Pray do you call cousins?(261) Look in Collins’s Baronets, and under the article Bedingfield you will find that he was an ingenious gentleman, and la blanche Whitnell, though one of the greatest beauties of the age, an excellent wife.  I am persuaded the Bedingfields crowded in these characters to take off the ridicule in Grammont; they have succeeded to a miracle.  Madame de Mirepoix told me t’other day, that she had known a daughter of the Countess de Grammont, an Abbess in Lorrain, who, to the ambassadress’s great scandal, was ten times more vain of the blood of Hamilton than of an equal quantity of that of Grammont.  She had told her much of her sister my Lady Stafford,(262) whom I remember to have seen when I was a child.  She used to live at Twickenham when Lady Mary Wortley(263) and the Duke of Wharton lived there; she had more wit than both of them.  What would I give to have had Strawberry Hill twenty years ago!  I think any thing but twenty years.  Lady Stafford used to say to her sister, “Well, child, I have come without my wit to-day;” that is, she had not taken her opium, which she was forced to do if she had any appointment, to be in particular spirits.  This rage of Grammont carried me a little while ago to old Marlborough’s,(264) at Wimbledon, where I had heard there was a picture of Lady Denham;(265) it is a charming one.  The house you know stands in a hole, or, as the whimsical old lady said, seems to be making a courtesy.  She had directed my Lord Pembroke not to make her go up any steps; “I wont go up steps;”—­and so he dug a saucer to put it in, and levelled the first floor with the ground.  There is a bust of Admiral Vernon, erected I suppose by Jack Spencer, with as many lies upon it as if it was a tombstone; and a very curious old picture up-stairs that I take to be Louis Sforza the Moor, with his nephew Galeazzo.  There are other good pictures in the house, but perhaps you have seen them.  As I have formerly seen Oxford and Blenheim, I did not stop till I came to Stratford-upon-Avon, the wretchedest old town I ever saw, which I intended for Shakspeare’s sake, to find snug and pretty, and antique, not old.  His tomb, and his wife’s, and John Combes’, are in an agreeable church, with several other monuments; as one of the Earl of Totness,(266) and another of Sir Edward Walker, the memoirs writer.  There are quantities of Cloptons, too but the bountiful corporation have exceedingly bepainted Shakspeare and the principal personages.

I was much struck with Ragley; the situation is magnificent; the house far beyond any thing I have seen of that bad age:  for it was begun, as I found by an old letter in the library from Lord Ranelagh to Earl Conway, in the year 1680.  By the way, I have had, and am to have, the rummaging of three chests of pedigrees and letters to that secretary Conway, which I have interceded for and saved from the flames.  The prospect is as fine as one destitute of a navigated river can be, ind hitherto totally unimproved; so