as then that your lordship remarked and distinguished
me. Your bounty it was that first revived my native pride. It is true
that it ran in a little dribbling rivulet, but still it was much to me.
Even before you were able to afford me any real assistance, you were
always ready to offer me a corner of your gingerbread, or a marble from
your hoard. Your lordship had at all times a taste for sumptuousness and
magnificence, but you knew how to limit your natural propensity in
consideration of the calls of affinity, and to give your farthings to
your friends.

Do not then, my dear lord, belie the first and earliest sentiments of
your heart. As you have ever heard me, let your attention be tripled
now. Read my letter once and again. Preserve it as a sacred deposit. Lay
it under your pillow. Meditate upon it fasting. Commit it to memory, and
repeat the scattered parcels of it, as Caesar is said to have done the
Greek alphabet, to cool your rising choler. Be this the amulet to
preserve you from danger! Be this the chart by which to steer the little
skiff of your political system safe into the port of historic
immortality!

My lord, you and I have read Machiavel together. It is true I am but a
bungler in Italian, and your lordship was generally obliged to interpret
for me. Your translation I dare say was always scientifical, but I was
seldom so happy as to see either grammar or sense in it. So far however
as I can guess at the drift of this celebrated author, he seems to have
written as the professor of only one science. He has treated of the art
of government, and has enquired what was wise, and what was political.
He has left the moralists to take care of themselves.

In the present essay, my lord, I shall follow the example of Machiavel.
I profess the same science, and I pretend only to have carried to much
greater heights an art to which he has given a considerable degree of
perfection. Your lordship has had a great number of masters. Your
excellent father, who himself had some dabbling in politics, spared no
expence upon your education, though I believe he had by no means so high
an opinion of your genius and abilities as I entertained. Your lordship
therefore is to be presumed competently versed in the rudiments of
ethics. You have read Grotius, Puffendorf, and Cumberland. For my part I
never opened a volume of any one of them. I am self-taught. My science
originates entirely in my unbounded penetration, and a sort of di