as great during the next spring as it had been in the last.  The tide of visitors again set in all its former force and volume towards the “genteel lodgings.”  His dinner list was once more full, and he was feasted and flattered by wits, beaux, courtiers, politicians, and titled-lady lion-hunters as sedulously as ever.  His letters, especially those to his friends the Crofts, of Stillington, abound, as before, in touches of the same amusing vanity.  With how delicious a sense of self-importance must he have written these words:  “You made me and my friends very merry with the accounts current at York of my being forbad the Court, but they do not consider what a considerable person they make of me when they suppose either my going or not going there is a point that ever enters the K.’s head; and for those about him, I have the honour either to stand so personally well-known to them, or to be so well represented by those of the first rank, as to fear no accident of the kind.”  Amusing, too, is it to note the familiarity, as of an old habitue of Ministerial antechambers, with which this country parson discusses the political changes of that interesting year; though scarcely more amusing, perhaps, than the solemnity with which his daughter disguises the identity of the new Premier under the title B——­e; and by a similar use of initials attempts to conceal the momentous state secret that the D. of R. had been removed from the place of Groom of the Chambers, and that Sir F.D. had succeeded T. as Chancellor of the Exchequer.  Occasionally, however, the interest of his letters changes from personal to public, and we get a glimpse of scenes and personages that have become historical.  He was present in the House of Commons at the first grand debate on the German war after the Great Commoner’s retirement from office—­“the pitched battle,” as Sterne calls it, “wherein Mr. P. was to have entered and thrown down the gauntlet” in defence of his military policy.  Thus he describes it: 

“There never was so full a House—­the gallery full to the top—­I was there all the day; when lo! a political fit of the gout seized the great combatant—­he entered not the lists.  Beckford got up and begged the House, as he saw not his right honourable friend there, to put off the debate—­it could not be done:  so Beckford rose up and made a most long, passionate, incoherent speech in defence of the German war, but very severe upon the unfrugal manner it was carried on, in which he addressed himself principally to the C[hancellor] of the E[xchequer], and laid on him terribly....  Legge answered Beckford very rationally and coolly.  Lord K. spoke long.  Sir F. D[ashwood] maintained the German war was most pernicious....  Lord B[arrington] at last got up and spoke half an hour with great plainness and temper, explained many hidden things relating to these accounts in favour of the late K., and told two or three conversations which had passed between the K. and himself relative