all his loyalty, can find little satisfaction at a minister overgrown in wealth and power from the lowest degree of want and contempt; when that power or wealth are drawn from the bowels and blood of the nation, for which every fellow-subject is a sufferer, except the great man himself, his family, and his pensioners.  I mean such a minister (if there hath ever been such a one) whose whole management hath been a continued link of ignorance, blunders, and mistakes in every article besides that of enriching and aggrandizing himself.

For these reasons the faults of men, who are most trusted in public business, are, of all others, the most difficult to be defended.  A man may be persuaded into a wrong opinion, wherein he hath small concern:  but no oratory can have the power over a sober man against the conviction of his own senses:  and therefore, as I take it, the money thrown away on such advocates might be more prudently spared, and kept in such a minister’s own pocket, than lavished in hiring a corporation of pamphleteers to defend his conduct, and prove a kingdom to be flourishing in trade and wealth, which every particular subject (except those few already excepted) can lawfully swear, and, by dear experience knows, to be a falsehood.

Give me leave, noble sir, in the way of argument, to suppose this to be your case; could you in good conscience, or moral justice, chide your paper-advocates for their ill success in persuading the world against manifest demonstration?  Their miscarriage is owing, alas! to want of matter.  Should we allow them to be masters of wit, raillery, or learning, yet the subject would not admit them to exercise their talents; and, consequently, they can have no recourse but to impudence, lying, and scurrility.

I must confess, that the author of your letter to me hath carried this last qualification to a greater height than any of his fellows:  but he hath, in my opinion, failed a little in point of politeness from the original which he affects to imitate.  If I should say to a prime minister, “Sir, you have sufficiently provided that Dunkirk should be absolutely demolished and never repaired; you took the best advantages of a long and general peace to discharge the immense debts of the nation; you did wonders with the fleet; you made the Spaniards submit to our quiet possession of Gibraltar and Portmahon; you never enriched yourself and family at the expense of the public.”—­Such is the style of your supposed letter, which however, if I am well informed, by no means comes up to the refinements of a fishwife in Billingsgate.  “You never had a bastard by Tom the waterman; you never stole a silver tankard; you were never whipped at the cart’s tail.”