“Mr. Crutchley lives now a great deal with me; the business of executor to Mr. Thrale’s will makes much of his attendance necessary, and it begins to have its full effect in seducing and attaching him to the house,—­Miss Burney’s being always about me is probably another reason for his close attendance, and I believe it is so.  What better could befall Miss Burney, or indeed what better could befall him, than to obtain a woman of honour, and character, and reputation for superior understanding?  I would be glad, however, that he fell honestly in love with her, and was not trick’d or trapp’d into marriage, poor fellow; he is no match for the arts of a novel-writer.  A mighty particular character Mr. Crutchley is:  strangely mixed up of meanness and magnificence; liberal and splendid in large sums and on serious occasions, narrow and confined in the common occurrences of life; warm and generous in some of his motives, frigid and suspicious, however, for eighteen hours at least out of the twenty-four; likely to be duped, though always expecting fraud, and easily disappointed in realities, though seldom flattered by fancy.  He is supposed by those that knew his mother and her connections to be Mr. Thrale’s natural son, and in many things he resembles him, but not in person:  as he is both ugly and awkward.  Mr. Thrale certainly believed he was his son, and once told me as much when Sophy Streatfield’s affair was in question but nobody could persuade him to court the S.S.  Oh! well does the Custom-house officer Green say,—­

  “’Coquets! leave off affected arts,
  Gay fowlers at a flock of hearts;
  Woodcocks, to shun your snares have skill,
  You show so plain you strive to kill.’”

“3rd June, 1781.—­Well! here have I, with the grace of God and the assistance of good friends, completed—­I really think very happily—­the greatest event of my life.  I have sold my brewhouse to Barclay, the rich Quaker, for 135,000_l_., to be in four years’ time paid.  I have by this bargain purchased peace and a stable fortune, restoration to my original rank in life, and a situation undisturbed by commercial jargon, unpolluted by commercial frauds, undisgraced by commercial connections.  They who succeed me in the house have purchased the power of being rich beyond the wish of rapacity[1], and I have procured the improbability of being made poor by flights of the fairy, speculation.  ’Tis thus that a woman and men of feminine minds always—­I speak popularly—­decide upon life, and chuse certain mediocrity before probable superiority; while, as Eton Graham says sublimely,—­

                               “’Nobler souls,
  Fir’d with the tedious and disrelish’d good,
  Seek their employment in acknowledg’d ill,
  Danger, and toil, and pain.’