He gave more attention to her account of Charles Fox than to any other part of her conversation. She spoke slightingly of him, and gave us some account of his life at Mrs. Armstead’s. She says he lives very little in the world, or in any general society, for years past; that his pleasure is to be at the head of a little society of ten or twelve toad eaters, and seems to contract his mind to such a situation. The conversation would have become more interesting had not Mrs. Crewe been so full of a plan for Ladies’ Subscriptions for the Emigrants, and consulting him so much on the means of securing the money from the fangs of the Bishop of St. Pol de Léon, whose part, however, Mr. Burke took steadily. This business was so discussed as to preclude much other conversation. Mr. Burke has been at Gregory’s twenty-nine years; and I was pleased to remark that he lived on the same moderate plan of life which I witnessed here five-and-twenty years ago. _Mem._ ‘To search for that visit.’[164] My visit on the whole was interesting. I am glad once more to have seen and conversed with the man who I hold to possess the greatest and most brilliant parts of any person of the age in which he lived. Whose conversation has often fascinated me; whose eloquence has charmed; whose writings have delighted and instructed the world; and whose name will without question descend to the latest posterity. But to behold so great a genius so depressed with melancholy, stooping with infirmity of body, feeling the anguish of a lacerated mind, and sinking to the grave under accumulated misery; to see all this in a character I venerate, and apparently without resource or comfort, wounded every feeling of my soul, and I left him the next day almost as low-spirited as himself. In May the Duke of Buccleugh carried me to see Mr. Secretary Dundas’s farm at Wimbledon, where I was to give my opinion of the mode of draining it. I found his people throwing money away like fools. They know nothing of the matter. This duke is another determined farmer, and seems to like conversing on no other subject.