GEORGE, PRINCE OF WALES, TO VISCOUNT COBHAM.

Leicester House, April 26, 1750.

MY LORD,—I am obliged to you for your affectionate expressions of concern for my misfortune in losing the best of fathers.

Your attachment to me gives me great pleasure; and I am, with great regard,

GEORGE P.

MR. JAMES GRENVILLE TO VISCOUNT COBHAM.

Paultons, July 13, 1752.

It was not fraternal fondness nor any such low motive that excited my epistolary ardour in writing to you from London, but since the purest actions of my life are fated to undergo the worst interpretations that friend or enemy can put upon them, I shall submit to my hard fortune, and persist in being what my new acquaintance Martinelli calls himself a malheureux honnête homme. I wish it was in my power to give you satisfaction, in making an ample description of the circumstances which attended the late fire at Lincoln's Inn 2. As Virgil, Tasso, Dante, and Ovid in his conflagration of the world, had succeeded with so much general applause in those animated descriptions of fire, I chose to leave untouched a part of poetry in which I despaired of beating my rivals, and I shall still continue in the

1 Afterwards King George the Third. Frederick, Prince of Wales, died on the 20th of March.

2 Numbers 10 and 11, in Lincoln's Inn New Square. The fire happened on the 27th of June, and broke out in the chambers of Mr. Wilbraham, about one in the morning.

same modest diffidence of my own force: unless you insist upon my taking down the lyre and giving you a specimen of my genius.

I must indeed confess that I ought to have been more exact in what relates to your deeds. Not a syllable of any other paper belonging to you was affected by those flames than what perished in the counterpart of your marriage settlement.

Perhaps it would have been better fortune to you if they too had suffered, as the destruction of deeds by such fires always serves to make good the titles of those estates, which the subsistence of them frequently invalidates. There was an Act of Parliament for making good the deeds that perished in the Temple fire. There will be one next sessions for those which were destroyed in this. If I was too inaccurate in the cir cumstances of a calamity which affected you, perhaps you have been as little accurate in one that may affect me. You talk of leaving Stowe and going into Northamptonshire, but not one word about the time when, which, nevertheless, is a circumstance which it much imports me to know; and I do humbly implore your goodness to let me be fully apprized of that circumstance, forthwith the whirl of my motions being to depend much thereupon.

I suppose you know with what danger and difficulty Mr. Yorke' escaped from the fire.

J. G.

1 Mr. Charles Yorke, second son of the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, was the principal sufferer in this calamity. He not only very narrowly escaped with his life, but the whole of his library of books, manuscripts, and papers, were entirely destroyed, including the valuable state papers of his great uncle, Lord Somers, which having recently come into possession of the Hardwicke family, had been deposited in Mr. Yorke's chambers. Lord Hardwicke has given an animated description of the VOL. I.

H

MRS. FORTESCUE TO MR. GRENVILLE.

Ebrington, October 18, 1752.

SIR,-I should have acknowledged the receipt of your letter sooner had not the purport of it' for some time absolutely incapacitated me from setting about anything.

I had indeed lived with my dear Lady Temple for a long series of time in an uninterrupted course of friendship, a happiness few enjoy, as there are but very few that are fashioned with those lasting materials that are requisite to constitute a true friend: she was possessed of every quality that could possibly make her a most valuable treasure to her friends, but this is a subject I cannot long dwell on, tears fall so fast that I can see no light. I condole with you all, and shall as long as I live love you all, and consequently interest myself in whatever relates to the children of my dear Lady Temple, whose virtues I shall not take upon me to enumerate to you, but give me leave to indulge in the mention of what among other beauties of the mind I have often admired in her, viz., that she had joined to a mest masculine understanding all the compassionate, tender, gentle softness of her own sex, without any of those trifling opiniâtreties about peccadillos which are so frequently seen amongst the generality of our sex; but I ought to consider who I am writing to, and that in dwelling on the value of what we have lost, I may make wounds still green bleed afresh: I will therefore only fire, in a letter to the Duke of Newcastle, which is printed in Harris's Life of Lord Hardwicke, vol. ii. p. 466. Among the title deeds lost were all those belonging to Lord Leigh's estate.

2 The announcement of the death of his mother, the Countess Temple, which happened on the 7th of October.

thank you for your goodness in preventing my abrupt hearing of the melancholy news of my dear friend's death, for this I shall always acknowledge as a great mark of your good nature and feeling disposition.

I heartily wish you and your amiable lady a long course of health and happiness, and am,

Sir, &c., &c.

LU. FORTESCUE.

My kind compliments wait on Lady Esther, and Lord and Lady Temple.

MR. PITT TO MR. GRENVILLE.

Bath, November 16, 1752.

DEAR SIR,-I wish extremely that it had been in my power to be the bearer myself of a thousand very sincere thanks for your obliging invitation to Wotton, but I find my health, though very much mended, stands in need of as long a course of these waters as I can take, before necessary business of office will call me to town; which leaves me no time for the pleasure of waiting on you, at Wotton the dry, whose paths of pleasantness I should be happy to tread. Don't imagine that I intend, by the epithet dry, to be flippant upon the cleanness of your walks; having experienced the merits of the soil in the autumnal season oftentimes, to my great satisfaction but à propos of clay, J. Pitt', that great master, (together with his journeyman Hoare',) lives in clay up to the elbows; and I think with great success:

1 See ante, page 66, note.

the

2 A sculptor at Bath, brother of Hoare the painter. He was now employed upon a marble monument to the memory of Captain Thomas Grenville.

model of the figure is almost done, and promises to be a very good one. The monumental part of the design, I find, upon examination, not to be so contracted in depth, as to make any saving in solid marble; on the contrary, there will be more contents of marble. This we have gone over very minutely; though this at first hearing must appear a little extraordinary, it will soon be explained by one consideration, which is this: the two feet reduced of the depth, are saved in that part which would have been let into the wall: by this means the profile of the monument, projecting forward from the line of the church wall will be full as deep as it would have been in the other design; and no light being left between the columns and the back of the edifice, the profile comes to take up more marble, by being made solid.

Perhaps I am about as clear as the Doctor in Molière, tout cela fait, que votre fille est muette: but when it is properly explained to you, you will be satisfied as we are, that the thing is so. The sum of our calculations therefore is that the trophies being restored according to your desire, the other savings in the work may stand against the increased quantity of marble; and that the extraordinary consumption of time taken up in modelling, and dancing after my friend Jack, being brought into consideration, Mr. Hoare's proposal of no abatement is not unreasonable. I thought I owed it to Hoare, to say this after having expressed another opinion in a former letter to you.

I beg my humblest compliments to Lady Hester and Mrs. Grenville. W. PITT.