of nuns
and of a Covent Garden of another description. They will not care a rush
whether his coat is long or short,--whether the color be purple, or blue
and buff. They will not trouble _their_ heads with what part of _his_
head his hair is out from; and they will look with equal respect on a
tonsure and a crop. Their only question will be that of their Legendre,
or some oilier of their legislative butchers: How he cuts up; how he
tallows in the caul or on the kidneys.

Is it not a singular phenomenon, that, whilst the _sans-culotte_
carcass-butchers and the philosophers of the shambles are pricking their
dotted lines upon his hide, and, like the print of the poor ox that we
see in the shop-windows at Charing Cross, alive as he is, and thinking
no harm in the world, he is divided into rumps, and sirloins, and
briskets, and into all sorts of pieces for roasting, boiling, and
stewing, that, all the while they are measuring _him_, his Grace is
measuring _me_,--is invidiously comparing the bounty of the crown with
the deserts of the defender of his order, and in the same moment fawning
on those who have the knife half out of the sheath? Poor innocent!

"Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood."

No man lives too long who lives to do with spirit and suffer with
resignation what Providence pleases to command or inflict; but, indeed,
they are sharp incommodities which beset old age. It was but the other
day, that, on putting in order some things which had been brought here,
on my taking leave of London forever, I looked over a number of fine
portraits, most of them of persons now dead, but whose society, in my
better days, made this a proud and happy place. Amongst those was the
picture of Lord Keppel. It was painted by an artist worthy of the
subject, the excellent friend of that excellent man from their earliest
youth, and a common friend of us both, with whom we lived for many years
without a moment of coldness, of peevishness, of jealousy, or of jar, to
the day of our final separation.

I ever looked on Lord Keppel as one of the greatest and best men of his
age, and I loved and cultivated him accordingly. He was much in my
heart, and I believe I was in his to the very last beat. It was after
his trial at Portsmouth that he gave me this picture. With what zeal and
anxious affection I attended him through that his agony of glory,--what
part my son, in the