At this period merit in literature was allowed or denied, according to the writer’s politics. In 1773 Sir John Dalrymple published the famous second volume of his ‘Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland, from the dissolution of the last Parliament until the Sea-Battle of La Hogue.’ The first volume had appeared two years previously. The third and concluding volume was not published till 1788. The second volume was _famous_ for its exposure of Lord William Russell and Algernon Sidney as recipients of money from Louis XIV.; money not personally applied, but used, or supposed to be used, for the purpose of establishing a republic. Walpole was furious at a book which, while it treated both sides, generally, with little tenderness, absolved the last two Stuart kings from blame, and spoke of William with particular severity. Walpole says of Sir John: ‘He had been a hearty Jacobite; pretended to be converted; then paid his court when he found his old principles were no longer a disrecommendation at court. The great object of his work was to depreciate and calumniate all the friends of the Revolution.... The famous second volume was a direct charge of bribery from France, on the venerable hero, Algernon Sidney, pretended to be drawn from Barillon’s papers at Versailles, a source shut up to others, and actually opened to Sir John, by the intercession of even George III.――a charge I would not make but on the best authority. Lord Nuneham, son of Lord Harcourt, then ambassador in Paris, told me his father obtained licence for Sir John to search those archives――amazing proof of all I have said on the designs of this reign; what must they be when George III. encourages a Jacobite wretch to hunt in France for materials for blackening the heroes who withstood the enemies of Protestants and Liberty?... Men saw the Court could have no meaning but to sap all virtuous principles and to level the best men to the worst,――a plot more base and destructive than any harboured by the Stuarts.... Who could trust to evidence either furnished from Versailles or coined as if it came from thence? And who could trust to Sir John, who was accused, I know not how truly, of having attempted to get his own father hanged, and who had been turned out of a place, by Lord Rockingham, for having accepted a bribe?’ [Sidenote: _WALPOLE’S ANTI-JACOBITISM._]