your accounts,—­have reversed the principle of them in my own favor; I now discover to you all these my frauds, and think myself entitled to your confidence upon this occasion.”  Now all the principles of diffidence, all the principles of distrust, nay, more, all the principles upon which a man may be convicted of premeditated fraud, and deserve the severest punishment, are to be found in this case, in which he says he holds himself to be entitled to their confidence and trust.  If any of your Lordships had a steward who told you he had lent you your own money, and had taken bonds from you for it, and if he afterwards told you that that money was neither yours nor his, but extorted from your tenants by some scandalous means, I should be glad to know what your Lordships would think of such a steward, who should say, “I will take the freedom to add, that I think myself, on such a subject, on such an occasion, entitled to your confidence and trust.”  You will observe his cavalier mode of expression.  Instead of his exhibiting the rigor and severity of an accountant and a book-keeper, you would think that he had been a reader of sentimental letters; there is such an air of a novel running through the whole, that it adds to the ridicule and nausea of it:  it is an oxymel of squills; there is something to strike you with horror for the villany of it, something to strike you with contempt for the fraud of it, and something to strike you with utter disgust for the vile and bad taste with which all these base ingredients are assorted.

Your Lordships will see, when the account which is subjoined to this unaccountable letter comes before you, that, though the Company had desired to know the channels through which he got those sums, there is not (except by a reference that appears in another place to one of the articles) one single syllable of explanation given from one end to the other, there is not the least glimpse of light thrown upon these transactions.  But we have since discovered from whom he got these bribes; and your Lordships will be struck with horror, when you hear it.

I have already remarked to you, that, though this letter is dated upon the 22d of May, it was not dispatched for Europe till December following; and he gets Mr. Larkins, who was his agent and instrument in falsifying the Company’s accounts, to swear that this letter was written upon the 22d of May, and that he had no opportunity to send it, but by the “Lively” in December.  On the 16th of that month he writes to the Directors, and tells them that he is quite shocked to find he had no earlier opportunity of making this discovery, which he thought himself bound to make; though this discovery, respecting some articles of it, had now been delayed nearly two years, and though it since appears that there were many opportunities, and particularly by the “Resolution,” of sending it.  He was much distressed, and found himself in an awkward situation, from an apprehension