His private life was reported to be very licentious. He married the widow of Sir Richard Ellys, Baronet, by whom he had no children, and died in 1781. The peerage, to which his claim is mentioned in a following page, descended to the Stapylton family.--E. [227] They called themselves the Dilettanti. In the year 1770, they published a pompous volume on some rubbish remaining of two or three temples in Ionia. [228] William Henry, third son of Frederick Prince of Wales; afterwards Duke of Gloucester. [229] Lord Bute held his levées at the Cockpit, Whitehall, as did afterwards the Duke of Grafton and Lord North. Till then, each minister saw company at his own house; but Lord Bute, who lived in a small house in Audley Street, Grosvenor Square, had not room enough. [230] Mr., afterwards Sir Gilbert, Elliot, father of the late Earl of Minto. His connection with Lord Bute does credit to that nobleman’s discernment, for he was a most useful coadjutor; and Professor Stewart says of him, that he “seems to have united with his other well-known talents and accomplishments, a taste for abstract disquisitions which rarely occurs in men of the world, accompanied with that soundness and temperance of judgment which in such researches are so indispensably necessary to guard the mind against the illusions engendered by its own subtility.”--Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. ii. p. 530.--E. [231] Dr. Smollet, originally a ship-surgeon, was an abusive Jacobite writer, author of a compilation of the History of England, in which he had spoken most scurrilously of the Duke of Cumberland for suppressing the Rebellion, and had been punished by the King’s Bench for slandering Admiral Knowles. [His “genius,” however, to use the words of Walter Scott, “has raised an imperishable monument to his memory,” in the poems and novels which Walpole does not deign to notice in this allusion to his works. Nor is the criticism just in other respects. Smollet’s tracts are not more virulent than most publications of a similar character of that day. His censure of the Duke of Cumberland has been confirmed by subsequent historians, and his punishment for the libel on Admiral Knowles reflects discredit on the Admiral rather than on himself.--See Walter Scott’s Lives of the Novelists, vol. i. p. 143.--E.] [232] Murphy, once an actor, was turned hackney writer, and had engaged in a paper called _the Contest_, in behalf of Lord Holland. He stole many plays from the French, and published other things long since forgotten. [“The Way to keep Him,” and “All in the Wrong,” are alone a sufficient refutation of the above harsh criticism on Murphy. He was a person of considerable accomplishments, and wanted only a better temper and more independence of character to have risen to eminence. He died at an advanced age in 1805.--E.]