Schemes of ample reach and true benefit would also promise best to insure the rewards coveted by personal ambition: and men of baser passions, finding it their interest, would naturally combine to perform useful service under the direction of strong minds: while men of good intentions would have their own pure satisfaction; and would exert themselves with more upright--I mean, more hopeful--cheerfulness, and more successfully.

It is not therefore inordinate desire of wealth or power which is so injurious--as the means which are and must be employed, in the present intellectual condition of the Legislature, to sustain and secure that power: these are at once an effect of barrenness, and a cause; acting, and mutually re-acting, incessantly.

An enlightened Friend has, in conversation, observed to the Author of these pages--that formerly the principles of men wore better than they who held them; but that now (a far worse evil!) men are better than their principles.

I believe it:--of the deplorable quality and state of principles, the public proceedings in our Country furnish daily new proof.

It is however some consolation, at this present crisis, to find--that, of the thoughts and feelings uttered during the two debates which led me to these painful declarations, such--as approach towards truth which has any dignity in it--come from the side of his Majesty's Ministers .-- But note again those contradictions to which I have so often been obliged to advert.
The Ministers advise his Majesty publicly to express sentiments of disapprobation upon the Convention of Cintra; and, when the question of the merits or demerits of this instrument comes before them in Parliament, the same persons--who, as advisers of the crown, lately condemned the treaty--now, in their character of representatives of the people, by the manner in which they received this motion, have pronounced an encomium upon it.