not having immense riches would be scanty evidence of his not having acquired them, there happening to be such a thing as spending them.  It is certain, he is dead very poor:  his debts, with his legacies, which are trifling, amount to fifty thousand pounds.  His estate, a nominal eight thousand a-year, much mortgaged.  In short, his fondness for Houghton has endangered Houghton.  If he had not so overdone it, he -might have left such an estate to his family as might have secured the glory of the place for many years:  another such debt must expose it to sale.  If he had lived, his unbounded generosity and contempt of money would have run him into vast difficulties.  However irreparable his personal loss may be to his friends, he certainly died critically well for himself:  he had lived to stand the rudest trials with honour, to see his character universally cleared, his enemies brought to infamy for their ignorance or villainy, and the world allowing him to be the only man in England fit to be what he had been; and he died at a time when his age and infirmities prevented his again undertaking the support of a government, which engrossed his whole care, and which he foresaw was falling into the last confusion.  In this I hope his judgment failed!  His fortune attended him to the last; for he died of the most painful of all distempers, with little or no pain.

The House of Commons have at last finished their great affair, their inquiry into the Mediterranean miscarriage.  It was carried on with more decency and impartiality than ever was known in so tumultuous, popular, and partial a court.  I can’t say it ended so; for the Tories, all but one single man, voted against Matthews, whom they have not forgiven for lately opposing one of their friends in Monmouthshire, and for carrying his election.  The greater part of the Whigs were for Lestock.  This last is a very great man:  his cause, most unfriended, came before the House with all the odium that could be laid on a man standing in the light of having betrayed his country.  His merit, I mean his parts, prevailed, and have set him in a very advantageous point of view.  Harry Fox has gained the greatest honour by his assiduity and capacity in this affair.  Matthews remains in the light of a hot, brave, imperious, dull, confused fellow.  The question was to address the King to appoint a trial, by court-martial, of the two admirals and the four coward captains.  Matthews’s friends were for leaving out his name, but, after a very long debate, were only 76 to 218.  It is generally supposed, that the two admirals will be acquitted and the captains hanged.  By what I can make out, (for you know I have been confined, and could not attend the examination,) Lestock preferred his own safety to the glory of his country; I don’t mean cowardly, for he is most unquestionably brave, but selfishly.  Having to do with a man who, he knew, would take the slightest opportunity to ruin him, if he in the least transgressed his orders, and knowing that man too dull to give right orders, he chose to stick to the letter, when, by neglecting it, he might have done the greatest service.