founded upon the same story as Lord Orford’s excellent tragedy, who however declares that it was taken from the confession of one of Tillotson’s penitents; but to go farther back, the same tale appears in one of the Queen of Navarre’s novels. He will not, however, receive anything against Lord Orford’s originality. To that nobleman the Irish peer, as we have seen, was strongly attached; again notices his death as a loss to writers of literary memorials of his time; desires his special and affectionate remembrance to him in many letters to Malone; and amid others equally strong, thus says in November 1787:—“You do me perfect justice in supposing that I should be sorry indeed to receive Mr. Walpole’s book at the price you mention. My most truly affectionate compliments and sincere respects to that most amiable of men.”
His lordship also shortly before Burke’s death had written to Malone in alarm at the chance of being embroiled in politics with his old friend, though by no fault of his own. An injudicious Irish politician had addressed him a pamphlet, in reply to one of the letters on a Regicide Peace, intermingled with abuse of their celebrated writer. But though the peer found fault with the politics of the commoner, no attack upon him could receive the slightest countenance. Should the piece become known, Malone was to deny, in his lordship’s name, the slightest knowledge of its production. If it escaped notice, let it remain so; and accordingly it passed at once unobserved to that populous yet noiseless region into which Fame declines to enter.
