e manner in which the benefit was conferred. It came to me,
indeed, at a time of life, and in a state of mind and body, in which no
circumstance of fortune could afford me any real pleasure. But this was
no fault in the royal donor, or in his ministers, who were pleased, in
acknowledging the merits of an invalid servant of the public, to assuage
the sorrows of a desolate old man....

I was not like his Grace of Bedford, swaddled, and rocked, and dandled
into a legislator: "_Nitor in adversum_" is the motto for a man like me.
I possessed not one of the qualities, nor cultivated one of the arts,
that recommend men to the favor and protection of the great. I was not
made for a minion or a tool. As little did I follow the trade of winning
the hearts by imposing on the understandings of the people. At every
step of my progress in life--for in every step was I traversed and
opposed--and at every turnpike I met, I was obliged to shew my passport,
and again and again to prove my sole title to the honor of being useful
to my country, by a proof that I was not wholly unacquainted with its
laws, and the whole system of its interests both abroad and at home.
Otherwise, no rank, no toleration even, for me. I had no arts but manly
arts. On them I have stood, and, please God, in spite of the Duke of
Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, to the last gasp will I stand....

The Duke of Bedford conceives that he is obliged to call the attention
of the House of Peers to his Majesty's grant to me, which he considers
as excessive and out of all bounds.

I know not how it has happened, but it really seems, that, whilst his
Grace was meditating his well-considered censure upon me, he fell into a
sort of sleep. Homer nods, and the Duke of Bedford may dream; and as
dreams--even his golden dreams--are apt to be ill-pieced and
incongruously put together, his Grace preserved his idea of reproach to
_me_, but took the subject-matter from the crown grants to _his own
family_. This is "the stuff of which his dreams are made." In that way
of putting things together, his Grace is perfectly in the right. The
grants to the house of Russell were so enormous, as not only to outrage
economy, but even to stagger credibility. The Duke of Bedford is the
leviathan among all the creatures of the crown. He tumbles about his
unwieldy bulk; he plays and frolics in the ocean of the royal bounty.
Huge as he is, and whilst "he lies floating many a rood," he is still a