man in the three nations may think me injurious to his propriety, that
I invade your praises, in undertaking to celebrate them alone; and
that I have assumed to myself a patron, who was no more to be
circumscribed than the sun and elements, which are of public benefit
to human kind.

As it was much in your power to oblige all who could pretend to merit
from the public, so it was more in your nature and inclination. If any
went ill-satisfied from the treasury, while it was in your lordship's
management, it proclaimed the want of desert, and not of friends: You
distributed your master's favour with so equal hands, that justice
herself could not have held the scales more even; but with that
natural propensity to do good, that had that treasure been your own,
your inclination to bounty must have ruined you. No man attended to be
denied: No man bribed for expedition: Want and desert were pleas
sufficient. By your own integrity, and your prudent choice of those
whom you employed, the king gave all that he intended; and gratuities
to his officers made not vain his bounty. This, my lord, you were in
your public capacity of high treasurer, to which you ascended by such
degrees, that your royal master saw your virtues still growing to his
favours, faster than they could rise to you. Both at home and abroad,
with your sword and with your counsel, you have served him with
unbiassed honour, and unshaken resolution; making his greatness, and
the true interest of your country, the standard and measure of your
actions. Fortune may desert the wise and brave, but true virtue never
will forsake itself[2]. It is the interest of the world, that virtuous
men should attain to greatness, because it gives them the power of
doing good: But when, by the iniquity of the times, they are brought
to that extremity, that they must either quit their virtue or their
fortune, they owe themselves so much, as to retire to the private
exercise of their honour;--to be great within, and by the constancy of
their resolutions, to teach the inferior world how they ought to judge
of such principles, which are asserted with so generous and so
unconstrained a trial.

But this voluntary neglect of honours has been of rare example in the
world[3]: Few men have frowned first upon fortune, and precipitated
themselves from the top of her wheel, before they felt at least the
declination of it. We read not of many emperors like Dioclesian and
Charles the Fifth, who have