The concluding lines of the above extract refer to the writer’s recent retirement from the House of Commons. In the spring of the preceding year, Walpole had announced that he should not again ask the suffrages of the Lynn burgesses, stating as his reasons the declining state of his health and his wish to withdraw from all public business; and though his health had improved in the interval, the General Election of 1768 found him fixed in his decision. Whatever may have been the real motives of his conduct, there is no indication in his Letters that he ever regretted the course he had taken. In June, 1769, he writes from Strawberry Hill: “I am come hither for two months, very busy with finishing my round tower, which has stood still these five years, and with an enchanting new cottage that I have built, and other little works. In August, I shall go to Paris for six weeks. In short, I am delighted with having bid adieu to Parliament and politics, and with doing nothing but what I like all the year round.” But the season was again rainy. A few days later, we have a letter to Cole, who was then settled at Waterbeach, near Cambridge: “Strawberry Hill, Monday, June 26, 1769. “Oh! yes, yes, I shall like Thursday or Friday, 6th or 7th, exceedingly; I shall like your staying with me two days exceedinglier; and longer exceedingliest: and I will carry you back to Cambridge on our pilgrimage to Ely. But I should not at all like to be catched in the glories of an installation,[44] and find myself a doctor, before I knew where I was. It will be much more agreeable to find the whole _caput_ asleep, digesting turtle, dreaming of bishoprics, and humming old catches of Anacreon, and scraps of Corelli. I wish Mr. Gray may not be set out for the north; which is rather the case than setting out for the summer. We have no summers, I think, but what we raise, like pine-apples, by fire. My hay is an absolute _water-souchy_, and teaches me how to feel for you. You are quite in the right to sell your fief in Marshland. I should be glad if you would take one step more, and quit Marshland. We live, at least, on terra firma in this part of the world, and can saunter out without stilts. _Item_, we do not wade into pools, and call it going upon the water, and get sore throats. I trust yours is better; but I recollect this is not the first you have complained of. Pray be not incorrigible, but come to shore.” At the end of August he is in Paris with Madame du Deffand. “My dear old woman,” he writes, “is in better health than when I left her, and her spirits so increased, that I tell her she will go mad with age. When they ask her how old she is, she answers, ‘J’ai soixante et mille ans.’” In a letter written to George Montagu a week afterwards, we have a description of this true Frenchwoman: