“Unless I borrow from my sleep, I can certainly have no time to please myself. I am this minute arrived here, Madam, and being the flower of chivalry, I sacrifice, like a true knight, the moments I steal from my rest to gallantry. Save me, or I shall become a solicitor in Chancery, unless business and fatigue overset my head, and reduce me to my poor nephew’s state. Indeed, I am half hurried out of my senses. Think of me putting queries to lawyers, up to the ears in mortgages, wills, settlements, and contingent remainders. My lawyer is sent away that I may give audience to the Honourable Mr. Manners, the genuine, if not the legitimate son of Lord William. He came civilly yesterday morning to ask me if he might not seize the pictures at Houghton, which he heard were worth threescore thousand pounds, for nine thousand he has lent Lord Orford. The vulture’s throat gaped for them all--what a scene is opened! Houghton will be a rookery of harpies--I doubt there are worse scenes to follow, and black transactions! What occupation chalked out for an end of a life that I had calculated for tranquillity, and which gout and law are to divide between them! “In the midst of this prospect must I keep up the tone of the world, go shepherdising with Macaronies, sit up at loo with my Lady Hertford, be witness to Miss Pelham’s orgies, dine at villas, and give dinners at my own. ’Tis well my spirits and resolution have survived my youth: you have heard how my mornings pass--now for the rest. Consultations of physicians, letters to Lady Orford, sent for to my brother, decent visits to _my_ Court,[55] sup at Lady Powis’s on Wednesday, drink tea with all the fashionable world at Mr. Fitzroy’s farm on Thursday, blown by a north wind there into the house, and whisk back to Lady Hertford’s; this morning to my brother’s to hear of new bills, away to dine at ----, Muswell Hill, with the Beauclerks, and florists and natural historians, Banks and Solanders; return to town, step to ask a friend whether reversions of jointures can be left away, into my chaise and hither. To-morrow come two Frenchmen to dinner--on Monday, a man to sell me two acres immensely dear as a favour,--Philip [his valet], I cannot help it, you must go and put him off; I have not a minute, I must go back to-morrow night to meet the lawyers at my brother’s on Sunday morning. Margaret [his housekeeper] comes in. ‘Sir, Lady Bingham desires you will dine with her at Hampton Court on Tuesday;’ I cannot. ‘Sir, Captain What-d’ye-call’m has sent twice for a ticket to see the house’--Don’t plague me about tickets. ‘Sir, a servant from Isleworth brought this parcel.’ What on earth is in it?--only printed proposals for writing the lives of all British writers, and a letter to tell me I could do it better than anybody, but