Here he spent large
sums, especially on pictures, and cultivated Cantelupe melons; and here,
as he grew older, and became permanently afflicted with deafness, his
chief companion was a useful friend, Solomon Dayrolles--one of those
indebted hangers-on whom it was an almost invariable custom to find, at
that period, in great houses--and perhaps too frequently in our own day.
Dayrolles, who was employed in the embassy under Lord Sandwich at the
Hague, had always, to borrow Horace Walpole's ill-natured expression,
'been a led-captain to the Dukes of Richmond and Grafton, used to be
sent to auctions for them, and to walk in the parks with their
daughters, and once went dry-nurse in Holland with them. He has
belonged, too, a good deal to my Lord Chesterfield, to whom I believe he
owes this new honour, "that of being minister at the Hague," as he had
before made him black-rod in Ireland, and gave the ingenious reason that
he had a black face.' But the great 'dictator' in the empire of
politeness was now in a slow but sure decline. Not long before his
death he was visited by Monsieur Suard, a French gentleman, who was
anxious to see '_l'homme le plus aimable, le plus poli et le plus
spirituel des trois royaumes_,' but who found him fearfully altered;
morose from his deafness, yet still anxious to please.
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