James's Street. It promises to be
the finest house in town, and, although not covering so much ground as
Whitehall, is judged far superior to that inchoate mass in its fine
proportions and the perfect symmetry of its saloons and galleries. There is
a garden a-making, projected by Mr. Evelyn, a great authority on trees and
gardens. A crowd of fine company had assembled to see the newly finished
hall and dining parlour, among them a fussy person, who came in attendance
upon my Lord Sandwich, and who was more voluble than became his quality as
a clerk in the Navy Office. He was periwigged and dressed as fine as his
master, and, on my being civil to him, talked much of himself and of divers
taverns in the city where the dinners were either vastly good or vastly
ill. I told him that as I never dined at a tavern the subject was
altogether beyond the scope of my intelligence, at which Sandwich and
Fareham laughed, and my pertinacious gentleman blushed as red as the heels
of his shoes. I am told the creature has a pretty taste in music, and is
the son of a tailor, but professes a genteel ancestry, and occasionally
pushes into the best company.
"Shall I describe to you one of my latest conquests, sweetheart? 'Tis
a boy--an actual beardless boy of eighteen summers; but such a boy! So
beautiful, so insolent, with an impudence that can confront Lord Clarendon
himself, the gravest of noblemen, who, with the sole exception of my Lord
Southampton, is the one man who has never crossed Mrs.
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