yourself.  In short, if you will live in the air all day, be totally idle, and not read or write a line by candle-light, and retrench your suppers, I shall rejoice in your having nothing to do but that dreadful punishment, pleasing yourself.  Nobody has any claims on you; you have satisfied every point of honour; you have no cause for being particularly grateful to the Opposition; and you want no excuse for living for yourself.  Your resolutions on economy are not only prudent, but just; and, to say the truth, I believe if you had continued at the head of the army, you would have ruined yourself You have too much generosity to have curbed yourself, and would have had too little time to attend to doing so.  I know by myself how pleasant it is to have laid up a little for those I love, for those that depend on me, and for old servants.  Moderate wishes may be satisfied; and which is still better, are less liable to disappointment.

I am not preaching, nor giving advice, but congratulating you it is certainly not being selfish, when I rejoice at your being thrown by circumstances into a retired life, though it will occasion my seeing less of you; but I have always preferred what was most for your own honour and happiness; and as you taste satisfaction already, it will not diminish, for they are the first moments of passing from busy life to a quiet one that are the most irksome.  You have the felicity of being able to amuse yourself with what the grave world calls trifles , but as gravity does not happen to be wisdom, trifles are full as important as what is respected as serious; and more amiable, and generally more innocent.  Most men are bad or ridiculous, sometimes both:  at least my experience tells me what my reading had told me before, that they are so in a great capital of a sinking ’country.  If immortal fame is his object, a Cato may die but he will do no good.  If only the preservation of his virtue had been his point, he might have lived comfortably at Athens, like Attieus who, by the way, happens to be as immortal; though I will give him credit for having had no such view.  Indeed, I look upon this country as so irrecoverably on the verge of ruin, from its enormous debt, from the loss of America, from the almost as certain prospect of losing India, that my pride would dislike to be an actor when the crash may happen.

You seem to think that I might send you more news.  So I might, if I would talk of elections;(516) but those, you know, I hate, as, in general, I do all details.  How Mr. Fox has recovered such a majority I do not guess, still less do I comprehend how there could be so many that had not voted, after the poll had lasted so long.(517) Indeed, I should be sorry to understand such mysteries.-Of new peers, or new elevations I hear every day, but am quite ignorant which are to be true.  Rumour always creates as many as the King, when he makes several.  In fact, I do know nothing.  Adieu!