To the Rev. William Mason
The quarrel with Gray
2 March, 1773.
What shall I say? How shall I thank you for the kind manner in which you submit your papers to my correction? But if you are friendly, I must be just. I am so far from being dissatisfied, that I must beg to shorten your pen, and in that respect only would I wish, with regard to myself, to alter your text. I am conscious that in the beginning of the differences between Gray and me, the fault was mine. I was young, too fond of my own diversions; nay, I do not doubt, too much intoxicated by indulgence, vanity, and the insolence of my situation, as a prime minister’s son, not to have been inattentive to the feelings of one, I blush to say it, that I knew was obliged to me; of one, whom presumption and folly made me deem not very superior in parts, though I have since felt my infinite inferiority to him. I treated him insolently. He loved me, and I did not think he did. I reproached him with the difference between us, when he acted from the conviction of knowing that he was my superior. I often disregarded his wish of seeing places, which I would not quit my own amusements to visit, though I offered to send him thither without me. Forgive me, if I say that his temper was not conciliating, at the same time that I will confess to you that he acted a most friendly part, had I had the sense to take advantage of it. He freely told me my faults. I declared I did not wish to hear them, nor would correct them. You will not wonder, that with the dignity of his spirit, and the obstinate carelessness of mine, the breach must have widened till we became incompatible.
After this confession, I fear you will think I fall short in the words I wish to have substituted for some of yours. If you think them inadequate to the state of the case, as I own they are, preserve this letter, and let some future Sir John Dalrymple produce it to load my memory; but I own I do not desire that any ambiguity should aid his invention to forge an account for me. If you have no objection, I would propose your narrative should run thus … and contain no more, till a proper time shall come for publishing the truth, as I have stated it to you. While I am living, it is not pleasant to see my private disagreements discussed in magazines and newspapers.