The dread which the reviewer supposes him to have had, lest he
should lose caste as a gentleman, by ranking as a wit and an
author, he was much too fine a gentleman to have believed
in the possibility of feeling. He knew he had never studied
since he left college; he knew that he was not at all a
learned man: but the reputation he had acquired by his wit and
by his writings, not only among fine gentlemen, but with
society in general, made him nothing loath to cultivate every
opportunity of increasing it. The account he gave of the
idleness of his life to Sir Horace Mann, when he disclaims the
title of "the learned gentleman," was literally true; and it
is not easy to imagine any reason why a man at the age of
forty-three, who admits that he is idle, and who renounces
being either a learned man or a politician, should be
"ashamed" of playing loo in good company till two or three
o'clock in the morning, if he neither ruins himself nor
others. (11) He wrote his letters as rapidly as his disabled
fingers would allow him to form the characters of a remarkably
legible hand. No rough draughts or sketches of familiar
letters were found amongst his papers at Strawberry Hill: but
he was in the habit of putting down on the backs of letters or
on slips of paper, a note of facts, of news, of witticisms, or
of any thing he wished not to forget, for the amusement of his
correspondents.

After reading "The Mysterious Mother," who will accede to the
opinion, that his works are "destitute of every charm that is
derived from elevation, or from tenderness of sentiment?" (12)