have for his person, to whom I must address, have almost driven me to receive only with a profound submission the effects of that virtue, which is never to be comprehended but by admiration; and the greatest note of admiration is silence.  It is that noble passion, to which poets raise their audience in highest subjects, and they have then gained over them the greatest victory, when they are ravished into a pleasure which is not to be expressed by words.  To this pitch, my lord, the sense of my gratitude had almost raised me:  to receive your favours, as the Jews of old received their law, with a mute wonder; to think, that the loudness of acclamation was only the praise of men to men, and that the secret homage of the soul was a greater mark of reverence, than an outward ceremonious joy, which might be counterfeit, and must be irreverent in its tumult.  Neither, my lord, have I a particular right to pay you my acknowledgements:  You have been a good so universal, that almost every man in the three nations may think me injurious to his propriety, that I invade your praises, in undertaking to celebrate them alone; and that I have assumed to myself a patron, who was no more to be circumscribed than the sun and elements, which are of public benefit to human kind.

As it was much in your power to oblige all who could pretend to merit from the public, so it was more in your nature and inclination.  If any went ill-satisfied from the treasury, while it was in your lordship’s management, it proclaimed the want of desert, and not of friends:  You distributed your master’s favour with so equal hands, that justice herself could not have held the scales more even; but with that natural propensity to do good, that had that treasure been your own, your inclination to bounty must have ruined you.  No man attended to be denied:  No man bribed for expedition:  Want and desert were pleas sufficient.  By your own integrity, and your prudent choice of those whom you employed, the king gave all that he intended; and gratuities to his officers made not vain his bounty.  This, my lord, you were in your public capacity of high treasurer, to which you ascended by such degrees, that your royal master saw your virtues still growing to his favours, faster than they could rise to you.  Both at home and abroad, with your sword and with your counsel, you have served him with unbiassed honour, and unshaken resolution; making his greatness, and the true interest of your country, the standard and measure of your actions.  Fortune may desert the wise and brave, but true virtue never will forsake itself[2].  It is the interest of the world, that virtuous men should attain to greatness, because it gives them the power of doing good:  But when, by the iniquity of the times, they are brought to that extremity, that they must either quit their virtue or their fortune, they owe themselves so much, as to retire to the private exercise of their honour;—­to be great within, and by the constancy of their resolutions, to teach the inferior world how they ought to judge of such principles, which are asserted with so generous and so unconstrained a trial.