capacity of superintendant of his patron's dietetics, he cried out one morning at breakfast to have the muffins taken away, Dodington aptly enough cried out at the same time to the servant to take away the raggamuffin, and truth to say a more dirty animal than poor Thompson was never seen on the outside of a pig stye; yet he had the plea of poverty and no passion for cold water,

It is about a short and pleasant mile from this villa to the parsonage house of Fulham, and Mr. Dodington having visited us with great politeness, I became a frequent guest at La Trappe, and passed a good deal of my time with him there, in London also, and occasionally in Dorsetshire, He was certainly one of the most extraordinary men of his time, and as I had opportunities of contemplating his character in all its various points of view, I trust my readers will not regret that I have devoted some pages to the further delineation of it.

I have before observed that the nature of my business as private secretary to Lord Halifax was by no means such as to employ any great portion of my time, and of course I could devote many hours to my own private pursuits,

without neglecting those attendances, which were due to my principal. Lord Halifax had also removed his abode to Downing-Street, having quitted his house in Grosvenor-Square upon the decease of his lady, so that I rarely found it necessary to sleep in town, and could divide the rest of my time between Fulham and La Trappe. It was likewise entirely correspondent with Lord Halifax's wishes that I should cultivate my acquaintance with Mr. Dodington, with whom he not only lived upon intimate terms as a friend, but was now in train to form, as it seemed, some opposition connexions; for at this time it happened that upon a breach with the Duke of Newcastle, he threw up his office of First Lord of Trade and Plantations, and detached himself from administration. This took place towards the latter end of the late king's reign, and the ground of the measure was a breach of promise on the part of the Duke to give him the Seals and a Seat in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for the Colonies.

In the summer of this year, being now an ex-secretary of an ex-statesman, I went to Eastbury, the seat of Mr. Dodington, in Dor

setshire, and passed the whole time of his stay in that place. Lord Halifax with his brotherin-law Colonel Johnstone of the Blues paid a visit there, and the Countess Dowager of Stafford and old Lady Hervey were resident with us the whole time. Our splendid host was. excelled by no man in doing the honours of his house and table; to the ladies he had all the courtly and profound devotion of a Spaniard, with the ease and gaiety of a Frenchinan towards the men. His mansion was magnificent, massy and stretching out to a great extent of front with an enormous portico of Doric columns ascended by a stately flight of steps; there were turrets and wings that went I know not whither, though now they are levelled with the ground, and gone to more ignoble uses: Vanbrugh, who constructed this superb edifice, seemed to have had the plan of Blenheim in his thoughts, and the interior was as proud and splendid as the exterior was bold and imposing. All this was exactly in unison with the taste of its magnificent owner, who had gilt and furnished the apartments with a profusion of finery, that kept no terms with simplicity, and not always with elegance or

harmony of style. Whatever Mr. Dodington's revenue then was, he had the happy art of managing it with that regularity and œconomy, that I believe he made more display at less cost, than any man in the kingdom but himself could have done. His town house in Pall-Mall, his villa at Hammersmith, and the mansion above described, were such establishments as few nobles in the nation were possessed of. In either of these he was not to be approached but through a suite of apartments, and rarely seated but under painted ceilings and gilt entablatures. In his villa you were conducted through two rows of antique marble statues ranged in a gallery floored with the rarest marbles, and enriched with columns of granite and lapis lazuli; his saloon was hung with the finest Gobelin tapestry, and he slept in a bed encanopied with peacocks' feathers in the style of Mrs. Montague. When he passed from Pall-Mall to La Trappe it was always in a coach, which I could suspect had been his ambassadorial equipage at Madrid, drawn by six fat unwieldy black horses, short docked and of colossal dignity: neither was he less

characteristic in apparel than in equipage; he had a wardrobe loaded with rich and flaring suits, each in itself a load to the wearer, and of these I have no doubt but many were cœval with his embassy above mentioned, and every birth-day had added to the stock. In doing this he so contrived as never to put his old dresses out of countenance by any variations in the fashion of the new; in the mean time his bulk and corpulency gave full display to a vast expanse and profusion of brocade and embroidery, and this, when set off with an enormous tye-perriwig and deep laced ruffles, gave the picture of an ancient courtier in his gala habit, or Quin in his stage dress; nevertheless it must be confessed this style, though out of date, was not out of character, but harmonized so well with the person of the wearer, that I remember when he made his first speech in the House of Peers as Lord Melcombe, all the flashes of his wit, all the studied phrases and well-turned periods of his rhetoric lost their effect simply because the orator had laid aside his magisterial tye, and put on a modern bag wig, which was as much out of costume