OF THIS VOLUME. xix contradicted by his own 'document.'* Again, ho looked on his ' document ' as one so exchisivcl y entitled to a particular appellation — namely, ' Letter ' of Service ' — that to no other document undei heaven could official authority venture to ascribe the same name ; and how he fared with that notion we already have learnt ; because we saw that Lord Har- dinge, when Commanding in Chief at the Horse Guards, had given the very same title to that other instrument which here, for the sake of distinction, I have called the Letter of Transfer. The Eeviewer's next escapade was the grand deviation achieved — not, of course, by so small a mistake as that of wrongly denying the name of a given Despatch, but — by jumping thence all the way to a wondrously distant conclusion, and believ- ing himself to have proved, as a consequence of the imputed misnomer, that no constitutional practice of the sort I described had ever been really existent. Imagine the scope of a 'judgment' adventured on that superb plan ! Or, test the range of such logic by supposing the Eeviewer to try it on some grander page of history. Then, if only he can make himself sure — and tliis with him is so easy! — that mankind the 'Secretary <it War,' and it was only owing to the subsequent concentration of Offices in Pall Mall — an event of recent years — that the Paper (having been brought thither from its ancient and humbler birthplace) proved so strangely confusing to my critic
- Of this the reader may judge, for the document, in all its
majesty, is given in the Appendix to this Preface.
