Page:The Wentworth Papers 1715-1739.djvu/19

 which follows. Thomas was the second son ; but his elder brother lost his life when still a youth. The third son, Peter, one of the most regular of letter-writers to his brother, was in early life equerry to the Duke of Gloucester, Queen Anne's son, and afterwards to Prince George of Denmark, upon whose death he seems to have obtained a similar position about the person of the queen. Little else can be told of his career that cannot be gathered from his own letters, so we leave them to tell the story, with the exception of two extracts from a letter, not elsewhere quoted, which have a more direct personal reference to himself In June, 1709, when his brother Thomas was our ambassador at Berlin, he offered Peter a post under him, which he declined, mainly for the following reasons, which we give in his own words : —

" I neither can speak nor write Latin, for I had no school- learning, but went from Holland, without knowing one word of Latin, immediately to the University, and there made it my business to understand a Latin author as one does a French book, for I was too far advanced in age to spend much time to make myself a grammarian, my whole design being then to qualify myself for the church, in order to which I was to employ my time to attain the sense of authors, and not stick at the order of words. Ecclesiastical history I was beginning with all my might, but then I married, which put an end to all my studies, and have improved in nothing but in children for these 10 or 12 years last past."

" Besides the before-mentioned disqualification, nature gives me no assistance of any quickness of parts to hide the want of acquired ; but, on the contrary, I have an innate horrid quality of an unaccountable foolish bashfulness which is enough to spoil the most ingenious person's behaviour, and what work that would make with so dull a creature as I, in so conspicious an employment, I blush with the very thoughts of it."

Peter married Juliana, daughter of Thomas Horde, of Cote, Oxfordshire, and his country house was at Henbury, Dorset- shire. It is only too evident from many letters that have been preserved, though most of them were hardly of sufficient

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