Then will be forgot the rebellions which, by a doubtful priority in crime, his ancestor had provoked and extinguished.  On such a conduct in the noble Duke, many of his countrymen might, and with some excuse might, give way to the enthusiasm of their gratitude, and, in the dashing style of some of the old declaimers, cry out, that, if the Fates had found no other way in which they could give a[18] Duke of Bedford and his opulence as props to a tottering world, then the butchery of the Duke of Buckingham might be tolerated; it might be regarded even with complacency, whilst in the heir of confiscation they saw the sympathizing comforter of the martyrs who suffer under the cruel confiscation of this day, whilst they beheld with admiration his zealous protection of the virtuous and loyal nobility of France, and his manly support of his brethren, the yet standing nobility and gentry of his native land.  Then his Grace’s merit would be pure and new and sharp, as fresh from the mint of honor.  As he pleased, he might reflect honor on his predecessors, or throw it forward on those who were to succeed him.  He might be the propagator of the stock of honor, or the root of it, as he thought proper.

Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should have been, according to my mediocrity and the mediocrity of the age I live in, a sort of founder of a family:  I should have left a son, who, in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, in every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment, would not have shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom he traces in his line.  His Grace very soon would have wanted all plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to mine than to me.  He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and symmetrized every disproportion.  It would not have been for that successor to resort to any stagnant, wasting reservoir of merit in me, or in any ancestry.  He had in himself a salient, living spring of generous and manly action.  Every day he lived he would have repurchased the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had received.  He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever but in the performance of some duty.  At this exigent moment the loss of a finished man is not easily supplied.

But a Disposer whose power we are little able to resist, and whose wisdom it behoves us not at all to dispute, has ordained it in another manner, and (whatever my querulous weakness might suggest) a far better.  The storm has gone over me; and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me.  I am stripped of all my honors, I am torn up by the roots, and lie prostrate on the earth.  There, and prostrate there, I most unfeignedly recognize the Divine justice, and in some degree submit to it.