for two or three days.  On the Wednesday morning she rose to have her bed made; and while sitting on the bed, with her maid by her, sunk down at once, and died without a pang or a groan.  Poor Mr. Raftor is struck to the greatest degree, and for some days would not see any body.  I sent for him to town to me; but he will not come till next week.  Mrs. Prado has been so excessively humane as to insist on his coming to her house till his sister is buried, which is to be to-night.

The Duchess does not come till the 26th.  Poor Miss Bunbury is dead; and Mrs. Boughton, I hear, is in a very bad way.  Lord John Russell has sent the Duchess of Bedford word, that he is on the point of marrying Lord Torrington’s eldest daughter; and they suppose the wedding is over.(565) Your ladyship, I am sure, will be pleased to hear that Lord Euston is gone to his father, who has written a letter with the highest approbation of Lady Euston.(566) You will be diverted, too, Madam, to hear that Hecate has told Mrs. Keppel, that she was sure that such virtue would be rewarded at last.

(562) Now first printed.

(563) “Neither years nor sufferings,” writes Hannah More to her sister, “can abate the entertaining powers of the pleasant Horace, which rather improve than decay; though he himself says he is only fit to be a milk-woman, as the chalk-stones at his fingers’ ends qualify him for nothing but scoring; but he declares he will not be a Bristol milk.woman.  I was obliged to recount to him all that odious tale.”  Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 14.-E.

(564) The incomparable Kitty Clive; who died at Twickenham on the 6th of December, in her seventy-second year.-E.

(565) Lord John Russell, who, in 1802, succeeded his brother Francis as sixth Duke of Bedford, married, at Brussels, in March 1786, Georgiana Elizabeth, second daughter of Lord Torrington.-E.

(566) Lord Euston, who, in 1811, succeeded his father as fourth Duke of Grafton, married, in November 1784, Charlotte Maria, daughter of the Earl of Waldegrave.-E.

Letter 300 To Miss Hannah More.  Berkeley Square, Feb. 9, 1786. (page 380)

It is very cruel, my dear Madam, when you send me such charming lines, and say such kind and flattering things to me and of me, that I cannot even thank you with my own poor hand; and yet my hand is as much obliged to you as my eye, and ear, and understanding.  My hand was in great pain when your present arrived.  I opened it directly, and set to reading, till your music and my own vanity composed a quieting draught that glided to the ends of my fingers, and lulled the throbs into the deliquium that attends opium when it does not put one absolutely to sleep.  I don’t believe that the deity who formerly practised both poetry and physic, when gods got their livelihood by more than one profession, ever gave a recipe in rhyme; and therefore, since Dr. Johnson has prohibited application to pagan divinities, and Mr. Burke has not struck medicine and poetry out of the list of sinecures, I wish you may get a patent for life for exercising both faculties.  It would be a comfortable event for me for, since I cannot wait on you to thank you, nor dare ask you