It is therefore with no ordinary interest that we welcome the first installment of a work[C] whose promise--and, we at once cordially add, performance--heralds a really satisfactory account, a realizable flesh-and-blood portraiture, of the English prime minister under whose administration the peace preliminaries of 1782 were signed. The present biographer comes before us with advantages for the treatment of his subject never before possessed. He has enjoyed access not only to his great-grandfather's papers at Lansdowne House, but to those of two other most important actors in the British drama of a century ago--Lord Bute, "the favorite," and Henry Fox; and these documents, pieced together and set side by side, throw upon the events to which they relate, and the motives and objects of their authors, that light, unquestionable and convincing, which is the peculiar and happy characteristic of this kind of evidence. It is all very well for an acrid Walpole, or in our own day a scandal-mongering Greville, to draw, with plausibly life-like touches, his version of this or that historical transaction--to tell us, with the authority of one seemingly in the secret, that in such and such a matter Lord A. was scheming for this, and that we are to find the key to Mr. B.'s conduct in the knowledge that he was all along intriguing for that; but how often it happens that when, by good luck, the contemporaneous documentary evidence of correspondence, private memoranda and the like is forthcoming, the off-hand allegations of the memoir-writer are in infinite particulars tried and found wanting in correctness, and sometimes fall refuted altogether! More than one notable instance of this will strike the historical student in reading this first volume of Lord Shelburne's _Life_; and in the eventful and disputed years which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice has yet to chronicle it may safely be assumed that he will have plenty to say in the way of correction and explanation of previous histories of the time.