flourishes, when occasion shall serve, for a greater orator to use, and dare only tell you, that I never passed any part of my life with greater satisfaction or improvement to myself, than those years which I have lived in the honour of your lordship’s acquaintance; if I may have only the time abated when the public service called you to another part of the world, which, in imitation of our florid speakers, I might (if I durst presume upon the expression) call the parenthesis of my life.

That I have always honoured you, I suppose I need not tell you at this time of day; for you know I staid not to date my respects to you from that title which now you have, and to which you bring a greater addition by your merit, than you receive from it by the name; but I am proud to let others know, how long it is that I have been made happy by my knowledge of you; because I am sure it will give me a reputation with the present age, and with posterity.  And now, my lord, I know you are afraid, lest I should take this occasion, which lies so fair for me, to acquaint the world with some of those excellencies which I have admired in you; but I have reasonably considered, that to acquaint the world, is a phrase of a malicious meaning; for it would imply, that the world were not already acquainted with them.  You are so generally known to be above the meanness of my praises, that you have spared my evidence, and spoiled my compliment:  Should I take for my common places, your knowledge both of the old and the new philosophy; should I add to these your skill in mathematics and history; and yet farther, your being conversant with all the ancient authors of the Greek and Latin tongues, as well as with the modern—­I should tell nothing new to mankind; for when I have once but named you, the world will anticipate all my commendations, and go faster before me than I can follow.  Be therefore secure, my lord, that your own fame has freed itself from the danger of a panegyric; and only give me leave to tell you, that I value the candour of your nature, and that one character of friendliness, and, if I may have leave to call it, kindness in you, before all those other which make you considerable in the nation[4].

Some few of our nobility are learned, and therefore I will not conclude an absolute contradiction in the terms of nobleman and scholar; but as the world goes now, ’tis very hard to predicate one upon the other; and ’tis yet more difficult to prove, that a nobleman can be a friend to poetry.  Were it not for two or three instances in Whitehall, and in the town, the poets of this age would find so little encouragement for their labours, and so few understanders, that they might have leisure to turn pamphleteers, and augment the number of those abominable scribblers, who, in this time of licence, abuse the press, almost every day, with nonsense, and railing against the government.