As far as I am myself concerned, I am desirous to complete, whilst I am able, the task allotted to me by Mr. Greville in his last hours, which indeed I regard as a sacred duty, since I know that in placing these Journals in my hands his principal motive and intention was that they should not be withheld from publication until the present interest in them had expired. The advance of years reminds me that if this duty is to be performed at all by me, it must not be indefinitely delayed, and if any strictures are passed on the Editor of these volumes, I prefer to encounter them in my own person rather than to leave the work in other hands and to the uncertainty of the future. If I turn to precedent and the example of other writers, it will be found that the interval of time which has elapsed since the latest date included in these volumes, embracing the period from 1837 to 1852, is considerably greater than that which marked the publication of similar contributions to political history[1]. At the head of these must be placed Bishop Burnet's 'History of His Own Time.' Bishop Burnet had lived in confidential relations with four Sovereigns and their Ministers, and it would be a mistake to compare the position of Mr. Greville (who never filled any office of a political nature, and who never lived in confidential intercourse with the Court) with that of the bold adviser of Charles II. and James II., and the trusted councillor of William and Mary. Bishop Burnet finished his history of the reigns of Charles II. and James II. about the year 1704; that of William and Queen Anne between 1710 and 1713. In 1714 he died. The first folio containing the earlier reigns was published by his son in 1724; the second in 1734, barely twenty years after the death of Queen Anne. Many passages were, however, suppressed, and the text was not restored in its integrity until the publication of the Oxford edition in the present century. [1] To look back as far as the Memoirs of the fifteenth century, it may be noted that the first edition of the Memoirs of Philippe de Comines, who had lived in the confidential intimacy of King Louis XI. and King Charles VIII. of France, was published in Paris in 1524, under a special privilege obtained for that purpose. Louis XI. died in 1483, and his son Charles VIII. in 1498. Comines himself died in 1511. These Memoirs, therefore, were published at a time when many of the persons mentioned in them, and most of their immediate descendants, were still alive. Lord Clarendon died in 1674, and the first edition of his 'History of the Rebellion and the Civil Wars' was published in 1702-4, with some alterations and omissions, which were supplied by the publication of the complete text in 1826.