Chapter 154

Arlington Street, Saturday evening. (May 28, 1763.] (page 223)

No, indeed, I cannot consent to your being a dirty Philander.(293) Pink and white, and white and pink and both as greasy as if you had gnawed a leg of a fowl on the stairs of the Haymarket with a bunter from the Cardigan's Head! For Heaven's sake don't produce a tight rose-coloured thigh, unless you intend to prevent my Lord Bute's return from Harrowgate. Write, the moment you receive this, to your tailor to get you a sober purple domino as I have done, and it will make you a couple of summer-waistcoats.

In the next place, have your ideas a little more correct about us of times past. We did not furnish ou cottages with chairs of ten guineas apiece. Ebony for a farmhouse!(294) So, two hundred years hence some man of taste will build a hamlet in the style of George the Third, and beg his cousin Tom Hearne to get him some chairs for it of mahogany gilt, and covered with blue damask. Adieu! I have not a minute's time more.

(293) At the masquerade given by the Duke of Richmond on the 6th of June at his house in Privy-garden.

(294) Mr. Conway was at this time fitting up a little building at Park-place, called the Cottage, for which he had consulted Mr. Walpole on the propriety of ebony chairs.