never held any principles indeed, of which, considering my age, I have
reason to be ashamed. The whole of my public life may be comprised in
eight or nine months of my 22nd year; and the whole of my political sins
during that time, consisted in forming a plan of taking a large farm in
common, in America, with other young men of my age. A wild notion indeed,
but very harmless.

As to my principles, they were, at all times, decidedly anti-jacobin and
anti-revolutionary, and my American scheme is a proof of this. Indeed at
that time, I seriously held the doctrine of passive obedience, though a
violent enemy of the first war. Afterwards, and for the last ten years of
my life, I have been fighting incessantly in the good cause, against
French ambition, and Trench principles; and I had Mr. Addington's
suffrage, as to the good produced by my Essays, written in the Morning
Post, in the interval of the peace of Amiens, and the second war,
together with my two letters to Mr. Fox.[26]

Of my former errors, I should be no more ashamed, than of my change of
body, natural to increase of age; but in that first edition, there was
inserted (without my consent!) a Sonnet to Lord Stanhope, in direct
contradiction, equally, to my _then_, as to my present principles. A
Sonnet written by me in ridicule and mockery of the bloated style of
French Jacobinical declamation, and inserted by Biggs, (the fool of a
printer,) in order forsooth, that he might send the book, and a letter to
Earl Stanhope; who, to prove that he was not mad in all things, treated
both book and letter with silent contempt.[27] I have therefore sent Mr.
Poole's second edition, and if it be in your power, I could wish you to
read the 'dedication to my brother,' at the beginning, to Lady E.
Perceval, to obtain whose esteem, so far at least as not to be confounded
with the herd of vulgar mob flatterers, I am not ashamed to confess