mind, which found amusement not in its dissipations, but varieties. To him, fresh from a narrower sphere, it was indeed seeing the world—a preparative to enlarged intelligence and liberal studies. Unlike Dublin there was no provincialism, none of those views or misapprehensions which smaller or partially isolated communities take of their own or others’ affairs. He saw none of that secondhand influence—few of those second-rate men who, busy or ambitious, always needy, often corrupt or instruments of corruption, influenced or governed his country less for its interests than their own. In London these things were better veiled or less practised. There he found the centre of that society always to him a main source of delight—literary and dramatic persons—or what formed a substitute as constituting a large admixture of both to a young man without ties of home—namely, coffee-house society. The “Grecian” in the Strand was then and long afterwards the favourite resort; and, to strangers in the metropolis, an irresistible evening attraction.
Glad was he likewise in opportunities of paying to an affectionate mother the duty of a good son, to which allusion is made in her letters. She had continued at Bath, unable to walk without assistance, and died there in the beginning of 1765. Lord Luxborough, now become Earl of Catherlough, thus writes to her husband from Golden Square, January, 1765:—
