Page:The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, Volume 3.djvu/103

Rh at home, and then attended to Cambridge. The lady afterwards detained him with her as the auditor of her accounts. He often wandered to London, and amused himself with the conversation of his friends.

He died in 1730, at Easthampstead in Berkshire, the seat of lady Trumbull; and Pope, who had been always his friend, honoured him with an epitaph, of which he borrowed the two first lines from Crashaw.

Fenton was tall and bulky, inclined to corpulence, which he did not lessen by much exercise; for he was very sluggish and sedentary, rose late, and when he had risen, sat down to his book or papers. A woman that once waited on him in a lodging, told him, as she said, that he would "lie a-bed, and be fed with a spoon." This however, was not the worst that might have been prognosticated, for Pope says, in his Letters, that "he died of indolence;" but his immediate distemper was the gout.

Of his morals and his conversation the account is uniform: he was never named but praise and fondness, as a man in the highest degree amiable and excellent. Such was the character given by the earl of Rh