of the obligations he also owed to your Lordship, which I should have thought a reasonable call upon him too to write to your Lordship, for an opinion at least, upon circumstances of so very singular and important a nature. He assured me, that as to himself, he felt and expressed constantly the obligations he owed to you; but that it had really not struck him as a proper thing to trouble your Lordship with his letters, when he could communicate nothing more than, he concluded, was conveyed to you by other channels; that he should be heartily sorry to be thought wanting in any instance of respect or attention to you; that as to Mr. Pitt, he heard him now constantly using the same declarations of respect, regard, and high opinion, he had always made for your Lordship, your consequence, your friendship, and your eminent abilities; that he still openly and loudly insisted upon your being the most injured character in this country, and that the time must come when you would have ample justice done you, by those among the first who now refused it to you. He said, that Mr. Pitt had told him the circumstance of your having had a very explicit conversation with him, before you went abroad, but that he had not given him any hint whatever of the turn or particulars of it; that he therefore could not from thence judge of the understood relation now subsisting between you, or consequently of the footing on which he was to write to you.[1] I assured him, that I was full as ignorant of the nature or matter of your Lordship's conversation with Mr. Pitt, as he could possibly be, and I therefore only hazarded the suggestion of my own mind on the idea of the propriety, gratitude and good sense, there would perhaps have been, in his applying for advice and direction in so critical a conjuncture; that I must indeed only remark, that he had himself rather seemed to feel the propriety of writing, as he had begun a letter; and I could not therefore suppose it to have been agreed, that you were not to hear any more from him on any change of political
- ↑ See supra, p. 267.
