long leases. However, a great deal was done, the whole was put into perfect repair, a great deal too much expended in some instances in farmhouses, the whole inclosed, pathways and roads turned, the bounds made good, and tenants were found to take it without any lease; but they took every advantage of the bad repute in which the estate was held, as well as of my ignorance and inexperience at the time, and my total want of assistance, to indemnify themselves, for any risk they might run, in settling the rent."[1]
"Since my return from Calcraft's," he writes to Barré, "I have been in Wiltshire and avoided politicks."[2] "I am glad to find you still like retirement," writes Weymouth, "though I dare say you have a great deal of amusement in yourself. I am sure that your mind is too active to let the great events of the world pass without taking some part in them."[3] "Have you done with those silly manuscripts," writes Sandwich,[4] at the same time offering him "a wild beast" for the menagerie then at Wycombe, but in after years removed to Bowood, where the skull of a lion—the sole relic of his peers—now wonders from the top of a cupboard at the strange company it keeps among bookshelves and parchments. But the bookshelves and parchments are not those from which Jemmy Twitcher attempted to win Lord Shelburne with the offer of a wild beast. These are now at the British Museum. Acquired and added to at various periods, the collection consisted in the main of the purchases of Mr. James West and Mr. Philip Carteret Webbe[5]—of Wilkes and judicial fame—from whom they were bought by Shelburne. It comprised many of the State papers of both the Cecils, from whom they had passed to Sir Michael Hickes, their Secretary,
- ↑ Account of his estates by Shelburne. A fragment evidently written late in life.
- ↑ Shelburne to Barré, September 1765.
- ↑ September 27th, 1765.
- ↑ September 25th, 1765.
- ↑ Mr. West did not die till 1773, nor Mr. Carteret Webbe till 1770, but an account of the whole collection is given above at the time when Lord Shelburne began to collect. For further details the reader is referred to the Preface of the Catalogus Manuscriptorum Bibliothecæ Lansdownianæ, by Sir H. Ellis, at the British Museum.
