.
Bedford, along with many other estimable gentlemen, was forthwith to be
turned out of his office.

To Horace Walpole it was a point of more than academic importance to
know whether gentlemen were to be unceremoniously turned out of their
offices. As far back as 1738, while still a lad, he had himself been
appointed to be Usher of the Exchequer; and as soon as he came of age,
he says, "I took possession of two other little patent places in
the Exchequer, called Comptroller of the Pipe, and Clerk of the
Estreats"--all these places having been procured for him through the
generosity of his father. The duties of these offices, one may suppose,
were not arduous, for it seems that they were competently administered
by Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, in addition to his duties as Collector of the
Customs at the port of Philadelphia; so well administered, indeed, that
Horace Walpole's income from them, which in 1740 was perhaps not more
than 1500 pounds a year, nearly doubled in the course of a generation.
And this income, together with another thousand which he had annually
from the Collector's place in the Custom House, added to the interest
of 20,000 pounds which he had inherited, enabled him to live very
well, with immense leisure for writing odd books, and letters full
of extremely interesting comment on the levity and low aims of his
contemporaries.

And so Horace Walpole, good patron that he was and competent
letter-writer, very naturally, hearing that Mr. Bedford was to lose an
office to which in the course of years he had become much accustomed,
sat down and wrote a letter to Mr. George Grenville in behalf of his
friend and servant. "Though I am sensible I have no pretensions for
asking you a favour,... yet I flatter myself I shall not be thought quite
impertinent in interceding for a person, who I can answer has neither
been to blame nor any way deserved punishment, and therefore I think
you, Sir, will be ready to save him from prejudice. The person I mean is
my deputy, Mr. Grosvenor Bedford, who, above five and twenty years ago,
was appointed Collector of the Customs in Philadelphia by my father. I
hear he is threatened to be turned out. If the least fault can be laid
to his charge, I do not desire to have him protected. If there cannot,
I am too well persuaded, Sir, of your justice not to be sure you will be
pleased to protect him."

George Grenville, a dry, precise man of great knowledge and industry,
almost always rig