These and numerous trifles of the like sort, not worth recording, amused my vacant hours at York, but when I returned home, I made a very short stay and hastened to college, where I was soon invited to the master's lodge by Doctor Smith, who was pleased to honor me with his approbation of my past exertions, and imparted to me a new arrangement, that he and the seniors had determined upon for annulling so much of the existing statutes as restricted all Bachelor of Arts, except those of the third year's standing, from offering themselves candidates for fellowships: when he had signified this to me, he kindly added, that as I should be in the second year of my degree at the next election, he recommended it to me by all means to present myself for examination, and to take my chance. This was a communication so flattering, that I knew not how to shape the answer, which he seemed to expect from me; I clearly saw that his meaning was to bring me into the society a year before any one had been elected since the statutes were in existence; I knew that by my election there must be an exclusion of some candidate of the year above me, who had only a single chance, whereas I had a double one; in the mean time, my circumstances were such as not to want the emoluments of a fellowship, and my age such as might well admit of a postponement. These were my reflections at that time, and I felt the force of them, but the regulation was gone forth, and there were others of my own year, who had announced their resolution of coming forward as candidates at the time of the election. There was no part therefore for me to take but to prepare myself for the examination and expect the result. To this I looked forward with much more terror and alarm than to all I had experienced in the schools and theatre, for I not only stood in awe of the master of Trinity, as being the deepest mathematician of his time, but as I had reason to believe he had been led to lay open the election in some degree on my account, I apprehended he would never suffer his partiality to single me out to the exclusion of any other without strict scrutiny into my pretensions, and as I had obtained a high honor when I took my degree, I greatly feared he might expect too much, and meet with disappointment.

Under these impressions, whilst I was preparing to resume. my studies with increased attention, and repair the time not profitably passed of late, I received a summons, which opened to me a new scene of life. I was called for by Lord Halifax to assume the situation of his private confidential secretary; it was considered by my family and the friends and advisers of my family, as an offer, upon which there could be no hesitation. They took the question as it struck them in their view of it;

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they could not look into futurity, neither could they take a perfect estimate either of my fitness for the situation held out to me, or of the eventual value of the situation, from which I was about to be displaced. What the prosecution of my studies might have led me to in that line of life, to which I had directed my attention, and fixed my attachment, is a matter of speculation and conjecture; what I might have avoided is now become matter of experience, and I can only say that had certain passages of my past life been then stated to me as probabilities to occur, I would have stuck to my college, and endeavored to have trodden in the steps of my ancestors.

I was not fitted for dependence; my nature was repugnant to it; I was most fortunately formed with feelings that could ill endure the assumed importance of some, or submit to take advantage of the weakness of others. I had ambition enough, and it may be more than enough; but it was the ambition of working out my own way by the labors of my mind, and raising to myself a character upon a foundation of my own laying. I certainly do not offend against truth when I say I had an ardent wish to earn a name in literature: I had studied books; I had not studied men, and perhaps I was too much disposed to measure my respect for their characters by the standard of their talents. I had no acquaintance with the noble lord, who now invited me to share his confidence, and receive my destiny from his hands. My good father did what was perfectly natural for a father to do in the like circumstances, he availed himself of the opportunity for placing me under the patronage of one of the most figuring and rising men of his time. There was something extremely brilliant and more than commonly engaging in the person, manners, and address of the Earl of Halifax. He had been educated at Eton, and came with the reputation of a good scholar to Trinity College, where he established himself in the good opinion of the whole society, not only by his orderly and regular conduct, but in a very distinguished manner by the attention which he paid to his studies, and the proofs he gave in his public exercises of his classical acquirements. He was certainly, when compared with men of his condition, to be distinguished as a scholar much above the common mark: he quoted well and copiously from the best authors, chiefly Horace; he was very fond of English poetry, and recited it very emphatically after the manner of Quin, who had been his master in that art: he had a partiality for Prior, which he seemed to inherit from the celebrated Lord Halifax, and would rehearse long passages from his Solomon, and Henry and Emma, with the whole of his verses, beginning with 'Sincere, oh tell me'-and

these he would set off with great display of action, and in a style of declamation more than sufficiently theatrical. He was married to a virtuous aud exemplary lady, who brought him a considerable fortune, and from whom he took the name of Dunk, and was made a freeman of London to entitle him to marry in conformity to the condition of her father's will. His family, when I came to him, consisted of this lady, with whom he lived in great domestic harmony, and three daughters; there was an elderly clergyman of the name of Crane, an inmate also, who had been his tutor, and to whom he was most entirely attached. A better guide, and a more faithful counsellor he could not have, for amongst all the men it has been my chance to know, I do not think I have known a calmer, wiser, more rightheaded man; in the ways of the world, the politics of the time, and the characters of those who were in the public management and responsibility of affairs, Doctor Crane was incomparably the best steersman that his pupil could take his course from, and so long as he submitted to his temperate guidance he could hardly go astray. The opinions of Doctor Crane were upon all points decisive, because in the first place they were always withheld till extorted from him by appeal, and secondly, because they never failed to carry home conviction of the prudence and sound judgment they were founded upon.

This was the state of the family to which I was now introduced. In the lord of the house I contemplated a man regular in his duties, temperate in his habits, and a strict observer of decorum: in the lady, a woman in which no fault or even foible could be discovered-mild, prudent, unpretending: in the tutor, a character not easy to develop, or rightly and correctly to appreciate, for whilst his qualities commanded respect, the dryness of his external repulsed familiarity: in short, I set him down as a man of a clear head and a cold heart: the daughters were children of the nursery.

Lord

I went to town attended by a steady and intelligent servant of my father's; this person, Anthony Fletcher by name, who then wore a livery, has since, by a series of good conduct and good fortune, established himself in an affluent and creditable situation at Bath, where he still lives in a very advanced age in the Crescent, well known and universally respected. Halifax's house was in Grosvenor Square, but I found lodgings taken for me by his order in Downing Street, for the purpose, as I understood, of my being near Mr. John Pownall, then acting secretary to the Board of Trade, at which it was Lord Halifax's office to preside. This gentleman was to give me the necessary instructions for my obtaining some insight into the

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nature of the business likely to devolve upon me. My location was certainly very well pitched for those communications, for Mr. Pownall lodged and boarded at a house in the same street, and with him I was to mess when not invited out.

The morning after my arrival I waited on this gentleman at his office in Whitehall, and was received by him with all possible politeness, but in a style of such ceremony and form as I was little used to, and not much delighted with. How many young men at my time of life would have embraced this situation with rapture! The whole town indeed was before me, but it had not for me either friend or relation, to whom I could resort for comfort or for counsel. With a head filled with Greek and Latin, and a heart left behind me in my college, I was completely out of my element. I saw myself unlike the people about me, and was embarrassed in circles, which according to the manners of those days were not to be approached without a set of ceremonies and manœuvres, not very pleasant to perform, and, when awkwardly performed, not very edifying to behold. In these graces Lord Halifax was a model; his address was noble and impressive; he could never be mistaken for less than he was, whilst his official secretary Pownall, who egregiously overacted his imitations of him, could as little be mistaken for more than he was. In the world, which I now belonged to, I heard very little, except now and then a quotation from Lord Halifax, that in any degree interested me; there were talkers, however, who would take possession of a subject as a highwayman does of a purse, without knowing what it contained, or caring whom it belonged to many of these gentlemen had doubtless found that ignorance had been no obstacle to their advancement, and now they seemed resolved it should be no bar to their assurance. I found there was a polite as well as a political glossary, which involved mysteries little less obscure than those which are couched under the hieroglyphics of Egypt, and I perceived that whosoever had the ready use and apt application of those passwords, was by right looked up to as the best bred and best informed man in the company: when a single word can comprise the matter of a whole volume, those worthy gentlemen have a very sufficient plea for not wasting their time upon reading. I have lived long enough to witness such amazing feats performed by impudence, that I much wonder why modest men will allow themselves to be found in societies, where they are condemned to be annoyed by talkers, who turn all things upside down, whilst they are not permitted to utter that which would set them right.

When it was my chance to dine at our boarding-house table

with the afore-mentioned sub-secretary, I contemplated with surprise the importance of his air, and the dignity that seemed attached to his official situation. The good woman of the house, who was at once our provider and our president, regularly addressed him by the name of statesman, and in her distribution of the joint showed something more than an impartial attention to his plate. If he knew any state secrets, I will do him the justice to say that he never disclosed them; and if he talked with ministers and great nobles as he talked of them, I will venture to say he was extremely familiar with them; and I cannot doubt but that this was the case; for if he was thus high with his equals, it surely behoved him to be much higher with those who but for such self-swelling altitudes might stand a chance to pass for his superiors. He had a brother in the guards, a very amiable man, and with him I formed a friendship. Having been told to inform myself about the colonies, and shown some folio books of formidable contents, I began more meo with the discoverers of America, and proceeded to travel through a mass of voyages, which furnished here and there some plots for tragedies, dumb shows and dances, as they have since done, but in point of information applicable to the then existing state of the colonies, were most discouragingly meagre, and most oppressively tedious in communicating nothing. I got a summary but sufficient insight into the constitutions of the respective provinces, for what was worth knowing was soon learnt, and when I found that my whole employment in Grosvenor Square consisted in copying a few private letters to governors and civil officers abroad, I applied my thoughts to other objects, and particularly to the approaching election at my college; still, London lodgings and London hours were not quite so well adapted to study as I could have wished, though I changed my situation for the better when I removed to an apartment which was taken for me in Mount Street, within a very short walk of Lord Halifax's house, where I attended for his commands every morning, and dined twice or thrice in the week. One day he took me with him to Newcastle House, in Lincoln's Inn Fields, for the purpose of presenting me to the duke, then prime minister; his lordship was admitted without delay; I waited two hours for my audience, and was then dismissed in two minutes, whilst his grace, stripped to his shirt, with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, was washing his hands.'

1 Sir Robert Walpole used to say of the Duke of Newcastle-'He has a foolish head and a perfidious heart. His name is perfidy.' 'For nearly thirty years,' says Lord Mahon, 'was he Secretary of State; for nearly ten years First Lord of the Treasury. His character during that period has been, of course,