I this day (July 24, 1789) perused Wentworth Lord Roscommon’s will at Doctors’ Commons. He having been once the owner of my estate in Westmeath, in Ireland, I feel an interest about him, and should be glad to meet with his picture by Carlo Maratti which is somewhere extant. His will is very short. He expresses the strongest hope of a resurrection and redemption by the merits of our Saviour, and commits his wretched body to the earth. He makes his (second) wife Isabella (daughter of Matthew Baynton, Yorkshire, Esq., whom he married in 1674) his executrix, and bequeathes her all his estate real and personal after payment of his debts. His will was made January 4, 1684–5, and proved the latter end of that month.
Knightly Chetwood, who has left MS. memoirs of him—now in the public library at Cambridge—was one of the witnesses to his will. I think he says in those memoirs that Lord Roscommon resembled his uncle Lord Strafford in the countenance. His widow married the father of the late Thomas Carter, Master of the Rolls in Ireland, and died in Dublin in 1722. I hoped to have found her picture in the possession of Mr. Carter’s heir, but he has it not.
Sir Joshua Reynolds was born at Plympton in Devonshire, in 1723. One of the first portraits he ever painted is in the possession of a Mr. Hamilton, nephew to Lord Abercorn. As he himself told me, when about the age of nineteen or twenty, he became very careless about his profession, and lived for near
