Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/69

Rh Warner's deeds of kindness and sympathy were undoubted. He was exerting himself at one period in his life for the benefit of his nephew. At another time he was flying "directly across country" from Hockliffe to Eton to help a friend's son "now in his last year and with a certainty of King's " who had got into a scrape and was threatened with expulsion. He was full of anxiety in an attempt to secure the post of governess in an English family of quality for a poor Frenchwoman aged 50. In October 1787 he sped from Gloucester to Bath to attend the remains of "his poor departed friend, sir Richard Hoare, to their place of rest at Barnes, in Surrey." When he returned to England about 1794 and took up his abode in Clerkenwell, he witnessed the distress brought upon that district by the watch tax, and exerted himself to the utmost extent to relieve the necessities of the poor workmen around him. He was one of a small set of four persons, three of them being clergymen, who recognised that individual help by small doles was of no avail, and consequently united their resources in order that they might be able by their collective offerings to render effective help to any worthy person in distress. Many good offices were done by and through their co-operation. Penneck of the British Museum was the survivor of these Samaritans. His kindly jocularity broke out in the lines to Mademoiselle Fagnani, the child that Selwyn and some other rakes of the period claimed the parentage of, on her eighth birthday. The opening lines " The morn that gave to Mie Mie birth Provokes the dullest son of earth, Provokes a snail, prosaic creature 1 To try for once, to crawl in metre " are a sufficient specimen of his efforts in poetical compliment. He himself must have thought well of the effusion, for after- wards he signs some of his letters and speaks of himself as F.G. E