He then said--'Mr. Trevor, you are already acquainted with the plainness, and what you perhaps have thought the bluntness, of my character. I have but one rule: I speak all that I think worthy of being spoken, and if I offend it is never from intention. What you have related of these lordly men does not in the least astonish me. Their vices are as odious as you have described them. Your great mistake is in supposing yourself blameless. You have chiefly erred in entertaining too high an opinion of your own powers, and in cherishing something like a selfish blindness to the principles of the persons, with whom you have been concerned. Your indiscriminate approbation of all you wrote raised your expectations to extravagance. Your inordinate appetite for applause made you varnish over the picture which the earl gave you of himself; though it must otherwise have been revolting to a virtuous mind: and your expectation of preferment so entirely lulled your moral feelings to sleep, that you could be a spectator of the picture you have drawn of the bishop, the day you dined with him, yet go the next morning to accept, if not to solicit, his patronage. You have committed other mistakes, which I think it best at present to leave unnoticed. In the remarks I have made, I have had no intention to give pain, but to awaken virtue. At present you are angry: and why?' 'Why!' exclaimed I, with mingled astonishment and indignation. 'A peer of the realm to be thus profligate in principle, and not excite my anger!'--'What is a peer of the realm, but a man educated in vice, nurtured in prejudice from his earliest childhood, and daily breathing the same infectious air he first respired! A being to be pitied!'--'Despised!'--'I was but three days in this earl's house. The false colouring given me by his agent first induced me to enter it; but I was soon undeceived.'--