s, confiscating chief-governors, or confiscating demagogs, are
the most exposed to jealousy, avarice, and envy.

The merit of the original grantee of his Grace's pensions was in
giving his hand to the work, and partaking the spoil with a prince who
plundered a part of the national church of his time and country. Mine
was in defending the whole of the national church of my own time and
my own country, and the whole of the national churches of all
countries, from the principles and the examples which lead to
ecclesiastical pillage, thence to a contempt of all prescriptive
titles, thence to the pillage of all property, and thence to universal
desolation.

The merit of the origin of his Grace's fortune was in being a favorite
and chief adviser to a prince who left no liberty to his native
country. My endeavor was to obtain liberty for the municipal country
in which I was born, and for all descriptions and denominations in it.
Mine was to support, with unrelaxing vigilance, every right, every
privilege, every franchise, in this my adopted, my dearer, and more
comprehensive country; and not only to preserve those rights in this
chief seat of empire, but in every nation, in every land, in every
climate, language, and religion in the vast domain that still is under
the protection, and the larger that was once under the protection, of
the British crown.

III

ON THE DEATH OF HIS SON[56]

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should
have been, according to my mediocrity, and the mediocrity of the age I
live in, a sort of founder of a family; I should have left a son, who,
in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science,
in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in
humanity, in every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment,
would not have shewn himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to
any of those whom he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would
have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which
belonged more to mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every
deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have
been for that successor to resort to any stagnant wasting reservoir of
merit in me, or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient living
spring of generous and manly action. Every day he lived, he would have
repurchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times
more he had