owned that Twisden once laid a wager that he would leap over a cow as she lay in the field. Just at the instant of the attempt, the cow got up, and the bishop dislocated his shoulder.[1]
“Pope’s house at Twickenham,” says Dr. Taylor (who is now living at Isleworth, and eighty-five years old) in a letter to my father in Ireland, written soon after the poet’s death, “I believe will be bought by Sir William Stanhope. They say the whole purchase will come within 1,500l. Pope died worth 4,000l. The King of Sardinia’s watch, which is mentioned in his will, is a common plain gold one, not worth twenty guineas.”
“People here,” he adds in the same letter, “do not talk of the Anglesey affair in the same strain they seem to do in Ireland. The verdict here is generally condemned. Bacon told me he heard Sir John Strange lately say at Tom’s that he had read the printed trial, and that the Pl. appeared clearly from thence to him to be a bastard; and that he was astonished at the charge and at the verdict.—Concanen arrived in London last night.”
Mr. Parsons, an ingenious picture cleaner and painter from whom I bought eight drawings yesterday done by the elder Richardson called upon me this morning, June 2nd, 1789. He says that the great sale of Richardson’s drawings was in 1746–7.
- ↑ It was often said formerly that many of the bishops sent from England to fill Irish sees were such as would not have been tolerated in England.
