By the
end of the year Vols. III. and IV. were in the press, and on January
27, 1761, they made their appearance. They had been disposed of in
advance to Dodsley for 380_l._--no bad terms of remuneration in
those days; but it is still likely enough that the publisher made
a profitable bargain. The new volumes sold freely, and the public
laughed at them as heartily as their two predecessors. Their author's
vogue in London, whither he went in December, 1760, to superintend
publication, was as great during the next spring as it had been in
the last. The tide of visitors again set in all its former force and
volume towards the "genteel lodgings." His dinner list was once more
full, and he was feasted and flattered by wits, beaux, courtiers,
politicians, and titled-lady lion-hunters as sedulously as ever. His
letters, especially those to his friends the Crofts, of Stillington,
abound, as before, in touches of the same amusing vanity. With how
delicious a sense of self-importance must he have written these words:
"You made me and my friends very merry with the accounts current at
York of my being forbad the Court, but they do not consider what a
considerable person they make of me when they suppose either my going
or not going there is a point that ever enters the K.
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