s have not offered you a Deputy
Lieutenantcy; so cheap a distinction could not have hurt them. But
then you are too proud to ask,' &c. Do you really suppose that I would
have accepted it even if it had been offered? No, by God! I would not
accept any distinction even if it were offered by honest men. I will
have nothing but what I can take. It is, however, both an injustice
and an affront to confer this dignity on low people, who do not
possess a fourth of my property, and whose family is as ignoble as
Lord Melbourne's own, and not to have offered the same to me. In the
eleventh page of the _Letters_ I published after the quelling of
Bonaparte are these words: 'I was the first to abjure the party of
the Whigs, and shall be the last to abjure the principles. When the
leaders had broken all their promises to the nation, had shown their
utter incapacity to manage its affairs, and their inclination to
crouch before the enemy, I permitted my heart after some struggles to
subside and repose in the cool of this reflection--Let them escape.
It is only the French nation that ever dragged such feebleness to the
scaffold,' Again, page 35--'Honest men, I confess, have generally in
the present times an aversion to the Whig faction, not because it
is suitable either to honesty or understanding to prefer the narrow
principles of the opposite party, but because in every country lax
morals wish to be and are identified with public feeling, and because
in our own a few of the very best have been found in an association
with the very worst.' Whenever the Tories have deviated from their
tenets, they have enlarged their views and exceeded their promises.
The Whigs have always taken an inverse course. Whenever they have come
into power, they have previously been obliged to slight those matters,
and to temporise with those duties, which they had not the courage
either to follow or to renounce.

"And now, my dear sir, to pleasanter matters. I have nothing in the
press, and never shall have. I gave Forster all my works, written or
to be written. Neither I nor my family shall have anything to do with
booksellers. They say a new edition of my _Imaginary Conversations_ is
called for. I have sent Forster a dozen or two of fresh ones, but I
hope he will not hazard them before my death, and will get a hundred
pounds or near it for the whole.

"If ever I attended a public dinner, I should like to have been
present at that which the people gave to yo