public merit of his own to keep alive the idea of the services by which his vast landed pensions were obtained.  My merits, whatever they are, are original and personal:  his are derivative.  It is his ancestor, the original pensioner, that has laid up this inexhaustible fund of merit which makes his Grace so very delicate and exceptious about the merit of all other grantees of the crown.  Had he permitted me to remain in quiet, I should have said, “’Tis his estate:  that’s enough.  It is his by law:  what have I to do with it or its history?” He would naturally have said, on his side, “’Tis this man’s fortune.  He is as good now as my ancestor was two hundred and fifty years ago.  I am a young man with 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.