“Most elections are over; and, if they were not, neither you nor I care about such details. I have no notion of filling one’s head with circumstances of which, in six weeks, one is to discharge it for ever. Indeed, it is well that I live little in the world, or I should be obliged to provide myself with that viaticum for common conversation. Our ladies are grown such vehement politicians, that no other topic is admissible; nay, I do not know whether _you_ must not learn our politics for the _conversationi_ at Florence,--at least, if Paris gives the _ton_ to Italy, as it used to do. There are as warm parties for Mr. Fox or Mr. Pitt at Versailles and Amsterdam as in Westminster. At the first, I suppose, they exhale in epigrams; are expressed at the second by case-knives; at the last they vent themselves in deluges of satiric prints,[95] though with no more wit than there is in a case-knife. I was told last night that our engraved pasquinades for this winter, at twelvepence or sixpence a-piece, would cost six or seven pounds.” In the result, Fox was returned, but Conway lost his seat. Walpole congratulates the latter on his retirement from public life: “Berkeley Square, Wednesday, May 5, 1784. “Your cherries, for aught I know, may, like Mr. Pitt, be half ripe before others are in blossom; but at Twickenham, I am sure, I could find dates and pomegranates on the quickset hedges, as soon as a cherry in swaddling-clothes on my walls. The very leaves on the horse-chesnuts are little things, that cry and are afraid of the north wind, and cling to the bough as if _old poker_ was coming to take them away. For my part, I have seen nothing like spring but a chimney-sweeper’s garland; and yet I have been three days in the country--and the consequence was, that I was glad to come back to town.