“George,” relates the prelate, “went in with the King, but no sooner he got loose but he came forth unto me into the Privy Gallery, and there embraced me. He professed that he was so infinitely bound unto me, that all his life long he must honour me as his father; and now he did beseech me, that I would give him some lessons how he should carry himself.” These lessons were three in number:—first, to pray daily to God to bless the King his master, and to give him grace studiously to serve and please him. The second was, that he should do all good offices between the King and the Queen, the King and the Prince. The third, that he should fill his master’s ears with nothing but the truth. These excellent instructions were afterwards repeated to James, who observed that they were “instructions worthy of an archbishop to give to a young man.” For some time, an affection, on the one hand expressed in parental terms, and gratitude on the other, continued. “And now, my George,” wrote the Archbishop, “because, out of your kind affection to me, you style me your father, I will from this day forward repute and esteem you for my son, and so hereafter you know yourself to be; and in token thereof I do now give you my blessing again, and charge you, as my son, daily to serve God, to be diligent and pleasing to your master, and to be wary that at no man’s instance you press him with many suits, because they are not your friends who urge those things upon you, but have private ends of their own, which are not fit for you. So praying God to bless you, “I rest, your very loving father, “G. CANT.”[87] Footnote 87: Extract from a letter quoted in Bishop Goodman’s Life, vol ii., p. 160. This epistle is endorsed “To my very loving son, Sir George Villiers, Knight,” and dated Lambeth, December 10th, 1615. The conduct of Villiers on a subsequent occasion made a deep impression on the mind of the excellent prelate who thus befriended the youth. “The Roman historian, Tacitus,” he bitterly remarks, “hath somewhere a note, that benefits while they may be requited, seem courtesies, but when they are so high that they cannot be repaid, they prove matters of hatred.”[88] This was a severe reflection on one who ought never to have forgotten the greatest of all obligations, those bestowed on the unfriended by one in the height of favour. Villiers may henceforth be regarded as fairly launched in his career; it was perhaps his misfortune that so few important obstacles occurred in his progress, and that it was achieved by an apparent concurrence of lucky events, and not by patient merit, nor by any of the legitimate sources of success. “The genius of the man,” observes a modern writer, “was daring and magnificent, and his elocution was graceful as his manners; but these were natural talents; he possessed no acquired ones.”[89] Footnote 88: