just when dinner was setting on, and pretended I was engaged, because I saw some fellows I did not know: and went to sir Matthew Dudley's, where I had the same inconvenience, but he would not let me go; otherwise I would have gone home, and sent for a slice of mutton and a pot of ale, rather than dine with persons unknown, as bad for aught I know, as your deans, parsons, and curates. Bad slabby weather to day. Now methinks I write at ease, when I have no letter of MD's to answer. But I mistook, and have got the large paper. The queen is laid up with the gout at Hampton court; she is now seldom without it any long time together; I fear it will wear her out in a very few years. I plainly find I have less twitchings about my toes since these ministers are sick and out of town, and that I don't dine with them. I would compound for a light easy gout to be perfectly well in my head. Pray walk when the frost comes, young ladies, go a frost-biting. It comes into my head, that from the very time you first went to Ireland I have been always plying you to walk and read. The young fellows here have begun a kind of fashion, to walk, and many of them have got swingeing strong shoes on purpose; it has got as far as several young lords; if it hold, it would be a very good thing. Lady Lucy and I are fallen out: she rails at me, and I have left visiting her.
5. MD was very troublesome to me last night in my sleep; I was a dreamed, methought, that Stella was here: I asked her after Dingley, and she said, she had left her in Ireland, because she designed her stay to be short, and such stuff. Monsieur Pontchartrain, the secretary of state in France, and monsieur Fontenelle, the secretary of the Royal Academy
