When this letter was produced, the Admiral was dead; new objects had engaged the minds of men; and this is not a nation where any impressions engrave themselves deeply. If I have mentioned it now, it was to demonstrate my own impartial veracity: and yet, though the delay was blameable, no consequences flowed from it. If he had lingered, it had been but for a day or two: he had arrived in time to fight the French, and could but have fought them, arriving a day or two sooner. Dispatched so late as he was, he never could have reached Minorca early enough to disturb their landing. This reasoning, therefore, is mere speculation, and not intended to absolve or condemn the Admiral, the justice of whose fate, I again declare, in my opinion by no means depended on the innocence or criminality of his behaviour: the iniquity of his suffering on such a sentence, and after such a recommendation of his Judges, gave the tone to his catastrophe. I must interrupt the sequel of his story to relate a few preceding and intervening passages. Two battalions, each composed of a thousand Highlanders, were raised for the service of America; the command given to the brother of Lord Eglinton, and to the Master of Lovat, the son of the famous old chieftain, who had suffered on Tower-hill after the late Rebellion. The young man had been forced into the same cause by his father, had been attainted and pardoned, but was never permitted to go into the Highlands; and though he received a pension from the Crown, he was allowed nothing from his paternal estate. His jurisdiction too had been abolished with the rest. This man was now selected by the Duke of Argyle, who told the Government, that under no other person the clan of Frazers would enlist. Stanley, formerly connected with Pitt, now attached to the Duke of Newcastle, under whose Ministry he was a candidate for the Admiralty, took severe notice of this measure in a very good speech, and roundly charged it on Pitt’s flattery to the Duke of Argyle. He expressed great dissatisfaction on the admission of disaffected Highlanders into the Army, said if Frazer had any experience, he had learned it in Rebellion; spared not the Scotch, and yet said, his was not prejudice, nor did he contract notions of any country by walking through the streets of it. This glanced at Pitt’s former declamation against Oxford. Stanley was ungracious in his manner, but had sense and knowledge, heightened with much oddness, and supported by great personal courage. Lord George Sackville defended the measure, and asked why rank should not be allowed to these extemporaneous officers, as it had been to the Colonels of the new regiments in the late Rebellion? This slip was taken up by Lord Granby, who said he was sorry to hear Rebels compared to Lords who had taken up arms to crush the Rebellion. Fox, not to be outstriped in homage to Argyle, justified the measure on the necessity of it.