[110] Meaning the establishment of the Mail-coach. Miss More, in her last letter, had said,--“Mail-coaches, which come to others, come not to me: letters and newspapers, now that they travel in coaches, like gentlemen and ladies, come not within ten miles of my hermitage; and while other fortunate provincials are studying the world and its ways, and are feasting upon elopements, divorces, and suicides, tricked out in all the elegancies of Mr. Topham’s phraseology, I am obliged to be contented with village vices, petty iniquities, and vulgar sins.”--_Memoirs_, vol. ii., p. 77. [111] Major Topham was the proprietor of the fashionable morning paper entitled _The World_. “In this paper,” says Mr. Gifford, in his preface to the “Baviad,” “were given the earliest specimens of those unqualified and audacious attacks on all private character, which the town first smiled at for their quaintness, then tolerated for their absurdity; and--now that other papers equally wicked and more intelligible have ventured to imitate it--will have to lament to the last hour of British liberty.” [112] Walpole was mistaken here. It was their granduncle, not their grandfather, from whom Mr. Berry had expected to inherit. [113] The date is thus put, alluding to his age, which, in 1789, was seventy-one.--MARY BERRY. [114] “Bishop Bonner’s Ghost.” [115] Her “Observations and Reflections made in the course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany,” honoured with a couplet in the “Baviad”-- “See Thrale’s grey widow with a satchel roam, And bring in pomp laborious nothings home.” [116] One half the prediction was fulfilled, since the Duke of Clarence outlived the Duke of York, and came to the throne in 1830, on the death of his eldest brother, at this time, 1789, the Prince of Wales. [117] This alludes to Miss Berry’s father having been disinherited by an uncle, to whom he was heir-at-law, and a large property left to his younger brother.--MARY BERRY. [118] A drawing by Miss Agnes Berry. [119] His secretary. [120] An unmarried sister of the first Earl Howe, who then lived at Richmond. [121] Here begins Kirgate’s handwriting in the MS. [122] A friend of the Berrys. He was then one of the Commissioners for Auditing the Public Accounts. [123] Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He was succeeded in the office by Lord Grenville.