been plagued all the week with staring crowds.  At last, it rained a deluge.  Well, said I, at last, nobody will come to-day.  The words were scarce uttered, when the bell rang.  I replied, “Tell them they cannot possibly see the house, but they are very welcome to walk in the garden."(1073) Observe; nothing above alludes to Dr. Ewin and Mr. Rawlinson:  I was not only much pleased with them, but quite glad to show them how entirely you may command my house, and your most sincere friend and servant.

(1068) Dr. Matthias Mawson, translated from Llandaff to the see of Ely in 1754.  He died in November 1770, in his eighty-seventh year.  His character was thus drawn, in 1749, by the Rev. W. Clarke:—­“Our Bishop is a better sort of man than most of the mitred order.  He is, indeed, awkward, absent, etc.; but then, he has no ambition, no desire to please, and is privately munificent when the world thinks him parsimonious.  He has given more to the Church than all the bishops put together for almost a century."-E.

(1069) The following is an extract from a previous letter of Mr. Cole’s, and to this Mr. Walpole alludes:—­“An old wall being to be taken down behind the choir (at Ely], on which were painted seven figures of six Saxon bishops, and a Duke, as he is called, of Northumberland, one Brithnoth; which painting I take to be as old as any we have in England—­I guessed by seven arches in the wall, below the figures, that the bones of these seven benefactors to the old Saxon conventual church were reposited in the wall under them:  accordingly, we found seven separate holes, each with the remains of the Said persons,” etc. etc.  Mr. Cole proposed that Mr. Walpole should contribute an Engraving from this painting to the history of Ely Cathedral, a work about to be published, or to use his interest to induce the Duke of Northumberland to do so.

(1070) “I have read,” says Gray, in a letter to Mr. Nicholls, “an octavo volume of Shenstone’s Letters.  Poor man! he was always wishing for money, for fame, and other distinctions; and his whole philosophy consisted in living against his will in retirement, and in a place which his taste had adorned; but which he only enjoyed when people of note came to see and commend it:  his correspondence is about nothing else but this place and his own writings, with two or three neighbouring clergy, who wrote verses too.”  Works, vol. iv. p. 135-E.

(1071) See vol. i. p. 244, letter 61.-E.

(1072) “In the infancy of modern gardening, a false taste was introduced by Shenstone, in his ferme orn`ee at the Leasowes; where, instead of surrounding his house with such a quantity of ornamental lawn or park Only, as might be consistent with the size of the mansion or the extent of the property, his taste, rather than his ambition, led him to ornament the whole of his estate; and in the vain attempt to combine the profits of a farm with the scenery of a park, he lived under the continual mortification of disappointed hope; and with a mind exquisitely sensible, he felt equally the sneer of the great man at the magnificence of his attempts and the ridicule of the farmer at the misapplication of his paternal acres.”  Repton.-E.