The authoress believes that she has discharged her task as a biographer with impartiality: she confesses, nevertheless, to a strong interest in the faulty but attractive character which she has attempted to delineate. When stating, in her summary of the Duke’s qualities, that time and trouble were rendering him a wiser and a better man, she was ignorant of the following tribute to Buckingham, written, when all patronage was closed by his death, by Dudley, Viscount Dorchester, to the Queen of Bohemia, and printed in the last volume of the Calendar. “The Duke declared a purpose to Dorchester on his (the Viscount’s) last return from the Queen of Bohemia, which he has since often reiterated, of making him, by his favour with the King his master, an instrument of better days than they have seen of late, he having a firm resolution (which he manifested to some other persons) to walk new ways, but upon old grounds and maxims, both of religion and policy, finding his own judgment to have been misled by errors of truth and persuasions of persons he began better to know; so as knowing otherwise the nobleness of his nature, and great parts and vigour, Dorchester had full satisfaction in him himself, and made no doubt but the world would have, notwithstanding the public hatred to which he was exposed. This testimony Dorchester owes him after his death.”[1] Footnote 1: Calendar, edited by Mr. Bruce, for 1628, 1629, p. 270. Of the restoration of the Navy by the strenuous efforts of the Duke the State Papers present almost a chronicle. The authoress regrets that she is not competent to do the subject justice; and hopes that some abler hand may employ with more effect the copious materials which will be found in those documents, of which she has touched merely on the leading points. Her aim has been chiefly to shew the energy, the sometime lofty purposes, of one who has been portrayed as a merely rapacious, vain, remorseless oppressor. The state of the times, the Impeachment, the Remonstrance, the Petition of Right, all bear so strongly on the circumstances of the Duke’s life, that it would be impossible, in a Memoir of him, to escape the difficult office of explaining to some extent the intricate politics of the day. In this attempt she also has derived her chief materials from the State Papers. Personal incidents, trusts, manners, character, literature, the arts, are subjects in regard to which the annals of this period are calculated to afford a great amount of instruction and interest. The authoress has already expressed her obligations to Mr. Lechmere and Mr. Lemon; to Mr. Bruce she also begs to offer her thanks for a suggestion by which she is enabled to insert an interesting account of the murder of Buckingham, in a letter from Lord Dorchester. (See page 112, vol. iii.)