unhappily, before my labours had commenced in earnest, he was taken ill, and in a few days followed his friend and patron to the grave. Few of the associates of his latter days valued him more than myself, or more deeply regretted his loss; and in revising these pages, my mind has often recurred with melancholy yet grateful satisfaction to the many agreeable and most instructive hours I have passed in his and Lord Holland’s society at a house which has acquired an European celebrity as the great point of intellectual and moral reunion among the most distinguished political and literary men of the present century. These Memoirs comprise the first twelve years of the reign of George the Third, and close the historical works of Horace Walpole. “On their merits,” to use the words of Lord Holland,[1] “it would be improper to enlarge in this place. That they contain much curious and original information, will not be disputed.” In common with the Memoires of George the Second, “they treat of a part of our annals most imperfectly known to us,” with the decided advantage of the period being one marked by events of deeper interest and more congenial in their character and bearings with those which have since engaged, and still occupy our attention. The contests between Whigs and Jacobites may not be undeserving our curiosity; yet they sink into insignificance when compared with the origin and progress of the American discontents, in which may be traced the first indistinct rudiments of the great antagonistic principles and social revolutions of our own time. The Parliamentary struggles, too, in the case of General Warrants, are important, not less on account of the stores of constitutional knowledge they elicited, than from the spirit of free inquiry into the Prerogatives of the Crown on the one hand and the Privileges of the People on the other, which necessarily sprang out of them. Nor is it an uninstructive lesson to observe the efforts made by George the Third to break up the political parties which had embarrassed the reign of his predecessor. These topics are among the most prominent in the History of England during the Eighteenth Century, and they constitute the staple of the present Work. Some of the best debates on the Stamp Act, and on the proceedings against Mr. Wilkes, are here reported with a vivacity and apparent correctness which may be sought in vain elsewhere; and we meet throughout the Work the same abundance of anecdote, and the same graphic description of men and manners, that characterise the Memoires of George the Second. It gives even more copious details of the negotiations between political parties, especially those incidental to the fall of Lord Rockingham’s Administration; the gradual alienation of that nobleman and his friends from the Duke of Grafton; and the other divisions among the Whig party, which ended in the long enjoyment of power by their opponents. The records of these transactions do not, it is true, form