Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/66

 time forward he will be jealous of you, and will hate you as long as he thinks you can rival him.' The event proved how justly I knew his character.

"There they were, shut up: and when they told me they had got their conditions in black and white, I told them how it would be. I said he would take them in; for what was a paper to a man like him? I wrote them such a letter, doctor, that they all thought it was Mr. Pitt's—Mr. Pitt's best style, too—until I swore he never knew a word about it. They fancied they had got all the loaves and fishes. One was to be Prime Minister, one First Lord of the Admiralty, and so on: but their ambition destroyed them. What have they been since Mr. Pitt's death?  Nothing at all. Who ever hears now of the Duke of B*********?"

I turned over the pages, and next read Wraxall's account of Mr. Sheridan, which Lady Hester said was very much to the purpose. "Mr. Pitt," she added, "always thought well of him, and never disliked my talking with him. Oh! how Sheridan used to make me laugh, when he pretended to marry Mr. Pitt to different women!"

I came to the passage where Sir Nathaniel finds fault with Mr. Pitt's having refused Sheridan's generous offer of co-operating with him in suppressing the