Page:Devonshire Characters and Strange Events.djvu/747

Rh and savagely opposed sinecure offices, yet no sooner was he raised to the peerage than he accepted one for himself, that of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with the enormous pension of £4,000 per annum. He had as Solicitor-General acquired the then unprecedented sum of £10,000 per annum. As money-lender he had obtained estates that brought him in large sums; but he ravened for more.

It is not my purpose to follow his political career, but to confine myself to his private life. The days of sevenpenny dinners in the Chancery Lane eating-house were left behind. He unbent after labours of the day in the Literary Club founded by Johnson in 1764, where he met Goldsmith and Sir William Jones, Reynolds, his fellow Devonian, who twice painted his portrait, Gibbon, and Burke. That Johnson and he entertained a mutual admiration is evinced by a conversation recorded by Boswell. "I told him," says the biographer, "that I had talked of him to Mr. Dunning a few days before, and had said that in his company we did not so much as interchange conversation as listen to him; and that Dunning observed upon this, ’One is always willing to listen to Dr. Johnson.' To which I answered, ’That is a great deal for you, Sir.' 'Yes, Sir,' (said Johnson), ’a great deal indeed. Here is a man willing to listen, to whom the world is listening all the rest of the year.'"

Dunning now purchased for £4700 the residue of a lease of ninety-nine years of the manors of Spitchwick and Widdecombe. In a letter to his sister he says that the length to which his lease would run would be sixty-three years. It was actually eighty-eight; and he made a very good bargain by the purchase. He built the ugly house at Spitchwick where had formerly stood a chapel of S. Laurence, and did much planting. He