Sir Benjamin Bathurst, a commercial man, father to the first Lord Bathurst,
the friend of Pope the poet, and who lived to the age of ninety, in
possession of his faculties,--always calling his son, the Chancellor,
"the old man!" He was one of Queen Anne's _twelve_ peers--but so rapid has
been the extinction and change, that the Bathursts are now considered old
nobility. He sprung from one of the _Grey Coat_ families in the weald of
Kent, the clothiers.

Old Dr. Farmer, the head of Emanuel College, Cambridge, Prebendary of
Canterbury, and afterwards of St. Paul's, or Westminster, used to frequent
a club in London, to which I belonged. He was at first reserved and silent:
but his forte was humour and drollery. At Cambridge he neglected forms and
ceremonies in his college too much: and was in all his glory when in
dishabille in his study, with his cat by his side, and his Shakspeare
tracts about him. He found no literature at Canterbury, and was disgusted
with his brother members of the cathedral: quaint Dean Horne, and
chattering romancing Dr. Berkeley, and his rhodomontading wife, were not
suited to him, and as little her son Monke Berkeley, of whom she gave such
an absurd and mendacious memoir, and who had none of his celebrated
grandfather Bishop Berkeley's genius. Farmer had some cleverness, but no
leading talent. He collected an immense quantity of rare and forgotten old
English books--especially poetry and the drama--at a trifling price. Todd,
the learned editor of Milton, Spencer, &c., was then a member of that
cathedral; but as his literary superiority was not pleasant to those above
him in that establishment, he was got rid of by promotion, elsewhere, out
of their patronage. He wrote the lives of the Deans of that Church, which
does not rise to more than local interest. It is a dull book.

It has been my fate to be Acquainted with Irish Secretaries. I saw much of
little Charles Abbot--afterwards Speaker--and at last Lord Colchester.
He was a pompous dwarf; yet of an analytical head. Nothing could be more
amusing than to see him strut up the House of Commons to take the chair;
nor was the amusement less to listen to him, when he delivered his edicts,
or the thanks of the House from the chair. His sonorous voice issuing from
a diminutive person, and the epigrammatic points of empty sentences,
formed with great artifice, were in very bad taste--though much admired by
a House which consisted of so few men of a class