Lord Chesterfield died in 1773, and his 'Letters to his Son,' a work abounding in keen and sarcastic observations on his contemporaries, were published in the following year, 1774. Sir Nathaniel Wraxall's 'Memoirs,' which contain the best account extant of the debates at the time of the Coalition Ministry in 1783, and on the Regency Question in 1788, were published in 1815, about thirty years after those discussions. But it is scarcely necessary to seek for remote precedents to justify the publication of the materials of contemporary history. Our own time has been fertile in great examples of it. For instance, the 'Memoirs of Lord Palmerston,' by Lord Dalling and Mr. Evelyn Ashley, are full of confidential correspondence on the secret discussions and resolutions of the Cabinet. The 'Journal of Lord Ellenborough,' recently published by Lord Colchester, contains the private record of a Cabinet Minister on the events of the day and the characters of his colleagues. The more recent publication of Lord Malmesbury's 'Autobiography,' and of the Croker Papers, has made public a large amount of correspondence and information of great interest, with reference to the ministerial combinations and political transactions of the present century. And above all, Her Majesty Queen Victoria, by placing the papers of the late Prince Consort, and her own correspondence and journals, in the hands of Sir Theodore Martin, for the purpose of composing from the most authentic materials a full biography of that illustrious Prince, has shown that, far from regarding with distrust or repugnance the records of contemporary history, she has been graciously pleased to contribute to it in the most ample manner by the publication of an immense mass of documents relating to the interior of the Court, the intercourse of the Sovereign with her Ministers, the character of foreign monarchs, the less known transactions of her reign, and even the domestic incidents of her life. No Sovereign ever courted more fully and more willingly the light of publicity on a reign which needs no concealment or disguise. It would be presumptuous to compare the Journals of an individual who never held any important office in the State, and who derived his knowledge of public affairs entirely from the intercourse of private friendship, with the correspondence and private records of sovereigns, ministers, and statesmen of the highest rank, which have been published with their sanction or with that of their immediate successors. These Journals advance no such pretension; but the production of so many confidential documents of contemporary or recent history by such personages may be fairly invoked to justify, _a fortiori_, the publication of notes and memoranda of a humbler character.