is a proprietor of shares, and a long lunged orator in the
meetings. I hear he has prophesied our incapacity,--'a foregone
conclusion,' whereof I hope to give him signal proofs before we
are done.

"Will you give us an opera? No, I'll be sworn; but I wish you
would.

"To go on with the poetical world, Walter Scott has gone back to
Scotland. Murray, the bookseller, has been cruelly cudgelled of
misbegotten knaves, 'in Kendal green,' at Newington Butts, in his
way home from a purlieu dinner,--and robbed--would you believe
it?--of three or four bonds of forty pound a piece, and a seal-ring
of his grandfather's, worth a million! This is his version,--but
others opine that D'Israeli, with whom he dined, knocked him down
with his last publication, 'The Quarrels of Authors,' in a dispute
about copyright. Be that as it may, the newspapers have teemed with
his 'injuria formae,' and he has been embrocated, and invisible to
all but the apothecary ever since.

"Lady B. is better than three months advanced in her progress
towards maternity, and, we hope, likely to go well through with it.
We have been very little out this season, as I wish to keep her
quiet in her present situation. Her father and mother have changed
their names to Noel, in compliance with Lord Wentworth's will, and
in complaisance to the property bequeathed by him.

"I hear that you have been gloriously received by the Irish,--and
so you ought. But don't let them kill you with claret and kindness
at the national dinner in your honour, which, I hear and hope, is
in contemplation. If you will tell me the day, I'll get drunk
myself on this side of the water, and waft you an applauding hiccup
over the Channel.

"Of politics, we have nothing but the yell for war; and C * * h is
preparing his head for the pike, on which we shall see it carried
before he has done. The loan has made every body sulky. I hear
often from Paris, but in direct contradiction to the home
statements of our hirelings. Of domestic doings, there has been
nothing since Lady D * *. Not a divorce stirring,--but a good many
in embryo, in the shape of marriages.

"I enclose you an epistle received this morning from I know not
whom; but I think it will amuse you. The writer must be a rare
fellow.[83]

"P