letters addressed to Shelburne depict the hermit of Kingsgate as drawn by himself:
Fox to Shelburne.
August 16th.
My dear Lord,—I won't thank you for the Honour of your Letter, but for what I value much more, the pleasure and satisfaction of finding myself remember'd by you in a place where I am delightfully forgetting myself and thought myself forgot by everybody. Lady Holland thanks you, and says it is indeed very pleasant in this quiet unmolested place, to think of the hurry and crowds she is not in. But so very many love a crowd, that she says you must impute to that alone, and not to adulation that you see so many at Court on every occasion. I fancy she is in the right. Charles has not yet found out what you want him to show me in Rousseau. For my own part, sea air gives me Appetite, Sleep, and Spirits; I am very happy, and continually amused, and with trifles that can lead to nothing sad and serious. Forty years hence may your Lordship be even as I now am. I have given the precedence, as indeed I do the preference, to domestic affairs.
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I don't know when you saw Lord Bute, but should it have been the 14th; I fear his Lordship must have been mistaken (though so sure) that a Messenger would come that night—I hope he is not in his other certainty, of Peace. And yet, as far as it turns on Monsieur de Grimaldi, what hopes are there from one who is an utter enemy to peace and to Choiseul? Are you so sure of Havannah? I am glad if you are, but I grieve to hear of difficultys that may arise from friends. These are not only the most grating, but the most fatal, too, of all difficultys; upon the whole I fear there must be an answer, and a good one from Spain to France before France will send one to England that will be satisfactory. However the firmer and the more sanguine Lord Bute is, the better.
