But whilst I humble myself before God, I do not know that it is forbidden to repel the attacks of unjust and inconsiderate men.  The patience of Job is proverbial.  After some of the convulsive struggles of our irritable nature, he submitted himself, and repented in dust and ashes.  But even so, I do not find him blamed for reprehending, and with a considerable degree of verbal asperity, those ill-natured neighbors of his who visited his dunghill to read moral, political, and economical lectures on his misery.  I am alone.  I have none to meet my enemies in the gate.  Indeed, my Lord, I greatly deceive myself, if in this hard season I would give a peck of refuse wheat for all that is called fame and honor in the world.  This is the appetite but of a few.  It is a luxury, it is a privilege, it is an indulgence for those who are at their ease.  But we are all of us made to shun disgrace, as we are made to shrink from pain and poverty and disease.  It is an instinct; and under the direction of reason, instinct is always in the right.  I live in an inverted order.  They who ought to have succeeded me are gone before me.  They who should have been to me as posterity are in the place of ancestors.  I owe to the dearest relation (which ever must subsist in memory) that act of piety which he would have performed to me:  I owe it to him to show that he was not descended, as the Duke of Bedford would have it, from an unworthy parent.

The crown has considered me after long service:  the crown has paid the Duke of Bedford by advance.  He has had a long credit for any service which he may perform hereafter.  He is secure, and long may he be secure, in his advance, whether he performs any services or not.  But let him take care how he endangers the safety of that Constitution which secures his own utility or his own insignificance, or how he discourages those who take up even puny arms to defend an order of things which, like the sun of heaven, shines alike on the useful and the worthless.  His grants are ingrafted on the public law of Europe, covered with the awful hoar of innumerable ages.  They are guarded by the sacred rules of prescription, found in that full treasury of jurisprudence from which the jejuneness and penury of our municipal law has by degrees been enriched and strengthened.  This prescription I had my share (a very full share) in bringing to its perfection.[19] The Duke of Bedford will stand as long as prescriptive law endures,—­as long as the great, stable laws of property, common to us with all civilized nations, are kept in their integrity, and without the smallest intermixture of the laws, maxims, principles, or precedents of the Grand Revolution.  They are secure against all changes but one.  The whole Revolutionary system, institutes, digest, code, novels, text, gloss, comment, are not only not the same, but they are the very reverse, and the reverse fundamentally, of all the laws on which civil life has hitherto been upheld in all the governments of the world.  The learned professors of the Rights of Man regard prescription not as a title to bar all claim set up against old possession, but they look on prescription as itself a bar against the possessor and proprietor.  They hold an immemorial possession to be no more than a long continued and therefore an aggravated injustice.