John, Viscount Kirkwall, born 1778, was the only son of the Countess of Orkney, who was still living.
On December 23 Mrs. Pennington writes: "As you say, the Abbot is indeed a very dull book. I begin to question whether a well-known point in History can be a good foundation for a Novel. There can be little interest where the event is more than anticipated, and if extraneous characters and circumstances are too freely introduced, we quarrel with them, as interfering with the truth.
"There is some pretty writing in the first volume of the Sketches, but the second falls off lamentably, and is downright stuff....
"You will be shocked on seeing, in the Bath papers, the entire destruction of the Kingston Rooms by fire!!! No one seems to know by what means. Those very rooms in which, near to the same time last year, you made above six hundred people so happy! Everybody, I believe, but me and Conway, who you certainly desired should have been most so: but he was wretched, and infected me with his misery, so perversely does everything go in this world."
Master of the Ceremonies,
BALL
LATE KINGSTON-ROOMS.
Tuesday 6th February 1821.
THE BURNING OF THE KINGSTON ROOMS