Then his Grace's merit would be pure and new and sharp, as
fresh from the mint of honor. As he pleased, he might reflect honor on
his predecessors, or throw it forward on those who were to succeed him.
He might be the propagator of the stock of honor, or the root of it, as
he thought proper.
Had it pleased God to continue to me the hopes of succession, I should
have been, according to my mediocrity and the mediocrity of the age I
live in, a sort of founder of a family: I should have left a son, who,
in all the points in which personal merit can be viewed, in science, in
erudition, in genius, in taste, in honor, in generosity, in humanity, in
every liberal sentiment and every liberal accomplishment, would not have
shown himself inferior to the Duke of Bedford, or to any of those whom
he traces in his line. His Grace very soon would have wanted all
plausibility in his attack upon that provision which belonged more to
mine than to me. He would soon have supplied every deficiency, and
symmetrized every disproportion. It would not have been for that
successor to resort to any stagnant, wasting reservoir of merit in me,
or in any ancestry. He had in himself a salient, living spring of
generous and manly action. Every day he lived he would have repurchased
the bounty of the crown, and ten times more, if ten times more he had
received. He was made a public creature, and had no enjoyment whatever
but in the performance of some duty.
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