To the Duke of Grafton, Lord Chatham wrote the next day in a different style, complaining of the disgrace of Lord Shelburne, and of the treatment of Sir Jeffery Amherst. This was sufficiently explicit, and the moment of timing his resignation; but a month before the meeting of Parliament announced the projects brooding in his breast, and his hopes of distressing by so short a warning. A war had given him his consequence, a war must restore it. America, even Corsica, presented hopes of war. Lord Shelburne, I knew from Sir Horace Mann, had been tampering with Paoli, the Corsican general; and, from one of Lord Chatham’s messengers, when I was three years before in France, I had learned his directions of inquiry into the state of their ports--a meritorious attention, and not common to him with any other of our Ministers. Resign he did. Yet the Court, though embarrassed at first, felt no inconvenience from losing him. The Duke of Grafton, as the King trusted he would, was so earnest on procuring a divorce, that he would not risk being defeated by parting with the power of influencing the Parliament in his favour. Nor, whatever were his obligations to Lord Chatham, did they call on him to take the same step. Lord Chatham had designed him for a mere tool of office, and had not only not consulted him, but, totally excluding him from his sight, had left him exposed to all the difficulties into which a state of feigned or actual frenzy had thrown the Government. Possessed of a Premier, the Court easily kept the machine together, and with but small inconvenience filled up the vacancies; for Shelburne, to avoid dismission, resigned on the pretext of following Lord Chatham.