His Grace may think as meanly as he will of my deserts in the far greater part of my conduct in life.  It is free for him to do so.  There will always be some difference of opinion in the value of political services.  But there is one merit of mine which he, of all men living, ought to be the last to call in question.  I have supported with very great zeal, and I am told with some degree of success, those opinions, or, if his Grace likes another expression better, those old prejudices, which buoy up the ponderous mass of his nobility, wealth, and titles.  I have omitted no exertion to prevent him and them from sinking to that level to which the meretricious French faction his Grace at least coquets with omit no exertion to reduce both.  I have done all I could to discountenance their inquiries into the fortunes of those who hold large portions of wealth without any apparent merit of their own.  I have strained every nerve to keep the Duke of Bedford in that situation which alone makes him my superior.  Your Lordship has been a witness of the use he makes of that preeminence.

But be it that this is virtue; be it that there is virtue in this well-selected rigor:  yet all virtues are not equally becoming to all men and at all times.  There are crimes, undoubtedly there are crimes, which in all seasons of our existence ought to put a generous antipathy in action,—­crimes that provoke an indignant justice, and call forth a warm and animated pursuit.  But all things that concern what I may call the preventive police of morality, all things merely rigid, harsh, and censorial, the antiquated moralists at whose feet I was brought up would not have thought these the fittest matter to form the favorite virtues of young men of rank.  What might have been well enough, and have been received with a veneration mixed with awe and terror, from an old, severe, crabbed Cato, would have wanted something of propriety in the young Scipios, the ornament of the Roman nobility, in the flower of their life.  But the times, the morals, the masters, the scholars, have all undergone a thorough revolution.  It is a vile, illiberal school, this new French academy of the sans-culottes.  There is nothing in it that is fit for a gentleman to learn.

Whatever its vogue may be, I still flatter myself that the parents of the growing generation will be satisfied with what is to be taught to their children in Westminster, in Eton, or in Winchester; I still indulge the hope that no grown gentleman or nobleman of our time will think of finishing at Mr. Thelwall’s lecture whatever may have been left incomplete at the old universities of his country.  I would give to Lord Grenville and Mr. Pitt for a motto what was said of a Roman censor or praetor (or what was he?) who in virtue of a Senatusconsultum shut up certain academies,—­“Cludere ludum impudentiae jussit.”  Every honest father of a family in the kingdom will rejoice at the breaking-up for the holidays, and will pray that there may be a very long vacation, in all such schools.