But I deal with him now only as a prophet. And I begin with his “Memoires of the last Ten Years of the Reign of George the Second,” where we find the record that the Colonists were seeking independence. This occurs in his description of the Duke of Newcastle as Secretary of State for the Colonies, during the long Walpole administration. Illustrating what he calls the Duke’s “mercurial inattention,” he says: “It would not be credited what reams of papers, representations, memorials, petitions from that quarter of the world [the Colonies], lay mouldering and unopened in his office”; and then, showing the Duke’s ignorance, he narrates how, when it was hinted that there should be some defence for Annapolis, he replied, with evasive, lisping hurry: “Annapolis, Annapolis! Oh, yes, Annapolis must be defended,--to be sure, Annapolis should be defended;--where is Annapolis?” But this negligence did not prevent him from exalting the prerogative of the Crown; and here the author says:-- “The instructions to Sir Danvers Osborn, a new governor of New York, seemed better calculated for the latitude of Mexico and for a Spanish tribunal than for a free, rich British settlement, and in such opulence and of such haughtiness that _suspicions had long been conceived of their meditating to throw off their dependence on their mother country_.”[348] This stands in the “Memoires” under the date of 1754, and the editor in a note observes, “If, as the author asserts, this was written at the time, it is a very remarkable passage.” By direction of the author the book was “to be kept unopened and unsealed” until a certain person named should attain the age of twenty-five years. It was published in 1822. Perhaps the honesty of this entry will be better appreciated, when it is noted, that, only a few pages later, Washington, whom the author afterwards admired, is spoken of as “this brave braggart” who “learned to blush for his rodomontade.”[349] As the difficulties with the Colonies increased, he became more sympathetic and prophetic. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann, 2d February, 1774, he wrote:-- “We have no news, public or private; but there is an ostrich-egg laid in America, where the Bostonians have canted three hundred chests of tea into the ocean; for they will not drink tea with our Parliament.… Lord Chatham talked of conquering America in Germany. _I believe England will be conquered some day or other in New England or Bengal._”[350] In May, 1774, his sympathies again appear:-- “Nothing was more shocking than the King’s laughing and saying at his levee that _he had as lief fight the Bostonians as the French_. It was only to be paralleled by James the Second sporting on Jeffreys’s ‘campaign in the West.’”[351] And under date of 28th May, 1775, we have his record of the encounter at Lexington, with the reflection:--