privileges of obscurity and sorrow.  At any rate, I have spoken and I have written on the subject.  If I have written or spoken so poorly as to be quite forgot, a fresh apology will not make a more lasting impression.  “I must let the tree lie as it falls.”  Perhaps I must take some shame to myself.  I confess that I have acted on my own principles of government, and not on those of his Grace, which are, I dare say, profound and wise, but which I do not pretend to understand.  As to the party to which he alludes, and which has long taken its leave of me, I believe the principles of the book which he condemns are very conformable to the opinions of many of the most considerable and most grave in that description of politicians.  A few, indeed, who, I admit, are equally respectable in all points, differ from me, and talk his Grace’s language.  I am too feeble to contend with them.  They have the field to themselves.  There are others, very young and very ingenious persons, who form, probably, the largest part of what his Grace, I believe, is pleased to consider as that party.  Some of them were not born into the world, and all of them were children, when I entered into that connection.  I give due credit to the censorial brow, to the broad phylacteries, and to the imposing gravity of those magisterial rabbins and doctors in the cabala of political science.  I admit that “wisdom is as the gray hair to man, and that learning is like honorable old age.”  But, at a time when liberty is a good deal talked of, perhaps I might be excused, if I caught something of the general indocility.  It might not be surprising, if I lengthened my chain a link or two, and, in an age of relaxed discipline, gave a trifling indulgence to my own notions.  If that could be allowed, perhaps I might sometimes (by accident, and without an unpardonable crime) trust as much to my own very careful and very laborious, though perhaps somewhat purblind disquisitions, as to their soaring, intuitive, eagle-eyed authority.  But the modern liberty is a precious thing.  It must not be profaned by too vulgar an use.  It belongs only to the chosen few, who are born to the hereditary representation of the whole democracy, and who leave nothing at all, no, not the offal, to us poor outcasts of the plebeian race.

Amongst those gentlemen who came to authority as soon or sooner than they came of age I do not mean to include his Grace.  With all those native titles to empire over our minds which distinguish the others, he has a large share of experience.  He certainly ought to understand the British Constitution better than I do.  He has studied it in the fundamental part.  For one election I have seen, he has been concerned in twenty.  Nobody is less of a visionary theorist; nobody has drawn his speculations more from practice.  No peer has condescended to superintend with more vigilance the declining franchises of the poor commons.  “With thrice great Hermes he has outwatched the Bear.”  Often have his candles been