"I learned some extraordinary things,"--things not from Friedrich
at all: mere dinner-table rumors; about the 16,000 English landing
here ("18,000" he calls them, and farther on, "20,000") with the
other 16,000 PLUS 6,000 of Hanoverian-Hessian sort, expecting
20,000 Dutch to join them,--who perhaps will not? "M. de Neipperg
[Governor of Luxemburg now] is come hither to Brussels; but brings
no Dutch troops with him, as he had hoped,"--Dutch perhaps won't
rise, after all this flogging and hoisting? "Perhaps we may soon
get a useful and glorious Peace, in spite of my Lord Stair, and of
M. van Haren, the Tyrtaeus of the States-General [famed Van Haren,
eyes in a fine Dutch frenzy rolling, whose Cause-of-Liberty verses
let no man inquire after]: Stair prints Memoirs, Van Haren makes
Odes; and with so much prose and so much verse, perhaps their High
and Slow Mightinesses [Excellency Fenelon sleeplessly busy
persuading them, and native Gravitation SLEEPILY ditto] will sit
quiet. God grant it!

"The English want to attack us on our own soil [actually Stair's
plan]; and we cannot pay them in that kind. The match is too
unfair! If we kill the whole 20,000 of them, we merely send 20,000
Heretics to-- What shall I say?--A L'ENFER, and gain nothing;
if they kill us, they even feed at our expense in doing it.
Better have no quarrels except on Locke and Newton! The quarrel I
have on MAHOMET is happily only ridiculous." ... Adieu,
M. le Marquis.

3. TO THE CARDINAL DE FLEURY. "Monseigneur, ... to give your
Eminency, as I am bound, some account of my journey to Aix-la-
Chapelle." Friedrich's guest there; let us hear, let us look.