Anson, Boscawen, and indeed nearly all the distinguished seamen of his day, were among his intimates or acquaintance; and he assisted some of the principal navigators in drawing up the relations which they gave to the world of their discoveries. In 1761, he was prompted by his apprehensions, that the nation was not sufficiently on her guard against the endeavours making by the French to deprive her of her possessions in the East, to publish a History of the War upon the Coast of Coromandel. The great work undertaken by Mr. Orme prevented him from pursuing the subject. Continuing thus to pass his days in the enjoyment of domestic happiness and learned ease, surrounded by a train of menials grown grey in his service, exercising the rites of hospitality with uniform cheerfulness, and performing the duties of religion with exemplary punctuality, respected by the good and admired by the ingenious, he reached his eighty-third year with little inconvenience from the usual infirmities of age. His faculties then declining, he was dismissed by a gradual exhaustion of his natural powers, and resigning his breath without a sigh on the seventeenth of September, 1802-- --Like ripe fruit he dropp'd Into his mother's lap ... ...for death mature. Having always lived in an union of the utmost tenderness with his family, he exhibited a pleasing instance of the "ruling passion strong in death." "Having passed," says his son, "a considerable time in a sort of doze, from which it was thought he had hardly strength to revive, he awoke, and upon seeing me, feebly articulated, 'How do the dear people do?' When I answered that they were well; with a smile upon his countenance, and an increased energy of voice, he replied, 'I thank God;' and then reposed his head upon his pillow, and spoke no more." He was buried at Twickenham, where, on inquiring a few years ago, I found that no monument had been raised to his memory. He left behind a widow, a daughter, and two sons. From the narrative of his life written by one of these, the Reverend Archdeacon Cambridge, and prefixed to a handsome edition of his poems and his papers in The World, the above account has been chiefly extracted. Chesterfield, another of the contributors to The World, inserted in it a short character of him under the name of Cantabrigiensis, introduced by an encomium on his temperance; for he was a water-drinker. That he was what is commonly termed a news-monger, appears from the following laughable story, told by the late Mr. George Hardinge, the Welch Judge:-- I wished upon some occasion to borrow a Martial. He told me he had no such book, _except by heart_. I therefore inferred, that he could not immediately detect me. Accordingly I sent him an epigram which I had made, and an English version of it, as from the original. He commended the latter, but said, that it wanted the neatness of the Roman. When I undeceived him, he laughed, and forgave me.