‘The Bath,’ he wrote to his friend Dayrolles, ’did me more good than I thought anything could do me; but all that good does not amount to what builders call half-repairs, and only keeps up the shattered fabric a little longer than it would have stood without them; but take my word for it, it will stand but a very little while longer.  I am now in my grand climacteric, and shall not complete it.  Fontenelle’s last words at a hundred and three were, Je souffre d’etre. deaf and infirm as I am, I can with truth say the same thing at sixty-three.  In my mind it is only the strength of our passions, and the weakness of our reason, that makes us so fond of life; but when the former subside and give way to the latter, we grow weary of being, and willing to withdraw.  I do not recommend this train of serious reflections to you, nor ought you to adopt them....  You have children to educate and provide for, you have all your senses, and can enjoy all the comforts both of domestic and social life.  I am in every sense isole, and have wound up all my bottoms; I may now walk off quietly, without missing nor being missed.’

The kindness of his nature, corrupted as it was by a life wholly worldly, and but little illumined in its course by religion, shone now in his care of his two grandsons, the offspring of his lost son, and of their mother, Eugenia Stanhope.  To her he thus wrote:—­

’The last time I had the pleasure of seeing you, I was so taken up in playing with the boys, that I forgot their more important affairs.  How soon would you have them placed at school?  When I know your pleasure as to that, I will send to Monsieur Perny, to prepare everything for their reception.  In the mean time, I beg that you will equip them thoroughly with clothes, linen, &c., all good, but plain; and give me the amount, which I will pay; for I do not intend, from this time forwards, the two boys should cost you one shilling.’

He lived, latterly, much at Blackheath, in the house which, being built on Crown land, has finally become the Ranger’s lodge; but which still sometimes goes by the name of Chesterfield House.  Here he spent large sums, especially on pictures, and cultivated Cantelupe melons; and here, as he grew older, and became permanently afflicted with deafness, his chief companion was a useful friend, Solomon Dayrolles—­one of those indebted hangers-on whom it was an almost invariable custom to find, at that period, in great houses—­and perhaps too frequently in our own day.

Dayrolles, who was employed in the embassy under Lord Sandwich at the Hague, had always, to borrow Horace Walpole’s ill-natured expression, ’been a led-captain to the Dukes of Richmond and Grafton, used to be sent to auctions for them, and to walk in the parks with their daughters, and once went dry-nurse in Holland with them.  He has belonged, too, a good deal to my Lord Chesterfield, to whom I believe he owes this new honour, “that of being minister