If I do not forbid myself censure, at least I shall shun that frequent poison of histories, flattery. How has it preponderated in most writers! My Lord Bacon was almost as profuse of his incense on the memory of dead Kings, as he was infamous for clouding the living with it. In the reign of Henry the Seventh, the whole strain of his panegyric (and it is more justly to be called so than Pliny’s, whose patron was really a good Prince), is to erect that sordid Monarch’s tyranny into prudence, nay, his very knavery into policy! Comines, a honester writer, though I fear by the masters whom he pleased, not a much less servile Courtier, says, that the virtues of Louis the Eleventh preponderated over his vices! Even Voltaire, who feels for Liberty more than almost ever any Frenchman did, has in a manner purified the dross of adulation, which cotemporary authors had squandered on Louis the Fourteenth, by adopting and refining it after the tyrant was dead. In his war of 1741, he paints that phantom of Royalty, the present King, extinguishing at Metz, with as much energy of concern, as if he was describing the death-bed of a Titus or an Antonine. But how unpardonable is a flattering history!--if anything can shock one of those mortal divinities (and they must be shocked before they will be corrected), it would be to find that the truth will be related of them at last. Nay, is it not cruel to them to hallow their bad memories? one is sure they will never _hear_ truth; shall they not even have a chance of _reading_ it? It may be wondered that I, who know and have drawn the emptiness of present Royalty, should, in the exordium to a new period, in which surely the effulgence of Majesty has not been displayed with any new lustre, detain the reader with reflections on a pageant which has so little operation on the reality of the drama. But I must be pardoned: though I now behold only a withering King, good, as far as acquiescing to whatever is the emergent humour of his people, and by no means the object of jealousy to his subjects, yet I am sensible that, from the prostitution of patriotism, from the art of Ministers who have had the address to exalt the semblance while they depressed the reality of Royalty, and from the bent of the education of the young Nobility, which verges to French maxims and to a military spirit, nay, from the ascendant which the Nobility itself acquires each day in this country, from all these reflections, I am sensible, that prerogative and power have been exceedingly fortified of late within the circle of the Palace; and though fluctuating Ministries by turns exercise the deposit, yet there it is; and whenever a Prince of design and spirit shall sit in the Regal Chair, he will find a bank, a hoard of power, which he may play off most fatally against this constitution. That evil I dread--the steps to that authority, that torrent which I should in vain extend a feeble arm to stem, those steps I mean to follow and record.