blast the fancied rights of men.
Pray by what logic are those rights
Allow'd to Blacks,--denied to Whites?'

Others may fail their king and country, but he as a throne and altar
Tory calls all to know that

'An ancient baron of the land
I by my king shall ever stand.'

He was now at last near the haven. The mass of his papers and materials
had been arranged, after a labour which, as he tells Reynolds, was
really enormous. The capacity for sustained effort, when set to it, of
which he had boasted over his condensation of the evidence in the great
Douglas case, stood him now in good service amid all his vexations,
dissipations and follies.

In February 1788 we hear of his having yet seven years of the life to
write. By January 1789 he had finished the introduction and the
dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, both of which had appeared difficult,
but he was confident they had been well done. To excite the interest in
his coming book, or as Mr Leslie Stephen thinks, to secure copyright, he
published in 1790 two quarto parts at half a guinea each--the letter to
Chesterfield and the conversation of Johnson with the king. By December
he has had additional matter sent him from Warren Hastings, and he hoped
to be out on 8th March, but the January of the new year found him with
still two hundred pages of copy, and the death not yet written. Yet many
a time, as he writes Temple, had he thought of giving it up. To add to
his troubles, he had indulged in landed speculations, paying L2500 for
the estate of a younger branch; he had been lending money to a cousin,
and if he could but raise a thousand pounds on the strength of his book,
he should be inclined to hold on, or 'game with it,' as Sir Joshua said.
Neither Reynolds nor Malone, however, took the hint; and at the latter's
door he cast longing looks as he passed. He tells him he had been in the
chair at the club, with Fox 'quoting Homer and Fielding to the
astonishment of Jo. Warton.' He had bought a lottery ticket with the
hopes of the prize of L5000, but--blank! The advance he needed was got
elsewhere, and the property in his book saved. April finds him
correcting the last sheet. He feared the result: 'I may get no profit,
the public may be disappointed, I may make enemies, even have quarrels.
But the very reverse of all this may happen.' Then on the 19th he writes
to Dempster: 'my _magnum opus_, in two volumes quarto, is to be
published on Monday, 16th May'-