Among the many letters which the publication of these last volumes of the 'Greville Memoirs' brought him, the following from Sir Arthur Gordon [Footnote: Fourth son of the Earl of Aberdeen.]--now Lord Stanmore, and then Governor of Ceylon--have a peculiar interest from their exact criticism of a point of detail with which the writer was personally acquainted at first hand:-- Queen's House, Colombo, June 18th. My dear Mr. Reeve,--I have very long delayed answering your last letter, in the hope that, when I did so, I might at the same time be able to send you my notes on the two last volumes of 'Greville.' But these notes will be numerous, and my time is scant for such work. On one point, the 'graspingness' alleged to have been shown by the Peclites after the formation of the Government in December 1852, and its modification to satisfy their exigencies, I have felt constrained to address the 'Times.' [Footnote: June 13th. The letter is reprinted in the Appenduxm _post_, p. 411.] The truth happens to have been exactly the other way, and Greville's notes are only the echo of the grumblings of the disappointed Whig placemen who talked to him. It is decidedly unjust not only to my father, Graham, and Gladstone, who are indirectly charged with this trafficking, but to the Duke of Newcastle and Herbert also, who more directly are so. I have, of course, read the volumes with great interest, but have had my suspicions greatly heightened that whatever may have been the case before--say 1841, the confidences Mr. Greville received in the later years of his life were not unfrequently only half-confidences, for the sake of obtaining his opinion on some collateral point, or of flattering or pleasing him by the show of confidence. There are, of course, many matters treated of in these volumes as to which I have no personal or private information, and I have no reason to question what he says about them; but I have some inclination to doubt, even as to these; for I find that as regards almost every transaction of which I do happen to know the whole history, he knows a good deal about it, but not _all_ about it. He was kept specially in the dark about the real history of Lord Palmerston's resignation in 1853 which is all the odder because he very nearly found it out. Hardly anybody does know what lay behind, though the difference about Reform was a very real one, so far as it went, and quite sufficient to justify--at all events, ostensibly--Lord P.'s virtual dismissal. Again, on another occasion, I see Mr. G.'s special friend, Lord Clarendon--I will not say, deliberately deceived him, but, certainly with full knowledge --allowed him to deceive himself on the strength of a half-confidence. [Footnote: A politic reticence, that has been called 'an economy of truth.']