publication, was as great during the next spring as it had been in
the last. The tide of visitors again set in all its former force and
volume towards the "genteel lodgings." His dinner list was once more
full, and he was feasted and flattered by wits, beaux, courtiers,
politicians, and titled-lady lion-hunters as sedulously as ever. His
letters, especially those to his friends the Crofts, of Stillington,
abound, as before, in touches of the same amusing vanity. With how
delicious a sense of self-importance must he have written these words:
"You made me and my friends very merry with the accounts current at
York of my being forbad the Court, but they do not consider what a
considerable person they make of me when they suppose either my going
or not going there is a point that ever enters the K.'s head; and
for those about him, I have the honour either to stand so personally
well-known to them, or to be so well represented by those of the first
rank, as to fear no accident of the kind." Amusing, too, is it to note
the familiarity, as of an old _habitué_ of Ministerial antechambers,
with which this country parson discusses the political changes of
that interesting year; though scarcely more amusing, perhaps, than the
solemnity with which his daughter disguises the identity of the new
Premier under the title B----e; and by a similar use of initials
attempts to conceal the momentous state secret that the D. of R. had
been removed from the place of Groom of the Chambers, and that Sir
F.D. had succeeded T. as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Occasionally,
however, the interest of his letters changes from personal to public,
and we get a glimpse of scenes and personages that have become
historical. He was present in the House of Commons at the first grand
debate on the German war after the Great Commoner's retirement from
office--"the pitched battle," as Sterne calls it, "wherein Mr. P.
was to have entered and thrown down the gauntlet" in defence of his
military policy. Thus he describes it: