MR. AUSTIN DOBSON'S ESSAY - St
ADmInsas of Mr. Austin Dobson's work, and students of the eighteenth century generally, will find much to interest them in his latest collection of essays. One of the most attractive of the papers is that on " Streatham Place," for many years the borne of the Thrales and "the summer resi- dence of Johnson " "In that delightful white house which was not so far from the roadway but that one could see the early bird-catchers on Tooting Common, he must have had almost every luxury that opulence could extend to an ailing and unusually unwieldy man between sixty and seventy. He had obviously his own attendant, for it is on record that his black servant Francis Barber married one of Mrs. Thrale's maids. There was, besides, a watchful valet always ready to bustle after and intercept him at the parlour door when
• Is Conscience an Emotion Three Lectures on Recent Ethical, Theories. By Us:dings ritishdall, D.Litt., P.B.A. London: T. Fisher linwiu. [4s. 6d. net.] f Roselba's Journal, and other`rapers. By Austin Dobson. London: Chatto And Windua.„ [6s.]
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he neglected to change his second best wig before he wont to dinner; and as he mounted bodward, the same inflexible attendant followed him with another."
Another essay which is specially interesting is that on the Duchess of Portland, "Prior's Peggy," whose amusements when in the country were "all of the Rural kind—Working, Spinning, Knotting, Drawing, Reading, Writing, Walking, and picking Herbs to put into an Herbal." On one occasion the Princess Amelia honoured " Peggy " with a visit, the prepara- tions for which Mrs. Delany, sister to the Duchess, describes as follows :— " All the comfortable sophas and great chairs, all the piramids of books (adorning almost every chair), all the tables and even the spinning-wheel were banish'd for that day, and the blew damask chairs set in prim form around the room, only one arm'd chair placed in the middle for her Royal Highness."
Mrs. Delany further tells us that when the Princess arrived she and her attendants were "conducted by the keeper, who met them at the end of the common, and were brought (not the common way) but thro' the bosom." We may also note "A New Dialogue of the Dead," which is "an attempt to imagine a meeting . . . between Henry Fielding and his first biographer, Arthur Murphy."
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