He came of a very ancient Wiltshire family, which he respected above all families in the world:  he could prove a lineal descent from King Edward the First, and his first ancestor, Roaldus de Richmond, rode by William the Conqueror’s side on Hastings field.  “We were gentlemen, Esmond,” he used to say, “when the Churchills were horse-boys.”  He was a very tall man, standing in his pumps six feet three inches (in his great jack-boots, with his tall fair periwig, and hat and feather, he could not have been less than eight feet high).  “I am taller than Churchill,” he would say, surveying himself in the glass, “and I am a better made man; and if the women won’t like a man that hasn’t a wart on his nose, faith, I can’t help myself, and Churchill has the better of me there.”  Indeed, he was always measuring himself with the Duke, and always asking his friends to measure them.  And talking in this frank way, as he would do, over his cups, wags would laugh and encourage him; friends would be sorry for him; schemers and flatterers would egg him on, and tale-bearers carry the stories to headquarters, and widen the difference which already existed there, between the great captain and one of the ablest and bravest lieutenants he ever had.

His rancor against the Duke was so apparent, that one saw it in the first half-hour’s conversation with General Webb; and his lady, who adored her General, and thought him a hundred times taller, handsomer, and braver than a prodigal nature had made him, hated the great Duke with such an intensity as it becomes faithful wives to feel against their husbands’ enemies.  Not that my Lord Duke was so yet; Mr. Webb had said a thousand things against him, which his superior had pardoned; and his Grace, whose spies were everywhere, had heard a thousand things more that Webb had never said.  But it cost this great man no pains to pardon; and he passed over an injury or a benefit alike easily.

Should any child of mine take the pains to read these his ancestor’s memoirs, I would not have him judge of the great Duke* by what a contemporary has written of him.  No man hath been so immensely lauded and decried as this great statesman and warrior; as, indeed, no man ever deserved better the very greatest praise and the strongest censure.  If the present writer joins with the latter faction, very likely a private pique of his own may be the cause of his ill-feeling.

     * This passage in the Memoirs of Esmond is written on a leaf
     inserted into the Ms. book, and dated 1744, probably after
     he had heard of the Duchess’s death.

On presenting himself at the Commander-in-Chief’s levee, his Grace had not the least remembrance of General Lumley’s aide-de-camp, and though he knew Esmond’s family perfectly well, having served with both lords (my Lord Francis and the Viscount Esmond’s father) in Flanders, and in the Duke of York’s Guard, the Duke of Marlborough, who was friendly and serviceable to the (so-styled) legitimate