Next to the above, Walpole’s liveliest letters about this date were written to Lady Ossory. Sometimes he has to lament the want of news: “Pray, Madam, where is the difference between London and the country, when everybody is in the country and nobody in town? The houses do not marry, intrigue, talk politics, game, or fling themselves out of window. The streets do not all run to the Alley, nor the squares mortgage themselves over head and ears. The play-houses do not pull themselves down; and all summer long, when nobody gets about them, they behave soberly and decently as any Christian in the parish of Marylebone. The English of this preface is that I have not the Israelitish art of making bricks without straw. I cannot invent news when nobody commits it.” He has nothing better to tell than an anecdote of Goldsmith, who died a few months later, and Garrick: “I dined and passed Saturday at Beauclerk’s, with the Edgecombes, the Garricks, and Dr. Goldsmith, and was most thoroughly tired, as I knew I should be, I who hate the playing off a butt. Goldsmith is a fool, the more wearying for having some sense. It was the night of a new comedy, called ‘The School for Wives,’[60] which was exceedingly applauded, and which Charles Fox says is execrable. Garrick has at least the chief hand in it. I never saw anybody in a greater fidget, nor more vain when he returned, for he went to the play-house at half-an-hour after five, and we sat waiting for him till ten, when he was to act a speech in ‘Cato’ with Goldsmith! that is, the latter sat in t’other’s lap, covered with a cloak, and while Goldsmith spoke, Garrick’s arms that embraced him, made foolish actions. How could one laugh when one had expected this for four hours?” On Christmas night 1773, he writes: “This has been a very barren half-year. The next, I hope, will reinstate my letters in their proper character of newspapers.” The event, however, belied his hopes. In June, 1774, he writes to his Countess: