ment, which was formed and employed against Madajee Scindia, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Camac, as I particularly apprized the court of directors, in my letter of the 20th November, 1780. The other two were certainly not intended, when I received them, to be made public, though intended for public service, and actually applied to it. The exigencies of the government were at that time my own, and every pressure upon it rested with its full weight upon my mind. Wherever I could find allowable means of relieving those wants, I eagerly seized them; but neither could it occur to me as necessary to state on our proceedings every little aid, which I could thus procure, nor do I know how I could have stated it, without appearing to court favour by an ostentation, which I disdain, nor without the chance of exciting the jealousy of my colleagues by the constructive assertion of a separate and unparticipated merit, derived from the influence of my station, to which they might have laid an equal claim. I should have deemed it particularly dishonourable to receive for my own use money tendered by men of a certain class, from whom I had interdicted the receipt of presents to my inferiors, and bound them by oath not to receive them. was therefore more than ordinarily cautious to avoid the suspicion of it which would scarcely have failed to light upon me, had I suffered the money to be brought directly to my own house, or to that of any person known to be in trust for me; for these reasons I caused it to be transported immediately to the treasury. There, you well know, Sir, it could not be received without being passed to some credit, and this could only be done by entering it as a loan, or as a deposit; the first was the least liable to reflection, and therefore I had obviously recourse to it. Why the second sum was entered as a deposit, I am utterly ignorant; possibly it was done without any special direction from me; possibly because it was the simplest mode of entry, and therefore preferred, as the transaction itself did not require concealment, having been already avowed. Although I am firmly persuaded, that these were my sentiments on the occasion, yet I will not affirm that they were. Though I feel their impression as the remains of a series of thoughts retained on my memory, I am not certain, that they may not have been produced by subsequent reflection on the principal fact, combining with it the probable motives of it. Of this I am certain, that it was my design originally to have concealed the receipt of all the sums, except the second, even from the knowledge of the court of directors. They had answered my purpose of public utility, and I had almost totally dismissed them from my remembrance. But when fortune threw a sum in my way of a magnitude, which could not be concealed, and the peculiar delicacy of my situation at the time, in which I received it, made me more circumspect of appearances, I chose to apprize my employers of it, which I did hastily and gener ally; hastily, perhaps to prevent the vigilance and activity of secret calumny; and generally, because I knew not the exact amount of the sum, of which I was in the receipt, but not in the full possession: I promised to acquaint them with the result as soon as I should be in possession of it, and in the performance of my promise I thought it consistent with it to add to the account all the former appropriations of the same kind; my good genius then suggesting to me, with a spirit of caution, which might have spared me the trouble of this apology, had I universally attended to it, that if I had suppressed them, and they were afterwards known, I might be asked, what were my motives for withholding part of these receipts from the knowledge of the court of directors, and informing them of the rest. It being my wish to clear up every doubt upon this transaction, which either my own mind could suggest, or which may have been suggested by others, I beg leave to suppose another question, and to state the terms of it in my reply, by informing you, the endorsement on the bonds was made about the period of my leaving the presidency, in the middle of the year 1781, in order to guard against their becoming a claim on the Company, as part of my estate, in the event of my death occurring in the course of the service, on which I was then entering. This, Sir, is the plain history of the transaction. I should be ashamed to request, that you would communicate it to the honourable court of directors, whose time is too valuable for the intrusion of a subject so uninteresting, but that it is become a point of indispensable duty; I must therefore request the favour of you to lay it, at a convenient time, before them. In addressing it to you personally, I yield to my own feelings of the respect, which is due to them as a body, and to the assurances, which I derive from your experienced civilities, that you will kindly overlook the trouble imposed by it. I have the honour to be, Sir, Cheltenham, 11th July, 1785. (Signed) LETTER TO WILLIAM ELLIOT, ESQ. OCCASIONED BY THE ACCOUNT GIVEN IN A NEWSPAPER OF THE SPEECH MADE IN THE HOUSE OF LORDS, BY THE **** IN THE DEBATE CONCERNING LORD FITZWILLIAM. OF 1795. MY DEAR SIR, Beaconsfield, May 26th, 1795. I have been told of the voluntary, which, for the entertainment of the House of Lords, has been lately played by his Grace the **** of *******, a great deal at my expense, and a little at his own. I confess I should have liked the composition rather better, if it had been quite new. But every man has his taste, and his Grace is an admirer of ancient music. There may be sometimes too much even of a good thing. A toast is good, and a bumper is not bad; but the best toast may be so often repeated as to disgust the palate, and ceaseless rounds of bumpers may nauseate and overload the stomach. The ears of the most steady-voting politicians may at last be stunned with "three times three." I am sure I have been very grateful for the flattering remembrance made of me in the toasts of the Revolution Society, and of other clubs formed on the same laudable plan. After giving the brimming honours to citizen Thomas Paine, and to citizen Dr. Priestley, the gentlemen of these clubs seldom failed to bring me forth in my turn, and to drink, "Mr. Burke, and, thanks to him for the discussion he has provoked." I found myself elevated with this honour; for, even by the collision of resistance, to be the means of striking out sparkles of truth, if not merit, is at least felicity. Here I might have rested. But when I found that the great advocate, Mr. Erskine, condescended to resort to these bumper toasts, as the pure and exuberant fountains of politics and of rhetoric, (as I hear he did, in three or four speeches made in defence of certain worthy citizens,) I was rather let down a little. Though still somewhat proud of myself, I was not quite so proud of my voucher. Though he is no idolater of fame, in some way or other, Mr. Erskine will always do himself honour. Methinks, however, in following the precedents of these toasts, he seemed to do more credit to his diligence as a special pleader, than to his invention as an orator. To those who did not know the abundance of his resources, both of genius and erudition, there was something in it that indicated the want of a good assortment, with regard to richness and variety, in the magazine of topics and common-places which I suppose he keeps by him, in imitation of Cicero and other renowned declaimers of antiquity. Mr. Erskine supplied something, I allow, from the stores of his imagination, in metamorphosing the jovial toasts of clubs into solemn special arguments at the bar. So far the thing showed talent: however, I must still prefer the bar of the tavern to the other bar. The toasts at the first hand were better than the arguments at the second. Even when the toasts began to grow old as sarcasms, they were washed down with still older pricked election port; then the acid of the wine made some amends for the want of anything piquant in the wit. But when his Grace gave them a second transformation, and brought out the vapid stuff, which had wearied the clubs and disgusted the courts; the drug made up of the bottoms of rejected bottles, all smelling so woefully of the cork and of the cask, and of everything except the honest old lamp, and when that sad draught had been further infected with the gaol pollution of the Old Bailey, and was dashed and brewed, and ineffectually stummed again into a senatorial exordium in the House of Lords, I found all the high flavour and mantling of my honours, tasteless, flat, and stale. Unluckily, the new tax on wine is felt even in the greatest fortunes, and his Grace submits to take up with the heel-taps of Mr. Erskine. I have had the ill or good fortune to provoke two great men of this age to the publication of their opinions; I mean, citizen Thomas Paine, and his Grace the **** of *******. Ỉ am not so great a leveller as to put these two great men on a par, either in the state, or the republic of letters; but, "the field of glory is a field for all." It is a large one indeed, and we all may run, God knows where, in chase of glory, over the boundless expanse of that wild heath, whose horizon always flies before us. I assure his Grace, (if he will yet give me leave to call him so,) whatever may be said on the authority of the clubs, or of the bar, that citizen Paine (who, they will have it, hunts with me in couples, and who only moves as I drag him along) has a sufficient activity in his own native benevolence to dispose and enable him to take the lead for himself. He is ready to blaspheme his God, to insult his king, and to libel the constitution of his country, without any provocation from me, or any encouragement from his Grace. I assure him, that Í shall not be guilty of the injustice of charging Mr. Paine's next work against religion and human society, upon his Grace's excellent speech in the House of Lords. I further assure this noble Duke, that I neither encouraged nor provoked that worthy citizen to seek for plenty, liberty, safety, justice, or lenity, in the famine, in the prisons, in the decrees of convention, in the revolutionary tribunal, and in the guillotine of Paris, rather than quietly to take up with what he could find in the glutted markets, the unbarricadoed streets, the drowsy Old Bailey judges, or, at worst, the airy, wholesome pillory of Old England. The choice of country was his own taste. The writings were the effects of his own zeal. In spite of his friend Dr. Priestley, he was a free agent. I admit, indeed, that my praises of the British government, loaded with all its encumbrances; clogged with its peers and its beef; its parsons and its pudding; its commons and its beer; and its dull slavish liberty of going about just as one pleases; had something to provoke a jockey of Norfolk, who was inspired with the resolute ambition of becoming a citizen of France, to do something which might render him worthy of naturalization in that grand asylum of persecuted merit; something which should entitle him to a place in the senate of the adoptive country of all the gallant, generous, and humane. This, I say, was possible. But the truth is, (with great deference to his Grace I say it,) citizen Mr. Paine is a Norfolk man, from Thetford. 1 |