hate letters and abominate interference, I will write to him on this
subject.

I have bought a certain quantity of reprints from a bookseller in
Chancery Lane, Pickering by name. I urged him to print the controversy
between Greene and the Harveys. He wished me to write a third part to a
fine edition of Cotton's _Angler_, for which I am quite
incompetent.[212]

I met at Richmond my old and much esteemed friend Lord Stowell,[213]
looking very frail and even comatose. _Quantum mutatus!_ He was one of
the pleasantest men I ever knew.

Respecting the letters, I picked up from those of Pitt that he was
always extremely desirous of peace with France, and even reckoned upon
it at a moment when he ought to have despaired. I suspect this false
view of the state of France (for such it was), which induced the British
Minister to look for peace when there was no chance of it, damped his
ardour in maintaining the war. He wanted the lofty ideas of his
father--you read it in his handwriting, great statesman as he was. I saw
a letter or two of Burke's in which there is an _epanchement du coeur_
not visible in those of Pitt, who writes like a Premier to his
colleague. Burke was under the strange hallucination that his son, who
predeceased him, was a man of greater talents than himself. On the
contrary, he had little talent and no resolution. On moving some
resolutions in favour of the Catholics, which were ill-received by the
House of Commons, young Burke actually ran away, which an Orangeman
compared to a cross-reading in the newspapers:--Yesterday the Catholic
resolutions were moved, etc., but, the pistol missing fire, the villains
ran off!

_May_ 25.--After a morning of letter-writing, leave-taking, papers
destroying, and God knows what trumpery, Sophia and I set out for
Hampton Court, carrying with us the following lions and
lionesses--Samuel Rogers, Tom Moore, Wordsworth, with wife and daughter.
We were very kindly and properly received by Walter and his wife, and a
very pleasant party.[214]

_May_ 26.--An awful confusion with paying of bills, writing of cards,
and all species of trumpery business. Southey, who is just come to town,
breakfasted with us. He looks, I think, but poorly, but it may be owing
to family misfortune. One is always tempted to compare Wordsworth and
Southey. The latter is unquestionably the greater scholar--I mean
possesses the most extensive stock of information, but there is a
freshness, vivacity, a