[273] Ib. 3. 255.
[274] Her prosaic sister-in-law, whom friends called ‘Body,’ as they called Vesey ‘Mind.’
[275] Letters to Mrs. Montagu 1. 358.
[276] See Melville’s Life and Letters of Sterne 2. 67 ff.
[277] Life of Mrs. Delany 5. 307. Gibbon wrote of Raynal (Letters 2. 75; 30 September 1783): ‘His conversation which might be very agreeable, is intolerably loud, peremptory, and insolent; and you could imagine that he alone was the Monarch and legislator of the World.’ Walpole, who met him at Baron d’Holbach’s, was so bored by his questions that he pretended to be deaf. ‘After dinner he found I was not, and never forgave me.’ Three years later, however, he dined with Walpole at Strawberry Hill: ‘The Abbé Raynal not only looked at nothing himself, but kept talking to the Ambassador the whole time, and would not let him see anything neither. There never was such an impertinent and tiresome old gossip. He said to one of the Frenchmen, we ought to come abroad to make us love our own country. This was before Mr. Churchill, who replied very properly, “Yes we had some Esquimaux here lately, and they liked nothing because they could get no train-oil for breakfast.”’ Letters 9. 92; 12 November 1774, and 10. 62; 15 June 1777.
[278] Posthumous Works 1. 174. ‘In the hour and half I was in his company, he uttered as much as would have made him an agreeable companion for a week, had he allotted time for answers.’
[279] Series of Letters 4. 113; cf. 3. 228 and 4. 108. It would appear that Mrs. Montagu feared that Mrs. Vesey was about to adopt certain of Rousseau’s ‘absurdities.’ Cf. Letters of Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Montagu 3. 241; 24 June 1785.
[280] Hartley writes to W. W. Pepys (20 August 1800), ‘Mrs. Vesey’s ... was indeed the most agreeable house for conversation.’ Gaussen’s A Later Pepys 2. 154.
[281] Frances Glanville Boscawen (1719?-1805) was the wife of the Hon. Edward Boscawen, Admiral (d. 1761), and mother of Viscount Falmouth and the Duchess of Beaufort.
[282] 3. 331.