Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/270

 arrive when I should make myself a beggar: but I should have done my duty. What sort of right, then, had the Queen to meddle with my affairs, and to give orders, in total ignorance of the subject, upon the strength of an appeal from a man whose claims might be half fabulous, and to offer me the indignity of forbidding a foreign consul to sign the certificate that I was among the number of the living, in order to get my pension into her hands? I have written a few lines on the subject, and there is my final determination:—"I shall give up my pension, and with it the name of an English subject, and the slavery that is entailed upon it." I have too much confidence in the great Disposer of all things, and in the magnificent star that has hitherto borne me above the heads of my enemies, to feel that I have done a rash act. I can be anything but ignoble, or belie the origin from which I sprang.

I have been assured by those not likely to deceive me, that a large property has been left me in Ireland, which has been concealed from me by my relations. I have put this business into the hands of Sir Francis Burdett; but should I in future require a law opinion upon the subject, the little aristocratical rascal (whose acquaintance I was about to make when a child, had not a democratical quirk of my father's been the reason of shutting up his family for some time in the