Page:Memoirs of the Lady Hester Stanhope.djvu/283

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Lady Hester Stanhope.
269

and it appears to me that he is beginning to see things in their proper light. * * * *

All that I have to entreat of your Grace is to allow me to appear in the light in which I really stand—attached to humanity, and attached to royalty, and attached to the claims that one human being has upon another. Nor can I allow myself to be deemed an intriguer; because I have said here, in all societies, that persons who abet those who attempt to shake the throne of Sultan Mahmoud shake the throne of their own sovereign, and, therefore, commit high treason: and among that class of persons I do not choose to rank myself. Nor am I to be reckoned an incendiary, when I seek to vindicate my own character, that never was marked with either baseness or folly:— it may have been, perhaps, with too little consideration for what are called by the world my own interests, and which I, in fact, despise, or at least only consider in a secondary point of view. There is nobody more capable of making the Queen understand that a Pitt is a unique race than your Grace: there is no trifling with them.

I have sent a duplicate of the enclosed letter to Her Majesty to my Lord Palmerston, through the hands of the English Consul, Mr. Moore. If it has not reached her safe, I hope that you will see that this