I have been assured by a person who had the best means of knowing, that the _Letter to a Noble Lord_ (the most rapid, impetuous, glancing, and sportive of all his works) was printed off, and the proof sent to him: and that it was returned to the printing-office with so many alterations and passages interlined, that the compositors refused to correct it as it was—took the whole matter in pieces, and re-set the copy. This looks like elaboration and after-thought. It was also one of Burke’s latest compositions.[50] A regularly bred speaker would have made up his mind beforehand; but Burke’s mind being, as originally constituted and by its first bias, that of an author, never became set. It was in further search and progress. It had an internal spring left. It was not tied down to the printer’s form. It could still project itself into new beauties, and explore strange regions from the unwearied impulse of its own delight or curiosity. Perhaps among the passages interlined, in this case, were the description of the Duke of Bedford, as ‘the Leviathan among all the creatures of the crown,’—the _catalogue raisonnée_ of the Abbé Sieyes’s pigeon-holes,—or the comparison of the English Monarchy to ‘the proud keep of Windsor, with its double belt of kindred and coeval towers.’ Were these to be given up? If he had had to make his defence of his pension in the House of Lords, they would not have been ready in time, it appears; and, besides, would have been too difficult of execution on the spot: a speaker must not set his heart on such forbidden fruit. But Mr. Burke was an author, and the press did not ‘shut the gates of _genius_ on mankind.’ A set of oratorical flourishes, indeed, is soon exhausted, and is generally all that the extempore speaker can safely aspire to. Not so with the resources of art or nature, which are inexhaustible, and which the writer has time to seek out, to embody, and to fit into shape and use, if he has the strength, the courage, and patience to do so.