Whether to console himself for this showy slavery, or to indulge a natural taste for the sarcasm which is forbidden in the atmosphere of high life, he wrote the Memoirs, of which we have given a sketch. The prudence of his son, the third earl, kept them in secret. The marquis, nephew of that earl, probably regarding the time as past when they could provoke private resentment, has suffered them to emerge, and Mr Croker has edited them, for the benefit of the rising generation. Whether the editor has done credit to himself or service to the public, by this employment of his hours of retirement, has been the subject of considerable question. That the volumes are amusing there can be no doubt; that they are flippant and frivolous there can be no question whatever; that they disclose conceptions of the interior of courts which may “make the rabble laugh and the judicious grieve,” that, though filtered through three generations of correctors, they yet remain miry enough still, requires no further proof than their perusal. We say this in no favouritism for either the King or the Queen: the truth was probably told of both. Their foreign habits evidently clung to them; and the purer feelings of England, as evidently, had not the power to purify the practices of their foreign descent. But if Lord Hervey’s mind was exercised in giving the secret life of courts to the world, we think that a much more contemptuous subject for the pencil might be found, in the man who, earning his daily bread by his courtiership, pretended to independence of opinion; who, listening to every expression of royalty with a bow, and receiving every command with the submission of a slave, threw off the sycophant only to assume the satirist, and revenged his sense of servitude only by privately registering the errors of those, the dust of whose shoes he licked for twelve hours in every twenty-four. But we must hope that the Memoirs of Lord Hervey will be the last with which the national curiosity is to be stimulated. We must have no further ill-natured overflowing on the absurdities of high life. If this fashion shall invade the shelves and _scrinia_ of noble families, there is probably not a household of the higher ranks which may not furnish its tribute. We shall be overrun with feeble gossiping and obsolete scandal. No rational purpose can be held in view by indulging the posthumous malice of a discontented slave. No manly curiosity can be gratified by breaking up the tomb, showing us only the decay so long hidden by its marbles and escutcheons from the eye.—_Requiescat._ THE GREAT TRAGEDIAN. CHAPTER I. Amidst a storm of applause the curtain fell. The applause continued, and the curtain rose once more; and the favourite actor, worn out with emotion and fatigue, reappeared to receive the homage which an enthusiastic multitude paid to his genius.