Had he lived, that reverend form would have risen in its place, and, with a mild, parental reprehension to his nephew, the Duke of Bedford, he would have told him that the favor of that gracious prince who had honored his virtues with the government of the navy of Great Britain, and with a seat in the hereditary great council of his kingdom, was not undeservedly shown to the friend of the best portion of his life, and his faithful companion and counsellor under his rudest trials.  He would have told him, that, to whomever else these reproaches might be becoming, they were not decorous in his near kindred.  He would have told him, that, when men in that rank lose decorum, they lose everything.

On that day I had a loss in Lord Keppel.  But the public loss of him in this awful crisis!—­I speak from much knowledge of the person:  he never would have listened to any compromise with the rabble rout of this sans-culotterie of France.  His goodness of heart, his reason, his taste, his public duty, his principles, his prejudices, would have repelled him forever from all connection with that horrid medley of madness, vice, impiety, and crime.

Lord Keppel had two countries:  one of descent, and one of birth.  Their interest and their glory are the same; and his mind was capacious of both.  His family was noble, and it was Dutch:  that is, he was of the oldest and purest nobility that Europe can boast, among a people renowned above all others for love of their native land.  Though it was never shown in insult to any human being, Lord Keppel was something high.  It was a wild stock of pride, on which the tenderest of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues.  He valued ancient nobility; and he was not disinclined to augment it with new honors.  He valued the old nobility and the new, not as an excuse for inglorious sloth, but as an incitement to virtuous activity.  He considered it as a sort of cure for selfishness and a narrow mind,—­conceiving that a man born in an elevated place in himself was nothing, but everything in what went before and what was to come after him.  Without much speculation, but by the sure instinct of ingenuous feelings, and by the dictates of plain, unsophisticated, natural understanding, he felt that no great commonwealth could by any possibility long subsist without a body of some kind or other of nobility decorated with honor and fortified by privilege.  This nobility forms the chain that connects the ages of a nation, which otherwise (with Mr. Paine) would soon be taught that no one generation can bind another.  He felt that no political fabric could be well made, without some such order of things as might, through a series of time, afford a rational hope of securing unity, coherence, consistency, and stability to the state.  He felt that nothing else can protect it against the levity of courts and the greater levity of the multitude; that to talk of hereditary monarchy, without anything else of hereditary reverence in the commonwealth,