Nothing of note in Parliament, except one slight day on the
American taxes.--Horace Walpole.

There were plenty of men in England, any time before 1763, who
found that an excellent arrangement which permitted them to hold
office in the colonies while continuing to reside in London. They
were thereby enabled to make debts, and sometimes even to pay
them, without troubling much about their duties; and one may
easily think of them, over their claret, as Mr. Trevelyan says,
lamenting the cruelty of a secretary of state who hinted that,
for form's sake at least, they had best show themselves once in a
while in America. They might have replied with Junius: "It was
not Virginia that wanted a governor, but a court favorite that
wanted a salary." Certainly Virginia could do with a minimum of
royal officials; but most court favorites wanted salaries, for
without salaries unendowed gentlemen could not conveniently live
in London.

One of these gentlemen, in the year 1763, was Mr. Grosvenor
Bedford. He was not, to be sure, a court favorite, but a man, now
well along in years, who had long ago been appointed to be
Collector of the Customs at the port of Philadelphia. The
appointment had been made by the great minister, Robert Walpole,
for whom Mr. Bedford had unquestionably done some service or
other, and of whose son, Horace Walpole, the letter-writer, he
had continued from that day to be a kind of dependent or protege,
being precisely the sort of unobtrusive factotum which that
fastidious eccentric needed to manage his mundane affairs. But
now, after this long time, when the King's business was placed in