“Here lies Edmund Keene, the Bishop of Chester, Who ate a fat goose and could not digest her.”

(362) In the May of this year, Dr. Keene married the only daughter of Lancelot Andrews, Esq. of Edmonton, formerly an eminent linendraper in Cheapside, a lady of considerable fortune.-E.

(363) Dr. Stephen Hales, author of “Vegetable Statics,” and “Vegetable Essays.”  This eminent natural philosopher and vegetable physiologist was offered a canonry of Windsor, but contented himself with the living of Teddington, which he held with that of Farringdon.  He died in 1761, at the age of eighty-four.

(364) Walpole, in his Memoires, gives the following account of Lord Waldegrave’s appointment:  " The Earl accepted it at the earnest request of the King, and after repeated assurances of the submission and tractability of Stone.  The Earl was averse to it.  He was a man of pleasure, understood the court, was firm in the King’s favour, easy in his circumstances, and at once undesirous of rising, and afraid to fall.  He said to a friend, “If I dared, I would make this excuse to the King--’Sir, I am too young to govern. and too old to be governed:’  but he was forced to submit.  A man of stricter honour and of more reasonable sense could not have been selected for the employment.”  Vol. i. p. 255.-E.

155 Letter 70 To Sir Horace Mann.  Arlington Street, Feb. 14, 1753.

I have been going to write to you every post for these three weeks, and could not bring myself to begin a letter with “I have nothing to tell you.”  But it grows past a joke; we will not drop our correspondence because there is no war, no Politics, no parties, no madness, and no scandal.  In the memory of England there never was so inanimate an age:  it is more fashionable to go to church than to either House of Parliament.  Even the era of the Gunnings is over:  both sisters have lain in, and have scarce made one paragraph in the newspapers, though their names were grown so renowned, that in Ireland the beggarwomen bless you with,-,, “the luck of the Gunnings attend you!”

You will scarce guess how I employ my time; chiefly at present in the guardianship of embryos and cockleshells.  Sir hans Sloane is dead, and has made me one of the trustees to his museum, which is to be offered for twenty thousand pounds to the king, the Parliament, the Royal Academies of Petersburnh, Berlin, Paris, and Madrid.(365) He valued it at fourscore thousand; and so would any body who loves hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese!  It is a rent-charge, to keep the foetuses in spirits!  You may believe that those who think money the most valuable of all curiosities, will not be purchasers.  The King has excused himself, saying he did not believe that there were twenty thousand pounds in the treasury.  We are a charming, wise set, all philosophers, botanists, antiquarians, and mathematicians; and adjourned our first meeting because Lord Macclesfield, our chairman, was engaged to a party for finding out the longitude.  One of our number is a Moravian who signs himself Henry XXVIII, Count de Reus.  The Moravians have settled a colony at Chelsea, in Sir Hans’s neighbourhood, and I believe he intended to beg Count Henry XXVIIIth’s skeleton for his museum.