Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/71

 Rh esteem. The banking family of Hoare, whose head as the squire of Barnes, had known the circumstances of the family for many years, had assisted him and with such help Warner had " been able to support his mother and his nearest relations whom his father, with a great deal of literary merit had left beggars." If the doctor could only get a piece of preferment that would add two or three hundred pounds a year to his income he would be of all men the most happy. Ireland existed at this moment for the benefit of impecunious Englishmen and Selwyn suggested that some preferment in that country, which he might afterwards exchange, should be bestowed upon him. If Selwyn's own benefice of Ludgershall were vacant, he would not ask for Carlisle's services. But the present incumbent was his relation, whom he had brought into the church with the hope of preferments from him. Otherwise he would certainly have given Warner that living and have consigned his kinsman to the good offices of Mr. Townshend. All this was written in the January and February of 1781. Next month Warner was to set off to Aix to " conduct home the Dowager Countess of Carlisle, a lady of very whimsical character," who was infatuated with an adventurer styling himself a German baron. In June he was with her in France and ere the summer was out had returned to his own land. The letters which he wrote during one of his expeditions to meet that countess were " highly diverting " but were so free in their nature that when the rev. Richard Penneck, the jovial superintendent of the reading-room at the British Museum had read them to "Jack " Taylor after a tete-a-tete dinner they were " successively committed to the flames." It would seem that in the late autumn of 1781 Warner was working for peace between France and England. He was to e 2