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58 horseback. This system commenced in 1784, twenty years after Mr. Allen's decease. Mail coaches led to a general improvement of roads, and this again to an increase in the speed of coaches, while the reticulations of cross posts became more fine, with intersections in every possible direction, and the whole continues still improving; so that, morally speaking, the illustrious founder still lives and breathes among us.

Mr. Allen had a sister, whom I faintly remember the widow of a Mr. Elliott, and left with an only daughter. The old lady had great pleasure in relating what she had seen and heard at Prior Park, her having been there in company with Pope, Swift, Thomson, &c. and from her is derived the story related by Mr. Polwhele of Mr. Hugh Boscowen.

The daughter married Mr. Thomas Daniell, then chief clerk to Mr. Lemon, an individual not moving in a sphere so splendid as that of Mr. Allen, but probably at least his equal in all the qualities essential to those who fix a new era in the history of whatever they undertake. On Mr. Lemon's decease in 1760, Mr. Daniell was enabled by the bounty of his wife's uncle to take all the large mercantile concern on himself, and having soon afterwards constructed a residence in Truro, Mr. Allen presented him with several ship-loads of Bath stone; and thus Truro, having quarries of excellent silicious building-stone almost in its streets, and with granite distant only a few miles, exhibits the front of its most handsome house encrusted with oolite from Bath. To a similar act of liberality on the part of Mr. Allen, the hospital of St. Bartholomew in London is indebted for an exterior casing of the same stone; which, in consequence of the recent improvements and extension of inland navigation, is now brought in great quantities to the metropolis, to Oxford, and to places still more remote from the quarries.

I may here perhaps introduce with propriety a relation