My dear Mr. Reeve,--Saturday night, November 28th, the books arrived. I am afraid, after Sunday church, more of my time than ought to have been Sunday's occupation was given to these three volumes. Of course, I have not _read_ them; I _rushed_ through, and am now going to read page by page. The interest is an immense one. Not only that I have _known many_ of the persons named, but I have _heard_ from all, and they seem to me like shadows reviving, returning to light and life. Dear Lord Clarendon's name struck me several times; and I remember, when Mr. Greville died, Lord Clarendon wrote me 'his papers had been given to the person most able to judge them.' At that time I did not know Mr. Reeve; but I recollect the words perfectly. Pray give my best compliments to Mrs. Reeve, and believe me very sincerely yours, SOPHIE. _From Lord Russell to Mr. T. Norton Longman_ _December 9th_.--I was much interested in C. Greville's Memoirs. He is not a bit too severe on George IV. A worse man has not lived in our time. On the other hand, many of the papers criticised the work in a hostile and violent manner. It was, they said, a breach of official confidence for a man in Greville's position to keep a journal at all. Greville--whose name it was fatally easy to rhyme to Devil--was described as a man delighting in listening at keyholes, and habitually misrepresenting the only half-heard secrets. Here is a specimen; one epigram out of many, all to the same effect, and all ending with the same rhyme:-- For fifty years he listened at the door, And heard some secrets, and invented more; These he wrote down, and statesmen, queens and kings, Are all degraded into common things. Though most have passed away, some still remain To whom such scandal gives a needless pain; And though they smile, and say 'Tis only Greville,' They wish him, Reeve, and Longman at the devil. The 'Quarterly Review,' too, in a peculiarly venomous article, compared the relative positions of Greville and Reeve with those of Bolingbroke and Mallet, as painted by Dr. Johnson. Bolingbroke, he had said, was a cowardly blackguard, who loaded a gun which he was afraid to fire off himself, and left a shilling to a beggarly Scotchman to pull the trigger after his death. The inference was inevitable; and though Reeve was neither a Scotchman nor a beggar, he unquestionably felt the sting, coming, as it did, from a friend of more than forty years' standing, Abraham Hayward [Footnote: See _ante_, vol. i. pp. 12, 34.]. The friendship was not unnaturally broken, nor does the old intimacy appear to have been ever renewed.