This year my valuable and very sincere friend, the Earl of Orford, died. The public papers that have announced the death of this noble lord have recorded the ancestry from which he was descended, the heirs of his honours, and the inheritors of his wealth, and have dwelt upon the titles that are extinct or devolved, together with all the posts and employments that are vacant. To me be the melancholy duty of noting what is of much more moment than the descent of a peerage or the transfer of an estate—the loss of an animated improver; of one who gave importance to cultivation by a thorough knowledge of political economy, and bent all his endeavours towards making mankind happy by seconding the pursuits of the farmer and the enquiries of the experimentalist. I leave the lieutenancy of a county, the rangership of a park, and the honours of the bedchamber to those in whose eyes such baubles are respectable. I would rather dwell on the merit of the first importer of Southdown sheep into Norfolk; on the merit of sending to the most distant regions for breeds of animals, represented as useful, not indeed always with success, but never without liberality in the motive; on the patron and friend of the common farmer, not the lord of a little circle of tenants, but the general and diffusive encourager of every species of agricultural improvement. Nor did he associate with the useful men because he was not qualified for the company of higher classes, for his mind was fraught with a great extent of knowledge; it was decorated by no trivial stores of classical learning, which exercised and set off the powers of a brilliant imagination, and thus qualified, alike for a Court or an Academy of Science, he felt no degradation in attending to THE PLOUGH. By the death of this noble personage the ‘Annals’ have lost a valuable correspondent, and their editor a warm friend. Notwithstanding the immense list of Peers, seven or eight only have become correspondents in this work. The insects of a drawing-room, the patrons of faro, the luminaries of Newmarket, are spared; while the hand of death deprives the farmer of a friend, Norfolk of a protector, and England of a real patriot.