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Letters addressed to the Countess of Ossory
Letters addressed to the Countess of Ossory Author:Horace Walpole Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the quality is to go after the opera to the lottery offices, where their ladyships bet with the keepers. You choose any number you please; if it does not come up... more » next day, you pay five guineas; if it does, receive forty, or in proportion to the age of the tirage. The Duchess of Devonshire in one day won nine hundred pounds. General Smith, as the luckiest of all mites, is of the most select parties, and chooses the numeros. LETTER CLXXXIX. Christmas Day, 1780. Though you order me to give you an account of myself, madam, I shall not obey, for I cannot give you a good one; and one is so apt to talk of one's self, and by the courtesy of self-love to think every trifle of importance, that I will boldly be out of order if I please, without being responsible to any one ; no, not even to a friend. We have so many enemies, and subdue them so rapidly, that I did not think it was worth while to notify to your ladyship the new war with Holland. Lord Cornwallis, I suppose, will step over and dispatch it in a parenthesis of six weeks, and still be as likely as ever to conquer America. Who is to burn Amsterdam I have not yet heard. Lord Warwick has already sent me John Thorpe's book, madam, and a most obliging letter. The Ampt- hill is not Houghton-Ampthill, but the individualpalace that stood in your paddock where the cross is, and in which Queen Catherine lay, as royal folk did then, though now they and everybody else only sleep ; and a spacious and goodly mansion it was. There is not the elevation, nor of Kirby Hatton, built by the dancing Chancellor in 1570; but there is the ground plan. I remember wanting to make the last Chancellor Bathurst dance at one of Mons. de Guines' balls. He came thither very drunk, and, as somebody wished to see the Scotch reel, I proposed that my L...« less