sty and pretty Daughter-in-law (the latter a clever and graceful
creature, Daughter of the late unfortunate Kaiser, and a distinguished
Correspondent of Friedrich's) are to be regarded as mere poisoned wind.
[See--Hanbury's Works,--ii. 209-240.] That "Polish Majesty gets into his
dressing-gown at two in the afternoon" (inaccessible thenceforth, poor
lazy creature), one most readily believes; but there, or pretty much
there, one's belief has to stop. The stories, in WALPOLE, on the King of
Prussia, have a grain of fact in them, twisted into huge irrecognizable
caricature in the Williams optic-machinery. Much else one can discern
to be, in essence, false altogether. Friedrich, who could not stand that
intriguing, spying, shrewish, unfriendly kind of fellow at his Court,
applied to England in not many months hence, and got Williams sent away:
["22d January, 1751" (MS. LIST in State-Paper Office).] on to Russia, or
I forget whither;--which did not mend the Hanbury optical-machinery on
that side. The dull, tobacco-smoking Saxon-Polish Majesty, about whom he
idly retails so many scandals, had never done him any offence.

On the whole, if anybody wanted a swim in the slop-pails of that extinct
generation, Hanbury, could he find an Editor to make him legible, might
be printed. For he really was deep in that slop-pail or extinct-scandal
department, and had heard a great many things. Apart from that, in
almost any other department,--except in so far as he seems to DATE
rather carefully,--I could not recommend him. The Letters and Excerpts
given in Walpole are definable as one pennyworth of bread,--much ruined
by such immersion, but very harmless otherwise, could you pick it
out and clean it,--to twenty gallons of Hanbury sherris-sack, or
chamber-slop. I have found nothing that seems to be, in all points,
true or probable, but this; worth cutting out, and rendering legible, on
other accounts. Hanbury LOQUITUR (in condensed form):

"In the summer of last year, 1749, there was, somewhere in Mahren, a
great Austrian Muster or Review;" all the more interesting, as it was
believed, or known, that the Prussian methods and manoeuvres were now to
be the rule for Austria. Not much of a Review otherwise, this of 1749;
Empress-Queen and Husband not personally there, as in coming Years they
are wont to be; that high Lady being ardent to reform her Army, root and
branch, according to the Prussian model,--more praise to her. [--Maria
Theresiens