"I supped that night, _tete-a-tete_, with Metham, who was d----d angry
with Hubby Bubby (Doddington) for having asked all the Musquetaires to
supper but him. He went to sleep at twelve, and I to White's, where _I
staid till six_. Yesterday I spent a good part of the day with my Lord
Coke at a _cock match_; and went, towards the latter end of Quin's benefit,
to Mariamne.
"The coaches rattle by fast, and George brings me word the House is up,
and I assure you I am extremely hungry."
We now come to the name of a man who attained a considerable celebrity in
his own time, but has almost dropped into oblivion in ours, Sir Charles
Hanbury Williams. He was the third son of John Hanbury, Esq., a
Monmouthshire gentleman, and took the name of Williams on succeeding to
the property of his grandfather. His mother was aunt to George Selwyn.
Entering Parliament early in life, he adopted the ministerial side, and
was a steady adherent to Sir Robert Walpole. He had his reward in
ministerial honours, being created a Knight of the Bath; and though Sir
Robert died in 1745, Williams had so far established his court influence,
that he was successively appointed envoy to Saxony, minister at Berlin,
and ambassador at St Petersburg. He was a man of great pleasantry, some
wit, and perpetual verse-making--the name of poetry is not to be stooped
to such compositions as his; but their liveliness and locality, their
application to existing times and persons, and their occasional hits at
politics and principles, made both them and their author popular. But the
fashionable language of the day had tendencies which would not now be
tolerated; and Sir Charles, a fashionable voluptuary, is charged with
having written what none should wish to revive. After a residence of ten
years on the Continent, he fell into a state of illness which deranged his
understanding. From this he recovered, but subsequently relapsed into the
same unhappy state, and died, it was surmised, by his own hand in 1759.
His letter details, in his own flighty style, one of the frolics of
fashion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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