ved in due course your two very interesting and
judicious letters, which gave me many new lights, and excited me to
fresh activity in the important subject they related to. However, from
that time I have not been perfectly free from doubt and uneasiness. I
used a liberty with those letters, which, perhaps, nothing can
thoroughly justify, and which certainly nothing but the delicacy of the
crisis, the clearness of my intentions, and your great good-nature can
at all excuse. I might conceal this from you; but I think it better to
lay the whole matter before you, and submit myself to your
mercy,--assuring you, at the same time, that, if you are so kind as to
continue your confidence on this, or to renew it upon any other
occasion, I shall never be tempted again to make so bold and
unauthorized an use of the trust you place in me. I will state to you
the history of the business since my last, and then you will see how far
I am excusable by the circumstances.

On the 3rd of July I received a letter from the Attorney-General, dated
the day before, in which, in a very open and obliging manner, he desires
my thoughts of the Irish Toleration Bill, and particularly of the
Dissenters' clause. I gave them to him, by the return of the post, at
large; but, as the time pressed, I kept no copy of the letter. The
general drift was strongly to recommend the _whole_, and principally to
obviate the objections to the part that related to the Dissenters, with
regard both to the general propriety and to the temporary policy at this
juncture. I took, likewise, a good deal of pains to state the difference
which had always subsisted with regard to the treatment of the
Protestant Dissenters in Ireland and in England, and what I conceived
the reason of that difference to be. About the same time I was called to
town for a day; and I took an opportunity, in Westminster Hall, of
urging the same points, with all the force I was master of, to the
Solicitor-General. I attempted to see the Chancellor for the same
purpose, but was not fortunate enough to meet him at home. Soon after my
return hither, on Tuesday, I received a very polite and I may say
friendly letter from him, wishing me (on supposition that I had
continued in town) to dine with him as [on?] that day, in order to talk
over the business of the Toleration Act, then before him. Unluckily I
had company with me, and was not able to leave them until Thursday, when
I went to town and called at hi