Here, too, we must introduce the name of another literary lady, whose acquaintance with our author, begun some time previously, ripened about this date into an occasional exchange of letters. Hannah More,[104] then one of the Vesey coterie in Clarges Street, which, however, she presently quitted, ranked, we conceive, in Walpole’s estimation, about midway between Mrs. Montagu and Miss Burney. Writing to Hannah, not long after her retirement from London, he says: “The last time I saw her,” that is Mrs. Vesey, “Miss Burney passed the evening there, looking quite recovered and well, and so cheerful and agreeable, that the Court seems only to have improved the ease of her manner, instead of stamping more reserve on it, as I feared: but what slight graces it can give, will not compensate to us and the world for the loss of her company and her writings. Not but that _some young ladies_ who can write, can stifle their talent as much as if they were under lock and key in the royal library. I do not see but _a cottage_ is as pernicious to genius as the Queen’s waiting-room.” Walpole had laughed at the “Blue-stockings,” but he bows graciously to the authors of “Cecilia” and “Percy,” and marks by an altered style of address his sense of the difference between the tone of these ladies and that of the Lady Ossorys and Kitty Clives with whom his youth and middle life had been spent. Poor Kitty’s old age of cards came to an end before the close of 1785, and Cliveden, which she had occupied for more than thirty years, stood for awhile untenanted. Horace lamented the loss of his old friend and neighbour, but she was several years senior to himself, and her death was not unexpected. The pair had lived so much together that probably few letters passed between them: none have been preserved, and the removal of the lady makes no gap in the gentleman’s correspondence. It is otherwise with the next name which was struck from Walpole’s list of old familiar acquaintances. Shortly after losing a friend from whom he was never long parted, he lost the friend whom he never met. No long time had elapsed since Walpole had written to Mann: “Shall we not be very venerable in the annals of friendship? What Orestes and Pylades ever wrote to each other for four-and-forty years without meeting? A correspondence of near half a century is not to be paralleled in the annals of the Post Office.” Again, about the time of Mrs. Clive’s death: “_Now_ I think we are like Castor and Pollux; when one rises, t’other sets; when you can write, I cannot. I have got a very sharp attack of gout in my right hand.… Your being so well is a great comfort to me.” Despite this congratulation, however, the Ambassador was very near to his final setting. He died at Florence on the 16th of November, 1786, after a long illness, during the latter part of which he was apparently not in a condition to receive letters. Walpole’s last letter to him is dated June 22, 1786.