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a year and more after the events just related Shelburne seems to have availed himself in earnest of the opportunity of cultivating the retirement on the charms of which he had formerly insisted when writing to Fox. While his enemies at Court were blackening his character, he was buying MSS., entertaining his friends, making a lake at Bowood, and restoring order on his estate at Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, which, on his succession, he says he "had found tenanted by beggars and bankrupts, universally out of repair, great part uninclosed, and the bounds of the rest in the worst possible order. No tenants could be got to take it without a great deal being done, and without