My other objection is still more serious:  and if I am so happy as to convince you, I shall hope that you will alter the paragraph; as it seems to impute something to Sir Robert, of which he was not only most innocent, but of which if he had been guilty, I should think him extremely so, for he would have been very ungrateful.  You say he had not the comfort to see that he had established his own family by any thing which he received from the gratitude of that Hanover family, or from the gratitude of that country, which he had saved and served!  Good Sir, what does this sentence seem to imply, but that either Sir Robert himself, or his family, thought or think, that the Kings George . and ii. or England, were ungrateful in not rewarding his services?  Defend him and us from such a charge!  He nor we ever had such a thought.  Was it not rewarding him to make him prime minister, and maintain and support him against his enemies for twenty years together?  Did not George I. make his eldest son a peer, and give to the father and son a valuable patent place in the custom-house for three lives?  Did not George ii. give my elder brother the auditor’s place, and to my brother and me other rich places for our lives; for, though in the gift of the first lord of the treasury, do we not owe them to the King who made him so?  Did not the late King make my father an earl, and dismiss him with a pension of 4000 pounds a-year for his life?  Could he or we not think these ample rewards?  What rapacious sordid wretches must he and we have been, and be, could we entertain such an idea?  As far have we all been from thinking him neglected by his country.  Did not his country see and know these rewards? and could it think these rewards inadequate?  Besides, Sir, great as I hold my father’s services, they were solid and silent, not ostensible.  They were of a kind to which I hold your justification a more suitable reward than pecuniary recompenses.  To have fixed the house of Hanover on the throne, to have maintained this country in peace and affluence for twenty years, with the other services you record, Sir, were actions, the `eclat of which must be illustrated by time and reflection; and whose splendour has been brought forwarder than I wish it had, by comparison with a period very dissimilar!  If Sir Robert had not the comfort of leaving his family in affluence, it was not imputable to his King or his country.  Perhaps I am proud that he did not.  He died forty thousand pounds in debt.  That was the wealth of a man that had been taxed as the plunderer of his country!  Yet, with all my adoration of my father, I am just enough to own that it was his own fault if he died so poor.  He had made Houghton much too magnificent for the moderate estate which he left to support it; and, as he never —­I repeat it with truth, never—­got any money but in the South Sea and while he was paymaster. his fondness for his paternal seat, and his boundless