Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/77

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Lady Hester Stanhope.
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not happen again:' but, what with great dinners, and one thing and another, it was impossible to do any good. As for your talking about English servants being more honest than those of other countries, I don't know what to say about it.

"Where Wraxall, in his book, insinuates that Mr. Pitt gave Mr. Smith a title, and made him Lord Carrington, merely to discharge a debt for money supplied in his emergencies, he is wrong, doctor. Mr. Pitt once borrowed a sum of money of six persons, but Lord Carrington was not of the number, and the title bestowed on him was for quite another reason: it was to recompense the zeal he had shown in raising a volunteer corps at his own expense at Nottingham, and in furnishing government with a sufficient sum to raise another. Mr. Pitt had also found Mr. Smith a useful man in affording him information about bankers' business, which he often stood in need of, and in making dinner parties, to enable Mr. Pitt to get rid of troublesome people, whom he otherwise would have been obliged to entertain at his own table. But Mr. Pitt never knew what I heard after his death, by mere accident, that the principal part of the loan, which Mr. S. presented to government in his own name, was in reality the gift of an old miser at Nottingham; who, being unable or unwilling to go to town to see the Chancellor of the Exchequer in person, and to be