A somewhat similar satisfaction must have stolen into the heart of Charles Greville when he wrote the last pages of his diary, and laid it aside for future publication. Nineteenth-century England presented none of the restrictions common to eighteenth-century France; and ten years after Greville’s death the first instalment of the ever-famous “Memoirs” exploded like a bomb in the serried ranks of British official and fashionable life. It shook, not the security, but the complacency of the Queen on her throne. It was an intelligent and impartial picture of the times; and there is nothing that people like less than to be intelligently and impartially described. Moreover, the writer was no anonymous critic whose words came unweighted by authority, no mere man of letters whom men of affairs could ignore. He had lived in the heart of administrative England, and he knew whereof he spoke. Lord Hervey’s memoirs are not autobiographical at all: they are historical, like the memoirs of Sully, and Jean de Joinville, and Philippe de Comines. They are very properly entitled “Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second,” and what their author did not know about that interesting reign (as seen from the angle of the Court) was not worth the knowing. Historians have made free use of his material; and some of those to whom it has been most valuable, like Thackeray, have harshly depreciated the chronicler. Dr. Jowett, in a moment of cynical misgiving, said that every amusing story must of necessity be unkind, untrue, or immoral. Hervey’s stories are not untrue, and not often immoral; but they _are_ unkind. What did he see about him of which he could consistently write with kindness? His sharpest thrusts have a careless quality which redeems them from the charge of vindictiveness. When he says of Frederick, Prince of Wales, “He was as false as his capacity would allow him to be,” it sounds like an observation passed with casual unconcern upon a natural phenomenon which had chanced to come under his notice.