of an entertainment, is the whole joy; for who goes to any diversion till the last minute of it?  I am persuaded that, instead if retrenching St. Athanasius’s Creed, as the Duke of Grafton proposed, in order to draw good company to church, it would be more efficacious if the Congregation were to be indulged with an After-room in the vestry; and, instead of two or three being gathered together, there would be all the world, before the prayers would be quite over.

Thursday night

“Despairing, beside a clear stream
A shepherd forsaken was laid;”—­

not very close to the stream, but within doors in sight of it; for in this damp weather a lame old Colin cannot lie and despair with any comfort on a wet bank:  but I smile against the grain, and am seriously alarmed at Thursday being come, and no letter!  I dread one of you being ill.  Mr. Batt(635) and the Abb`e Nicholls(636) dined with me to-day, and I could talk of you en pais de connoissance.  They tried to persuade me that I have no cause to be in a fright about you; but I have such perfect faith in the kindness of both of you, as I have in your possessing every other virtue, that I cannot believe but some sinister accident must have prevented my hearing from you.  I wish Friday was come!  I cannot write about any thing else till I have a letter.

(632) A dog of Miss Berry’s left in Walpole’s care during their absence in Yorkshire.-M.B.

(633) The dog which had been bequeathed to Mr. Walpole by Madame du Deffand at her death, and which was likewise called Tonton.  See ant`e, p. 275, letter 217.-M.B.

(634) on the night of the 17th, the Opera-house was entirely consumed by fire.-E.

(635) Thomas Batt, Esq. then one of the commissioners for public accounts.-E.

(636) The Rev. Norton Nicholls, rector of Lound and Bradwell in the county of Suffolk; one of the most elegant scholars and accomplished gentlemen of the day.  He died in November 1809, in his sixty-eighth year. " It was his singular good fortune,” says Mr. Dawson Turner, , to have been distinguished in his early life by the friendship of Gray the poet; while the close of his days was cheered and enlivened and dignified by the friendship, and almost constant society, of a Man scarcely inferior to Gray in talent and acquirements Mr. Mathias; who has embalmed his memory in an Italian Ode and a biographical Memoir; which latter is a beautiful specimen of that kind of composition.,, They will both be found in the fifth volume of Nicholls’s Illustrations of Literature.-E.

Letter 330 To Miss Hannah More.  Strawberry Hill, June 23, 1789. (PAGE 418)