name, or in my
own, plead guilty to the neglects and other misbehaviour which
your Excellency thinks proper to lay to our charge.

Your Excellency is of opinion, that His Majesty's servants
should have employed themselves in endeavouring to find a
successor to your Excellency from the receipt of your letter of
the 12th of March. If your Excellency will give yourself the
trouble to recollect the transactions of that period, you will,
I am sure, concur with me in opinion, that it would have been
the extreme of folly and presumption for any of His Majesty's
present servants to have treated upon this subject with any
person breathing before the 2nd of April, when they had the
honour of kissing His Majesty's hand. Long after the day of the
receipt of your Excellency's letter, it was perfectly uncertain
here, to whose hands His Majesty would commit the management of
his affairs; nay, your Excellency cannot be ignorant, that,
since that time, the expectations (and I doubt not the hopes) of
the public were fixed upon seeing your Excellency at the head of
the Administration.

The 2nd of April was, therefore, the first moment that any of
His Majesty's present servants could take any step towards the
nomination of a new Chief Governor of Ireland. From that time
measures for that purpose have been constantly pursued, till the
affair was finally settled, on the 24th of last month. The
various impediments which have arisen I need not mention to your
Excellency, but the fact is exactly as I have stated; and, as
the delay is not unprecedented, nor even very long, I think it
is not trespassing too much upon your Excellency's candour to
expect that you will believe my assertion.

In your last letter, your Excellency seems hurt, that the London
newspapers should have announced in Dublin the appointment of
the Earl of Northington two days before you received my letter.
Whatever might have been the information or the conjectures of
the news-writers, I assure your Excellency that I wrote within
an hour after I received authentic information of that
appointment.

As to the total and absolute neglect of Irish considerations, on
which your Excellency expresses yourself so strongly, you
certainly cannot mean to allude to the ordinary and current
business (which has been regularly atten