Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should
have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I
live in, a sort of founder of a family: I should have left a son, who,
in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed,--in science, in
erudition, in genius, in taste, in honour, in generosity, in humanity,
in every liberal sentiment, and every liberal accomplishment,--would not
have shown himself inferior to the duke of Bedford, or to any of those
whom he traces in his line. His grace very soon would have wanted all
plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more
to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency,
and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that
successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of merit in me, or
in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous
and manly action. Every day he lived he would have re-purchased the
bounty of the Crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had
received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever
but in the performance of some duty. At this exigent moment, the loss of
a finished man is not easily supplied.
But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose
wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another
manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better.
The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which
the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my
honours, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth!
There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognise the divine
justice, and in some degree submit to it. But whilst I humble myself
before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of
unjust and inconsiderate men. The patience of Job is proverbial. After
some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted
himself, and repented in dust and ashes. But even so, I do not find
him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal
asperity, those ill-natured neighbours of his, who visited his dunghill
to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery. I am
alone. I have none to meet my enemies in the gate. Indeed, my Lord, I
greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of
refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honour in the world. This
is the appetite but of a few. It is a luxury, it is a privilege, it is
an indulgence for those who are at their ease. But we are all of us made
to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain, and poverty, and
disease. It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct
is always in the right. I live in an inverted order. They who ought to
have succeeded me have gone before me. They who should have been to
me as posterity are in the place of ancestors. I owe to the dearest
relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which
he would have performed to me; I owe it to him to show that he was
not descended, as the duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy
parent.