his competitor.” This was written on the 5th of December, 1783. Ten days later the India Bill was defeated in the House of Lords; the King at once dismissed the Coalition; and before the end of the year Pitt was installed as head of the Government, a position which he retained for the rest of Walpole’s life. The struggle which the new Ministry had to maintain for several weeks against an adverse majority in the House of Commons is matter of familiar history which needs not here be dwelt upon. The intense excitement which these events created throughout the country is faithfully reflected in Walpole’s correspondence. We find them producing a rupture between him and his correspondent of many years’ standing, the poet Mason, which was not healed till shortly before the deaths of the parties. And in writing to Mann, Walpole several times refers to the general ferment. Thus he says: “Politics have engrossed all conversation, and stifled other events, if any have happened. Indeed our ladies, who used to contribute to enliven correspondence, are become politicians, and, as Lady Townley says, ‘squeeze a little too much lemon into conversation.’ They have been called back a little to their own profession--dress, by a magnificent ball which the Prince of Wales gave two nights ago to near six hundred persons, to which the Amazons of both parties were invited; and not a scratch was given or received.” Again, in announcing the dissolution of Parliament: “All the island will be a scene of riot, and probably of violence. The parties are not separated in gentle mood: there will, they say, be contested elections everywhere: consequently vast expense and animosities.… We have no private news at all. Indeed, politics are all in all. I question whether any woman will have anything to do with a man of a different party. Little girls say, ‘Pray, Miss, of which side are you?’ I heard of one that said, ‘Mama and I cannot get Papa over to our side!’… To the present drama, Elections, I shall totally shut my ears. I hated elections forty years ago; and, when I went to White’s, preferred a conversation on Newmarket to one on elections: for the language of the former I did not understand, and, consequently, did not listen to; the other, being uttered in common phrase, made me attend, whether I would or not. When such subjects are on the tapis, they make me a very insipid correspondent. One cannot talk of what one does not care about; and it would be jargon to you, if I did: however, do not imagine but I allow a sufficient quantity of dulness to my time of life. I have kept up a correspondence with you with tolerable spirit for three-and-forty years together, without our once meeting. Can you wonder that my pen is worn to the stump? You see it does not abandon you; nor, though conscious of its own decay, endeavour to veil it by silence. The Archbishop of Gil Blas has long been a lesson to me to watch over my own ruins; but I do not extend that jealousy of vanity