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promoting virtue and knowledge, and by recommending whatsoever may be either useful or ornamental to fociety.

I know that the homage I now pay you, is offering a kind of violence to one who is as folicitous to fhun applause, as he is affiduous to deserve it. But, my Lord, this is perhaps the only particular, in which your prudence will be always difappointed.

While justice, candour, equanimity, a zeal for the good of your country, and the most perfuafive eloquence in bringing over others to it, are valuable diftinctions, You are not to expect that the Public will fo far comply with your inclinations

nations, as to forbear celebrating fuch extraordinary qualities. It is in vain that you have ndeavoured

to conceal your fhare of merit, in the many national fervices which You You have effected. Do what You will, the prefent age will be talking of your virtues, though pofterity alone will do them justice.

Other men pafs through oppofitions and contending interefts in the ways of ambition; but your great abilities have been invited to power, and importuned to accept of advancement. Nor is it ftrange that this fhould happen to your Lordship, who could bring into the fervice of your Sovereign the arts and policies of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the most A 2 exact

exact knowledge of our own conftitution in particular, and of the interests of Europe in general; to which I must also add, a certain dignity in Yourself, that, to fay the least of it, has been always equal to those great honours which have been conferred upon You.

It is very well known, how much the Church owed to You in the most dangerous day it ever faw, that of the arraignment of its prelates; and how far the civil power, in the late and present reign, has been indebted to your counfels and wisdom.

But to enumerate the great advantages which the public has received from your administration,

would

would be a more proper work for an history than for an addrefs of this nature.

Your Lordship appears as great in your private life, as in the most important offices which You have borne. I would therefore rather choose to speak of the pleasure You afford all who are admitted into your converfation, of your elegant tafte in all the polite parts of learning, of your great humanity and. complacency of manners, and of the furprizing influence which is peculiar to You, in making every one,, who converses with your Lordship, prefer You to himself, without thinking the lefs meanly of his own talents. But if I fhould take notice

of all that might be obferved in

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your Lordship, I fhould have nothing new to fay upon any other

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