I have long considered as the greatest happiness of my life, the having
so promising a pupil as your lordship. Though your abilities are
certainly of the very first impression, they are not however of that
vague and indefinite species, which we often meet with in persons, who,
if providence had so pleased, would have figured with equal adroitness
in the character of a shoe-black or a link-boy, as they now flatter
themselves they can do in that of a minister of state. You, my lord,
were born with that accomplishment of secrecy and retentiveness, which
the archbishop of Cambray represents Telemachus as having possessed in
so high a degree in consequence of the mode of his education. You were
always distinguished by that art, never to be sufficiently valued, of
talking much and saying nothing. I cannot recollect, and yet my memory
is as great, as my opportunity for observation has been considerable,
that your lordship, when a boy, ever betrayed a single fact that chanced
to fall within your notice, unless indeed it had some tendency to
procure a school-fellow a whipping. I have often remarked your lordship
with admiration, talking big and blustering loud, so as to frighten
urchins who were about half your lordship's size, when you had no
precise meaning in any thing you said. And I shall never forget, the
longest day I have to live, when I hugged you in my arms in a kind of
prophetic transport, in consequence of your whispering me, in the midst
of a room-full of company, in so sly a manner that nobody could observe
you, that you had just seen John the coachman bestow upon Betty the
cook-maid, a most devout and cordial embrace. From your rawest infancy
you were as much distinguished, as Milton represents the goddess Hebe to
have been, by "nods and becks and wreathed smiles;" with this
difference, that in her they were marks of gaiety, and in you of
demureness; that in her they were unrestrained and general, and in you
intended only for a single _confidant_. My lord, reflecting upon all
these circumstances, it is not to be wondered at that I treated your
lordship even in clouts with the reverence due to an infant Jove, and
always considered myself as superintending the institution of the first
statesman that ever existed.

But, my lord, it has ever been my opinion, that let nature do as much as
she will, it is in the power of education to do still more. The many
statesmanlike qualities that you brought into the world with