like other debts, ceases to be due on being paid.
One comfort indeed is, that it is as seldom paid as other debts.

I have been very fortunate lately: I have met with an extreme good print
of M. de Grignan;[1] I am persuaded, very like; and then it has his
_touffe ebourifee_; I don't, indeed, know what that was, but I am sure
it is in the print. None of the critics could ever make out what Livy's
Patavinity is; though they are all confident it is in his writings. I
have heard within these few days what, for your sake, I wish I could
have told you sooner--that there is in Belleisle's suite the Abbe
Perrin, who published Madame Sevigne's letters, and who has the
originals in his hands. How one should have liked to have known him! The
Marshal[2] was privately in London last Friday. He is entertained to-day
at Hampton Court by the Duke of Grafton. Don't you believe it was to
settle the binding the scarlet thread in the window, when the French
shall come in unto the land to possess it? I don't at all wonder at any
shrewd observations the Marshal has made on our situation. The bringing
him here at all--the sending him away now--in short, the whole series of
our conduct convinces me, that we shall soon see as silent a change as
that in "The Rehearsal," of King Usher and King Physician. It may well
be so, when the disposition of the drama is in the hands of the Duke of
Newcastle--those hands that are always groping and sprawling, and
fluttering, and hurrying on the rest of his precipitate person. But
there is no describing him but as M. Courcelle, a French prisoner, did
t'other day: "Je ne scais pas," dit il, "je ne scaurois m'exprimer, mais
il a un certain tatillonage." If one could conceive a dead body hung in
chains, always wanting to be hung somewhere else, one should have a
comparative idea of him.

[Footnote 1: M. de Grignan son-in-law to Mme. de Sevigne, the greater
part of whose letters are to his wife.]

[Footnote 2: The Marechal de Belleisle and his younger brother, the
Comte de Belleisle, were the grandsons of Fouquet, the Finance Minister
treated with such cruelty and injustice by Louis XIV. The Parisians
nicknamed the two brothers "Imagination" and "Common Sense." The Marshal
was joined with the Marshal de Broglie in the disastrous expedition
against Prague in the winter of 1742; when, though they succeeded in
taking and occupying the city for a time, t