Page:Eight Friends of the Great - WP Courtney.djvu/65

through the arguments of a priest at the church of St. Eustache, she had become a convert to roman Catholicism. Warner was not displeased — " all the portion she asks is only my picture on a snuff box," he says, but he supposes that he " must make a little addition and put some- thing in the box " — for when she took up her abode in a nunnery there would be a larger share of his small means for each of his other sisters and his nephews. That he did not attach much importance to differences in religious observ- ances may be realised from the statement of " Jack" Taylor (records of my life. Vol. L, 177-8) that he was one of the company at dinner with the Rev. Richard Penneck in his rooms at the British Museum, who agreed that a Roman catholic priest might accept from Mr. Townley, himself a Roman catholic, the offer of a " good benefice " in the English church which was in his gift. The priest is said to have been duly instituted, to have become " a favourite preacher with his congregation and to have performed his duties with exemplary zeal and piety." At the beginning of April, 1779, Warner was once more in England, in his bachelor's den at Barnard's Inn, on the south side of Holborn, and one of his first acts in London was to endeavour to see the corpse of poor Miss Ray at the Shakespeare Tavern, so as to send Selwyn an account of it but he " had no interest with her keepers and could not get admittance for money." He had therefore to content him- self by forwarding some details of Hackman, her murderer. Later on, however, he saw Hackman's dead body a " fine corpse " at Surgeon's Hall, and found him a " genteel, well- made young fellow of four and twenty." In his " little cabin," as Warner called his rooms in Barnard's Inn or in his country residence in Bedfordshire, his life ebbed away, in social enjoyment, in preaching, and in the performance of kind acts. He loved good living and his game