I think too highly of him, and too meanly of myself, to presume I am equal to the task.  They who do not agree with me in the former part of my position, will undoubtedly allow the latter part.  In the next place, the very truths that I should relate would be so much imputed to partiality, that he would lose of his due praise by the suspicion of my prejudice.  In the next place, I was born too late in his life to be acquainted with him in the active part of it.  Then I was at school, at the university, abroad, and returned not till the last moments of his administration.  What I know of him I could only learn from his own mouth in the last three years of his life; when, to my shame, I was so idle, and young, and thoughtless, that I by no means profited of his leisure as I might have done; and, indeed, I have too much impartiality in my nature to care, if I could, to give the world a history, collected solely from the person himself of whom I should write.  With the utmost veneration for his truth, I can easily conceive, that a man who had lived a life of party, and who had undergone such persecution from party, should have had greater bias than he himself could be sensible of.  The last, and that a reason which must be admitted, if all the others are not—­his papers are lost.  Between the confusion of his affairs, and the indifference of my elder brother to things of that sort, they were either lost, burnt, or what we rather think, were stolen by a favourite servant of my brother, who proved a great rogue, and was dismissed in my brother’s life; and the papers were not discovered to be missing till after my brother’s death.  Thus, Sir, I should want vouchers for many things I could say of much importance.  I have another personal reason that discourages me from attempting this task, or any other, besides the great reluctance that I have to being a voluminous author.  Though I am by no means the learned man you are so good as to call me in compliment; though, on the contrary, nothing can be more superficial than my knowledge, or more trifling than my reading,—­yet, I have so much strained my eyes, that it is often painful to me to read even a newspaper by daylight.  In short, Sir, having led a very dissipated life, in all the hurry of the world of pleasure, I scarce ever read but by candlelight, after I have come home late at nights.  As my eyes have never had the least inflammation or humour, I am assured I may still recover them by care and repose.  I own I prefer my eyes to anything I could ever read, much more to anything I could write.  However, after all I have said, perhaps I may now and then, by degrees, throw together some short anecdotes of my father’s private life and particular story, and leave his public history to more proper and more able hands, if such will undertake it.  Before I finish on this chapter, I can assure you he did forgive my Lord Bolingbroke[1]—­his nature was forgiving:  after all was over, and he had nothing to fear or disguise, I can say with truth,