the hands of George Grenville, who entertained the odd notion
that a Collector of the Customs should reside at the port of
entry where the customs were collected rather than in London
where he drew his salary, it was being noised about, and was
presently reported at Strawberry Hill, that Mr. Bedford, along
with many other estimable gentlemen, was forthwith to be turned
out of his office.

To Horace Walpole it was a point of more than academic importance
to know whether gentlemen were to be unceremoniously turned out
of their offices. As far back as 1738, while still a lad, he had
himself been appointed to be Usher of the Exchequer; and as soon
as he came of age, he says, "I took possession of two other
little patent places in the Exchequer, called Comptroller of the
Pipe, and Clerk of the Estreats"--all these places having been
procured for him through the generosity of his father. The duties
of these offices, one may suppose, were not arduous, for it seems
that they were competently administered by Mr. Grosvenor Bedford,
in addition to his duties as Collector of the Customs at the port
of Philadelphia; so well administered, indeed, that Horace
Walpole's income from them, which in 1740 was perhaps not more
than 1500 pounds a year, nearly doubled in the course of a
generation. And this income, together with another thousand which
he had annually from the Collector's place in the Custom House,
added to the interest of 20,000 pounds which he had inherited,
enabled him to live very well, with immense leisure for writing
odd books, and letters full of extremely interesting comment on
the levity and low aims of his contemporaries.

And so Horace Walpole, good patron that he was and competent