I was talking to Lady Charlotte Lindsay, the daughter of Lord North, a great favourite of mine, about the apartments and the furniture, when she said with a good deal of emotion: "This is an interesting visit to me.

I have never been in this house for fifty years.

It was here that I was born; I left it a child when my father fell from power in 1782, and I have never crossed the threshold since." Then she told me how the rooms seemed dwindled to her; how the staircase, which appeared to her in recollection to be the most spacious and magnificent that she had ever seen, had disappointed her.

She longed, she said, to go over the garrets and rummage her old nursery.

She told me how, in the No-Popery riots of 1780, she was taken out of bed at two o'clock in the morning.