Having never proposed to write a regular history, but to throw together some anecdotes and characters which might cast a light on the times in which I have lived, and might lead some future and more assiduous historian to an intimate knowledge of the men whose counsels or actions he shall record, I had determined to lay down my pen at the death of that Minister, whose fortune, situation, and genius had superinduced a very new complexion over his country, and who had composed a system of lethargic acquiescence, in which the spirit of Britain, agitated for so many centuries, seemed willingly to repose. But as the numbness of that enchantment has been dispelled by the evanition of the talisman, though so many of its mischievous principles survive, I shall once again endeavour to trace the stream of events to their secret source, though with a pen more unequal than ever to the task. A Monkish writer may be qualified to record an age of barbarity and ignorance; Sallust alone was worthy to snatch the rapid episode of Catiline from oblivion; Tacitus, to paint monsters whose lives surpassed caricatura; Livy, to embrace whole ages of patriots and heroes. Though no Catiline, I trust, will rise in my pages, to deform his country by his horrid glory; though our present minister,[240] notwithstanding he has the monkey disposition of Heliogabalus, is happily without his youth or lusts, and by the character of the age that disposition is systematized into little mischiefs and unbloody treacheries; though we have no succession of incorrupt senators; yet the times beginning to wear in some lights a more respectable face, it will require a steadier hand, and more dignified conceptions, than served to seize and to sketch out the littlenesses and trifles that had characterized the foregoing period. The style, therefore, of the following sheets will perhaps wear a more serious aspect than I have used before: yet shall I not check a smile now and then at transient follies; nor, as much appropriated as gravity is to an historian, can I conceive how history can always be faithful, if always solemn. Is a palace a perpetual shrine of virtue, or incessantly a tribunal of severity? do not follies predominate in mankind over either virtues or vices? and whoever has been conversant in a Court, does he not know how strongly the cast of it verges towards ridiculous? Besides, I am no historian: I write casual Memoirs; I draw characters; I preserve anecdotes, which my superiors, the historians of Britain, may enchase into their weighty annals, or pass over at their pleasure. In one point I shall not vary from the style I have assumed, but shall honestly continue to relate the blemishes of material personages as they enter upon the scene: and whoever knows the interior of affairs, must be sensible to how many more events the faults of statesmen give birth, than are produced by their good intentions.