low and my reputation very high.  You know the nature of that assembly; they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shows them game, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged.  The thread of the negotiations, which could not stand still a moment without going back, was in my hands, and before another man could have made himself master of the business much time would have been lost, and great inconveniences would have followed.  Some, who opposed the Court soon after, began to waver then, and if I had not wanted the inclination I should have wanted no help to do mischief.  I knew the way of quitting my employments and of retiring from Court when the service of my party required it; but I could not bring myself up to that resolution, when the consequence of it must have been the breaking my party and the distress of the public affairs.  I thought my mistress treated me ill, but the sense of that duty which I owed her came in aid of other considerations, and prevailed over my resentment.  These sentiments, indeed, are so much out of fashion that a man who avows them is in danger of passing for a bubble in the world; yet they were, in the conjuncture I speak of, the true motives of my conduct, and you saw me go on as cheerfully in the troublesome and dangerous work assigned me as if I had been under the utmost satisfaction.  I began, indeed, in my heart to renounce the friendship which till that time I had preserved inviolable for Oxford.  I was not aware of all his treachery, nor of the base and little means which he employed then, and continued to employ afterwards, to ruin me in the opinion of the Queen and everywhere else.  I saw, however, that he had no friendship for anybody, and that with respect to me, instead of having the ability to render that merit, which I endeavoured to acquire, an addition of strength to himself, it became the object of his jealousy and a reason for undermining me.  In this temper of mind I went on till the great work of the peace was consummated and the treaty signed at Utrecht; after which a new and more melancholy scene for the party, as well as for me, opened itself.

I am far from thinking the treaties, or the negotiations which led to them, exempt from faults.  Many were made no doubt in both by those who were concerned in them; by myself in the first place, and many were owing purely to the opposition they met with in every step of their progress.  I never look back on this great event, passed as it is, without a secret emotion of mind; when I compare the vastness of the undertaking and the importance of its success, with the means employed to bring it about, and with those which were employed to traverse it.  To adjust the pretensions and to settle the interests of so many princes and states as were engaged in the late war would appear, when considered simply and without any adventitious difficulty, a work of prodigious extent.  But this was not all.  Each of our Allies thought himself entitled to raise his demands