While men were taken up with the politics of the age, there was a Minister so smitten with the exploded usages of barbarous times, that he thought of nothing less than reviving the feudal system. This was the Earl of Egmont,[446] who had actually drawn up a plan for establishing that absurd kind of government in the island of St. John.[447] He printed several copies of his scheme, and sent them about to his brother peers. And so little were they masters of the subject, and so great was the inattention of the Ministry to the outlying parts of our empire, that his Lordship, in the following year, had prevailed with the Council to suffer him to make the experiment, if General Conway had not chanced to arrive at Council and expose the folly of such an undertaking, which occasioned its being laid aside. Lord Egmont was such a passionate admirer of those noble tenures and customs, that he rebuilt his house at Enmere in Somersetshire in the guise of a castle, moated it round, and prepared it to defend itself with cross-bows and arrows, against the time in which the fabric and use of gunpowder shall be forgotten. On the 9th Mr. Grenville opened the budget, fully, for brevity was not his failing; but he did it with art and ability too, though not disguising how much he was hurt by abuse. He said it had been written in pamphlets that 400,000_l._ a year was dealt out in pensions; pretending that the accusation had been levelled against the profusion of those granted in Ireland, which he denied to be so great as alleged, particularly in that bestowed on Lord Sandwich, which, as I have said, had been stopped. But in truth the charge had been levelled against that sort of corruption in England; and on that he chose to be silent. Much art, he said, had been used to dissuade people from subscribing to the loans of Government; but no new money was to be raised,--no lottery; the latter to be kept in reserve for another exigence. He hoped, therefore, people would engage in the funds, as if monied men would not keep their cash a year longer, when it must be borrowed! He took great merit on the revenue being managed with more frugality than in the late reign, and on the increase of the customs, particularly in the duties on tea, though the increase of trade had much more share in that rise than his regulations. He stated the debt incurred by the late war at sixty-four millions already funded, and nine that were not. But above all he praised, and justly, the reduction of the demands from Germany. They amounted to 1,354,803_l._ and upwards, of which 103,355_l._ had only been allowed. 263,211_l._ had been suspended, and 988,237_l._[448] had been struck off. The time had been limited for the demands to be brought in, or more would have been asked from that quarter: and yet our taxes, he said, exceeded by three millions what they did in 1754. He then opened his, famous shall I call it, or fatal, plan for collecting a revenue from America;[449] a plan which, though