But I have yet another reason to inforce your attention to what I am about to write.  I was, as I have said, the instructor of your choice.  When I had yet remained neglected in the world, when my honours were withered by the hand of poverty, when my blossoms appeared in the eyes of those who saw me of the most brown and wintery complexion, and, if your lordship will allow me to finish the metaphor, when I stank in their noses, it was 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 divine and supernatural afflatus.  With all this your lordship knows I am a modest man.