very old pensions; he
is an old man with very young pensions: that's all."

Why will his Grace, by attacking me, force me reluctantly to compare my
little merit with that which obtained from the crown those prodigies of
profuse donation by which he tramples on the mediocrity of humble and
laborious individuals? I would willingly leave him to the Herald's
College, which the philosophy of the _sans-culottes_ (prouder by far
than all the Garters, and Norroys, and Clarencieux, and Rouge-Dragons
that ever pranced in a procession of what his friends call aristocrats
and despots) will abolish with contumely and scorn. These historians,
recorders, and blazoners of virtues and arms differ wholly from that
other description of historians who never assign any act of politicians
to a good motive. These gentle historians, on the contrary, dip their
pens in nothing but the milk of human kindness. They seek no further for
merit than the preamble of a patent or the inscription on a tomb. With
them every man created a peer is first an hero ready-made. They judge of
every man's capacity for office by the offices he has filled; and the
more offices, the more ability. Every general officer with them is a
Marlborough, every statesman a Burleigh, every judge a Murray or a
Yorke. They who, alive, were laughed at or pitied by all their
acquaintance make as good a figure as the best of them in the pages of
Guillim, Edmondson, and Collins.

To these recorders, so full of good-nature to the great and prosperous,
I would willingly leave the first Baron Russell and Earl of Bedford, and
the merits of his grants. But the aulnager, the weigher, the meter of
grants will not suffer us to acquiesce in the judgment of the prince
reigning at the time when they were made. They are never good to those
who earn them. Well, then, since the new grantees have war made on them
by the old, and that the word of the sovereign is not to be taken, let
us turn our eyes to history, in which great men have always a pleasure
in contemplating the heroic origin of their house.

The first peer of the name, the first purchaser of the grants, was a Mr.
Russell, a person of an ancient gentleman's family, raised by being a
minion of Henry the Eighth. As there generally is some resemblance of
character to create these relations, the favorite was in all likelihood
much such another as his master. The first of those immoderate grants
was not taken from the ancient demesne of the