The domain of personal incident crops up richly and interestingly throughout these volumes, and comes freshly and truthfully upon us in the correspondence of the hour. Whether we read of Lady ----, who ran away with her footman John, and sent back her fine clothes, 'because she would no longer have any need for them;' or of the deep gambling and other queer affairs of Charles Fox in his dissipated youth; or of the sayings and doings of the notorious Wilkes, who so shocked society, or of his duel, in which he bore himself so honourably, the epistolary narrative is full of _naïveté_ and interest. The second marriage of Lord Coventry (whose first wife was the elder of the beautiful Miss Gunnings) must have been what is now called 'good fun.' The marriage party was all assembled in stately magnificence; but his Grace of Canterbury was from home, and the licence did not arrive! But the party was equal to the emergency--'so it was agreed that they should eat the dinner, rather than it should be spoiled. So to dinner they went [at the early hour then in fashion], and sat all the afternoon, dressed in their white and silver, expecting every moment the express from Lambeth, but nothing came. The same reason held good for eating a supper as for eating the dinner; and in short they supped and sat till after two, and then, by mutual consent, dismissed the parson, and all retired.' Two hours afterwards (4 a.m.) the express with the licence arrived, and the ceremony went off with due _éclat_ in the forenoon. We may remark that it is comforting to find in these letters of the day a guarantee for the genuineness of many of the excellent bonmots and repartees which have taken their place in our anecdotical literature in connection with the more or less famous men of that period, and which sparkle pleasantly across the pages of these volumes.
But quitting the domain of purely personal incident, let us glance at some passages in the letters which throw curious light upon the England of our forefathers in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Here is a picture of Cambridgeshire which looks strange now, and which indeed startled the writer thereof, Mrs. Harris, when she and her husband went on a visit to their friend the Dean of Sarum's parsonage in that locality. She says that the country is the most disagreeable she ever saw; and talking of the Fens, says that the herds of cattle which feed on them in the summer months are up to their bellies in water even in the dry season:--