Whether it proceeded from ignorance or partiality I do not know, but in fathoming the grounds of the reigning discontents, Mr. Burke was as defective in not going back far enough, as he was in the inefficiency of his remedies. Though his book contained many melancholy truths, it was far from probing to the bottom of the sore. The canker had begun in the Administration of the Pelhams and Lord Hardwicke, who, at the head of a proud aristocracy of Whig Lords, had thought of nothing but establishing their own power; and who, as it suited their occasional purposes, now depressed and insulted the Crown and Royal Family, and now raised the prerogative. Their factious usurpations and insolence were even some excuse for the maxim taken up by Frederic Prince of Wales, by the Princess Dowager, and the reigning King, of breaking that overbearing combination; and so blinded were the Pelhams by their own ambition, that they furnished the Princess with men whose principles and abilities were best suited to inspire arbitrary notions into her son, and to instruct him how to get rid of his tyrants, and establish a despotism that may end in tyranny in his descendants. Though the Princess and Lord Bute gave rashly in to those views, their passions, folly, and cowardice oftener defeated the plan than promoted it; and it was in this light only that Lord Bute ought to be acquitted of raising the prerogative. _He_ rendered it contemptible; while Stone and Murray were the real sources of those discontents, which Burke sought, but never discovered. As I have said so much in the first part of these Memoirs on these heads, it is unnecessary to retail them here. A few facts will evince that the Pelhams, Hardwicke, and their friends, were an aristocratic faction; that they insulted and provoked the Crown and Royal Family, and raised disgusts in them against the Whig party, at the same time planting the rankest Tories about the successor and his mother, and forcing them to throw themselves into the arms of even Jacobites. 1. When the late King intended to restore Lord Granville, the Minister of his own election, the Pelhams, leaguing with the great Lords and principal Whigs, deserted him in the very heat of the rebellion, and obliged him to surrender at discretion. What a lesson was that to the late Prince!--no wonder it laid him open to the wiles of Lord Bolingbroke!