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
