I really am at a loss to draw any sort of parallel between the public
merits of his grace, by which he justifies the grants he holds, and
these services of mine, on the favourable construction of which I have
obtained what his grace so much disapproves. In private life, I have not
at all the honour of acquaintance with the noble duke. But I ought to
presume, and it costs me nothing to do so, that he abundantly deserves
the esteem and love of all who live with him. But as to public service,
why truly it would not be more ridiculous for me to compare myself in
rank, in fortune, in splendid descent, in youth, strength, or figure,
with the duke of Bedford, than to make a parallel between his services
and my attempts to be useful to my country. It would not be gross
adulation, but uncivil irony, to say, that he has any public merit of
his own to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed
pensions were obtained. My merits, whatever they are, are original
and personal; his are derivative. It is his ancestor, the original
pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit, which
makes his grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all
other grantees of the crown. Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I
should have said, 'Tis his estate; that's enough. It is his by law; what
have I to do with it or its history? He would naturally have said on his
side, 'Tis this man's fortune. He is as good now as my ancestor was two
hundred and fifty years ago. I am a young man with very old pensions: he
is an old man with very young pensions,--that's all. Why will his grace,
by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my little merit with
that which obtained from the crown those prodigies of profuse donation
by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and laborious
individuals? I would willingly leave him to the herald's college,
which the philosophy of the sans culottes (prouder by far than all the
Garters, and Norroys, and Clarencieux, and Rouge Dragons, that ever
pranced in a procession of what his friends call aristocrats and
despots) will abolish with contumely and scorn. These historians,
recorders, and blazoners of virtues and arms, differ wholly from that
other description of historians, who never assign any act of politicians
to a good motive. These gentle historians, on the contrary, dip their
pens in nothing but the milk of human kindness. They seek no further for
merit than the preamble of a patent, or the inscription of a tomb. With
them every man created a peer is first a hero ready made. They judge of
every man's capacity for office by the offices he has filled; and the
more offices, the more ability. Every general-officer with them is
a Marlborough; every statesman a Burleigh; every judge a Murray or
a Yorke. They who, alive, were laughed at or pitied by all their
acquaintance, make as good a figure as the best of them in the pages of
Guillim, Edmondson, and Collins.