I shall relate another very extraordinary anecdote, which will not be mentioned improperly in this place, though I do not know the precise time in which it happened. The Princess Dowager dreamed that she was in the palace of Saxe Gotha: the window was open, and the moon, level to it, shook with a tremulous motion before her eyes, to her great disquiet. She bade Lord Bute try to fix it. Extending his arms to stop its motion, it burst in his hand into ten thousand fiery splinters; on which, turning to the Princess, he said reproachfully, “See, Madam, to what you have brought me!” This dream was the Princess so weak as to repeat the next morning to some of her women; one of whom, I guess the wife of Velters Cornwall, told it to Lady Suffolk,[365] who trusted it to me. She did not name her authority, but said she heard it from one of the Princess’s bedchamber; and Mrs. Cornwall I know was the one with whom Lady Suffolk was the most connected. I repeat this vision, not as prophetic or divine, but as a strong picture of what passed in the mind on which it painted itself. Before I close this account of the negotiation, I ought to assign the reason why Mr. Pitt had so slightingly or offensively mentioned Mr. Legge, the second in Opposition, and long the second to Mr. Pitt himself. With all his abilities, Legge was of a creeping underhand nature, and aspired to the lion’s place by the manœuvre of the mole. While yet connected with Mr. Pitt, and before he had lost favour at Leicester House,[366] he had, before the late King’s death, brought about a secret interview with Newcastle; but with so much circumspection, that meeting him at Lord Duplin’s, Legge had insisted the conversation should pass without candles and in the dark. The Duke was charmed with the mystery, and with the pleasure of betraying it to Mr. Pitt. Mr. Elliot, as he told me himself, discovered it too, and acquainted Lord Bute--and thus with both was Legge ruined. I now return to the common occurrences of the year. In one point the Favourite and his rivals agreed; that is, in the destruction of Wilkes. The rashness and despotic conduct of the triumvirate had made them parties in the same cause; they pursuing him with what they called Law, and the Scotch without attention to any law. Johnstone, one of Lord Bute’s American governors,[367] had the same view with Forbes, but took a looser plan. Having been reflected on in a North Briton, I think then no longer written by Wilkes, he challenged the author, whoever it was; and, to be sure of provoking at least one person, threw out in his challenge printed in the newspapers, severe sarcasms on Lord Temple’s want of spirit.