“Lord Hallifax is returned with great glory from his Lord Lieutenancy in Ireland. He pleased all people; he united all parties; he contented those he was sent by and those he was sent to; and has shown it is possible to please the government and to be popular there.... I suppose you have heard of the death of Sir Edward Dering, which was sudden. He has entailed everything on his grandson, and left but very small fortune to his younger children. People seem to think that by making one person in their family rich, they can make one very happy; but alas! human happiness cannot be carried beyond a certain pitch. Competency will make every one easy: great wealth cannot make any one happy. It is strange, parents should seem to feel only for one child, or, indeed, that the heir should be dearer than the child; for it is as heir they show their regards to one of the family. No personal merit, no tender attachment, no sympathy of disposition can overrule that circumstance. Sir Edward Dering dyed very rich....
“Mr. Harrison’s watch” (the fourth and most perfect time-keeper, for ascertaining the longitude at sea, invented by the Yorkshire carpenter’s son, by which he ultimately received £24,000) “has succeeded beyond expectation; navigation will be improved by it, which all who have the spirit of travelling shall rejoice at. The wives of some of our general officers are gone to Lisbon with their husbands, which I tell you for the honour of the fair sex. Lord Anson is in a very bad state of health. I am told Rome is the best place so get books at; I should be glad to have Muratori ‘Sopra le cose delli secoli passi.’ I have his ‘Annals of Italy.’ ... My love to my sister and dear little godson.... Pray remember, you owe me a goddaughter still.”
Mrs. Scott’s letter in June, to Mr. W. Robinson, has two passages in it which are like notes to her sister’s epistle.
“You will find few commoners in England. We make nobility as fast as people make kings and queens on Twelfth Night, and almost as many.... Lady Townshend says, she dare not spit out of her window for fear of spitting on a lord.”
“.... The Duke of Newcastle, after his resignation, had a very numerous levée, but somebody observed to him, there were but two bishops, present. He is said to have replied, that bishops like other men, were too apt to forget their maker. I think this has been said for him, or the resignation of power has much brightened his understanding; for of whatever he may be accused, the crime of wit was never laid to his charge.”
Walpole states, with regard to the prelates at the old duke’s levée: “As I suppose all bishops are prophets, they foresee that he will never come into place again; for there was but one that had the decency to take leave of him, after crowding his rooms for forty years together: it was Cornwallis.” The duke went out on finding he had no chance of carrying a pecuniary aid to Prussia. If he was almost a fool, as some kind friends said, he had the wisdom to keep in place longer than any of his contemporaries. He was succeeded as Prime Minister by Lord Bute. Cornwallis, Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, reaped the reward of his fidelity. He was promoted to the Archbishopric of Canterbury in 1768. It should be added to the honour of the duke, who, however mentally ill-endowed and eccentric, was a gentleman in practice, that he declined a pension on his retirement. He might be incapable of serving his country, he said, but England should certainly not find him a burthen. Chesterfield cites, as an example of his timidity, the duke’s childish fear at Lord Chesterfield’s bill for correcting the calendar, and, as a proof of his integrity, the fact that “he retired from business above four hundred thousand pounds poorer than when he engaged in it.”
The duke left “business” in a considerable amount of confusion. In a letter dated July 27, 1762, Mrs. Scott writes to Mr. Robinson at Rome, after much small talk on babies and jokes on prophesied lyingsin, in these words:
“Political disputes never ran so high in print as at present. The periodical papers are numerous and abusive to the greatest degree. By what I hear, the lawyers find it some substitution for the decay of business in the courts; for the minority papers regularly undergo the inspection of council learned in the law before they are published, that the authors who stand on the very verge of treason may not, by some inadvertency, make a faux pas that will throw them down the precipice; and some persons of consequence are under engagements to the printer to indemnify him should the heavy hand of authority oppress him....
“... The king has given Johnson a pension of £300 per annum,—a necessary step for one who wishes to be thought the patron of literature, and what every one must approve.”