Note 28 — Chapter IX · HISTORIC NOOKS OF WARWICKSHIRE

Dr. Joseph Wharton, in a letter to the poet Gay, described Lavinia Fenton as follows: "She was a very accomplished and most agreeable companion; had much wit, good strong sense, and a just taste in polite literature. Her person was agreeable and well made; though I think she could never be called a beauty. I have had the pleasure of being at table with her when her conversation was much admired by the first characters of the age, particularly old Lord Bathurst and Lord Granville." General James Wolfe, killed in battle, at the famous storming of Quebec, was born in 1726, and he died in 1759. Robert Clive, the famous soldier and the first Lord Clive, was born in 1725, and he died, a suicide,—haunted, it was superstitiously said, by ghosts of slaughtered East Indians,—in 1774.