CHAP, xij GOLDSMITH IN PRACTICE AND BUEKE IN OFFICE,

only issue lie consented to recognise) who continued after 1705.
the separation to live with her father and aunt, Mrs. Peg jJtTIV
Nugent, till she married the Marquis of Buckingham in 1775,
and united the names of Nugent and Grenville, Pdchard
Glover (the epic and dramatic poet of Leicester-house) cha-
racterises him briefly as a jovial voluptuous Irishman who
had left popery for the protestant religion, money, and
widows;—but Glover lived to see him surrender these
favourites, and, not far from his eightieth year, go back to
popery again. When his friendship with Goldsmith began, he
was a tall, stout, vigorous man of nearly sixty, with a remark-
ably loud voice and a broad Irish brogue; whose strong and
ready wit, careless decision of manner, and reckless auda-
city of expression, obtained him always a hearing from the
House of Commons, in which he had sat for four-and-twenty
years. He was now watching, with more than ordinary
personal interest, the turn of the political wheel. So3 for
the interest they took in the opening of Burke's great political
life, was his new friend Goldsmith, and every member of the
Gerrard-street club.

The ministry which succeeded Bute's (that of George
Grenville and the Bedfords, or, as they were called, the
Bloornsbury gang) * was coming to a close at last, after a
series of impolitic blunders without parallel in the annals
of statesmen. Early in March of the previous year ('64),
after convulsing England from end to end with the question

'' one of the clauses went to propose that watchmen should be compelled to
"sleep during the day-time, Lord Nugent, "with admirable humour, got up
"and desired that he might be personally included in the provisions of the
" bill, being frequently so tormented with the gout, as to be unable to sleep either
« by day or by night." i. 131-135.

* So called because Bedford-house stood in Bloomsbury-square. Walpole's
George III. ii. 441. The Pitt and Temple party were styled, happily enough,
the whole cousin-[cozen]-hood. Waldegrave's Memoirs, 56.[Wraxall is writing two years after Goldsmith's death]