_11th May._--Parr entertained us uncommonly; he was in full force. We gratified him highly by going into the room into which he retreated to smoke. His vanity is such that the slightest attention elates him, and more particularly, when it comes from a person whom he would denominate a woman of quality. Mr. Knight’s love of pedantry got him too frequently upon verbal criticism, and when they did fall upon a doubtful Greek word, they pulled at it like hungry curs. When they returned to the library he talked upon literature. His praise of Middleton’s style was that a man of strong feelings and vigorous conceptions ought to study it to abate the ardour and rigidity of style, and he recommended it to Bobus. He asserted that Middleton was an unbeliever in Christianity, and read several passages, which put it out of all doubt, from his _Defence of the Free Enquiry_. Of Warburton he expressed the utmost admiration; his opponents, he said, who had attacked him, were snarling hounds; ‘mine was the froth of a mastiff.’ He said of Burke’s first book upon the French Revolution that it was ‘the effervescence of rage’; the second was ‘the bitter sediment of malignity.’ On Tuesday I went to Money Hill; Miss Fox, Drew, and Charles went with us. I returned on Friday. The two mornings I passed there we drove about in the sociable to see the country. We drove through Cassiobury, Lord Essex’s; to The Grove, Ld. Clarendon’s, and so on to Russell Farm, the Ladies’ Capel. Pretty ground and fertile country. Ld. H. fished, and caught a few trout. Beauclerk did not articulate ten words; he seems happy, but it is the bliss of torpor. She resides reluctantly in the dignified solitude of a _guinguette_ in the skirts of a petty town. From Beauclerk’s practice one should think his precept was that conversation spoilt society; he rarely incurs that _risque_. It is to be regretted, as he has a most acute perception, and an uncommon degree of subtilty in his argument. No person is clearer on the _obscure_ subject of abstract metaphysics; his definitions are ingenious and brilliant. Finance is also a branch of political economy he is profound in, and had he entered Parliament he would have distinguished himself. At present he is lost; shyness, indolence, and a sort of content deprive society of his exertions and his friends of his company. [Sidenote: THE KING SHOT AT]