“Adieu, and believe me with kindly regards to the ladies,

“Yours,

“W.S.L.”

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The last in this series of letters which has reached my hands is altogether undated, but appears by the post-mark to have been written from Bath, 19th July, 1838.

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“MY DEAR SIR,—­There is one sentence in your letter which shocked me not a little.  You say ’The Whigs have not offered you a Deputy Lieutenantcy; so cheap a distinction could not have hurt them.  But then you are too proud to ask,’ &c.  Do you really suppose that I would have accepted it even if it had been offered?  No, by God!  I would not accept any distinction even if it were offered by honest men.  I will have nothing but what I can take.  It is, however, both an injustice and an affront to confer this dignity on low people, who do not possess a fourth of my property, and whose family is as ignoble as Lord Melbourne’s own, and not to have offered the same to me.  In the eleventh page of the Letters I published after the quelling of Bonaparte are these words:  ’I was the first to abjure the party of the Whigs, and shall be the last to abjure the principles.  When the leaders had broken all their promises to the nation, had shown their utter incapacity to manage its affairs, and their inclination to crouch before the enemy, I permitted my heart after some struggles to subside and repose in the cool of this reflection—­Let them escape.  It is only the French nation that ever dragged such feebleness to the scaffold,’ Again, page 35—­’Honest men, I confess, have generally in the present times an aversion to the Whig faction, not because it is suitable either to honesty or understanding to prefer the narrow principles of the opposite party, but because in every country lax morals wish to be and are identified with public feeling, and because in our own a few of the very best have been found in an association with the very worst.’  Whenever the Tories have deviated from their tenets, they have enlarged their views and exceeded their promises.  The Whigs have always taken an inverse course.  Whenever they have come into power, they have previously been obliged to slight those matters, and to temporise with those duties, which they had not the courage either to follow or to renounce.

“And now, my dear sir, to pleasanter matters.  I have nothing in the press, and never shall have.  I gave Forster all my works, written or to be written.  Neither I nor my family shall have anything to do with booksellers.  They say a new edition of my Imaginary Conversations is called for.  I have sent Forster a dozen or two of fresh ones, but I hope he will not hazard them before my death, and will get a hundred pounds or near it for the whole.