to late posterity: and your flourishing youth, and that of your
excellent Duchess, are happy omens of my wish. It is observed by Livy
and by others, that some of the noblest Roman families retained a
resemblance of their ancestry, not only in their shapes and features,
but also in their manners, their qualities, and the distinguishing
characters of their minds. Some lines were noted for a stern, rigid
virtue, savage, haughty, parsimonious, and unpopular: others were more
sweet and affable, made of a more pliant paste, humble, courteous, and
obliging, studious of doing charitable offices, and diffusive of the
goods which they enjoyed. The last of these is the proper and indelible
character of your Grace's family. God Almighty has endued you with a
softness, a beneficence, an attractive behaviour winning on the hearts
of others; and so sensible of their misery, that the wounds of fortune
seem not inflicted on them, but on yourself. You are so ready to
redress, that you almost prevent their wishes, and always exceed their
expectations; as if what was yours, was not your own, and not given you
to possess, but to bestow on wanting merit. But this is a topic which I
must cast in shades, lest I offend your modesty, which is so far from
being ostentatious of the good you do, that it blushes even to have it
known; and therefore I must leave you to the satisfaction and testimony
of your own conscience, which, though it be a silent panegyric, is yet
the best.

You are so easy of access, that Poplicola was not more, whose doors were
opened on the outside to save the people even the common civility of
asking entrance; where all were equally admitted--where nothing that was
reasonable was denied--where misfortune was a powerful recommendation,
and where (I can scarce forbear saying) that want itself was a powerful
mediator, and was next to merit.

The history of Peru assures us, that their Incas, above all their titles
esteemed that the highest which called them Lovers of the Poor--a name
more glorious than the Felix, Pius, and Augustus of the Roman emperors,
which were epithets of flattery, deserved by few of them, and not
running in a blood like the perpetual gentleness and inherent goodness
of the Ormond family.

Gold, as it is the purest, so it is the softest and most ductile of all
metals. Iron, which is the hardest, gathers rust, corrodes itself, and
is therefore subject to corruption; it was never intended for coins and
me