your inclinations, and which I do not think requisite to state, feeling the discussion of them unbecoming towards myself and others, from the same motives of delicacy which would influence me in your case, mutatis mutandis. But I must annex two conditions—one, that it must not be considered as the consequence of any past engagement, which I am now disclaiming; another, that it shall not be understood to be with any political view, for you quite mistake my plans. I wish well to what I call the new principles, and will promote them so far as a free declaration of my own sentiments in public or private will go; but politics have given long since too much way to philosophy, for me to give myself further trouble about them. I would as soon take England upon my back, as take the trouble of fighting up a second time the game to which you allude. If I plant any more, I have long determined that it shall be like the birds: the trees must depend on the nature of the soil. I will bestow no pains on fencing, much less manuring and dunging them.
"I am now only afraid that you will be angry that your sixty-one pages have not on the one hand had the effect of subduing or terrifying me; or on the other, made me angry; and that you apprehend them to be thrown away. They have not occasioned to me one moment's irritation; but they are not thrown away. I select, with satisfaction, the seeds of esteem and regard which I perceive interspersed. It is no small pleasure to me to reflect that, open and unguarded as I am well known to be, in such intimate habits as I have indulged with you, I have exposed myself so little. I see the merit of the advice which is mixed, which, if I was as perseveringly ambitious as you suppose, is as good as any Lord Bacon could have given to the Duke of Buckingham; and though the rest is at the expense of myself and of friends whom I highly respect and esteem, concerning whom you appear to have fallen into strange mistakes, I cannot help admiring the ingenuity with which you attach expressions to meanings, and meanings to expressions, to advance your argument; besides a great
