a note, you can for a minute suppose the least diminution in my regard for you or friendship to you. I am not prone to enter into such tyes on slight ground, nor, when once made, to infringe them without serious reason, which, I flatter myself, Lord Shelburne can never give me. Having answered this part of your letter with the frankness that becomes a man and your friend, suffer me with the same freedom to touch some sentences that follow. You here (and I have observed it before on another occasion) state your entering into the King's Service as an act of personal friendship to me. I am so unwilling to refuse anything of that kind from you, that I will accept it in one light as such, but let me view it in others too. Let me with truth affirm that, when I recommended my friend to the King as a person whose talents for business far advanced his age, I also had that friend's advantage in view.
"The Board of Trade at your age, my dear Lord, and at the critical minute of this Peace, appears to me one of the greatest situations this country can afford and the very noblest field you can possibly exercise your talents in. Ambition ought to be satisfied and every day you discharge your duty in this important trust, every report you draw, like the excellent one you have favoured me with,[1] lays in materials to raise your character, to make you known, to render you respected, and to take off that envy that in spite of your endeavours will exist from the few years of manhood you are able to count. Hear in me a friend that will not often trouble you with advice. Don't be concerned at want of information or the little paultry trappings of Ministry. If any around you whisper you are not of sufficient importance, hear them not. My Lord, they either talk ignorantly or selfishly, and in both cases foolishly; they will find that such impressions and the jealousys that ever attend them will by hurting you, root up their hopes. In short, both you and they will lose the end for want of patience in using the means to obtain it. Be satisfied with a rigid attendance on the
- ↑ It is not clear what this report was, but probably his reply to Egremont is meant.
