that even his most familiar conversations, if
taken down in writing, would bear the press, without the least correction
either as to method or style. If his conduct, in the former part of his
life, had been equal to all his natural and acquired talents, he would
most justly have merited the epithet of all-accomplished. He is himself
sensible of his past errors: those violent passions which seduced him in
his youth, have now subsided by age; and take him as he is now, the
character of all-accomplished is more his due than any man's I ever knew
in my life.

But he has been a most mortifying instance of the violence of human
passions and of the weakness of the most exalted human reason. His
virtues and his vices, his reason and his passions, did not blend
themselves by a gradation of tints, but formed a shining and sudden
contrast. Here the darkest, there the most splendid colors; and both
rendered more shining from their proximity. Impetuosity, excess, and
almost extravagance, characterized not only his passions, but even his
senses. His youth was distinguished by all the tumult and storm of
pleasures, in which he most licentiously triumphed, disdaining all
decorum. His fine imagination has often been heated and exhausted, with
his body, in celebrating and deifying the prostitute of the night; and
his convivial joys were pushed to all the extravagance of frantic
Bacchanals. Those passions were interrupted but by a stronger ambition.
The former impaired both his constitution and his character, but the
latter destroyed both his fortune and his reputation.

He has noble and generous sentiments, rather than fixed reflected
principles of good nature and friendship; but they are more violent than
lasting, and suddenly and often varied to their opposite extremes, with
regard to the same persons. He receives the common attentions of civility
as obligations, which he returns with interest; and resents with passion
the little inadvertencies of human nature, which he repays with interest
too. Even a difference of opinion upon a philosophical subject would
provoke, and prove him no practical philosopher at least.

Notwithstanding the dissipation of his youth, and the tumultuous
agitation of his middle age, he has an infinite fund of various and
almost universal knowledge, which, from the clearest and quickest
conception, and happiest memory, that ever man was blessed with, he
always carries about him. It is his pocket-money, and h