iety are
so delicate and numerous, the details so nice and varying, that
unless caught at the moment they escape, and it is impossible to
collect them again. That is the charm and the merit of genuine
contemporary records.

The two leading qualities in the mind of Mr. Greville were the
love of truth and the love of justice. His natural curiosity,
which led him to track out and analyse the causes of events with
great eagerness, was stimulated by the desire to arrive at their
real origin, and to award to everyone, with judicial impartiality,
what appeared to him to be a just share of responsibility.
Without the passions or the motives of a party politician, he
ardently sympathised with the cause of Liberal progress and
Conservative improvement, or, as he himself expresses it, with
Conservative principles on a Liberal basis. He was equally
opposed to the prejudices of the old Tory aristocracy, amongst
whom he had been brought up, and to the impetuous desire of
change which achieved in his time so many vast and various
triumphs. His own position, partly from the nature of the
permanent office he held in the Privy Council, and partly from
his personal intimacies with men of very opposite opinions, was a
neutral one; but he used that neutral position with consummate
judgment and address to remove obstacles, to allay irritations,
to compose differences, and to promote, as far as lay in his
power, the public welfare. Contented with his own social
position, he was alike free from ambition and from vanity. No man
was more entirely disinterested in his judgments on public
affairs, for he had long made up his mind that he had nothing to
gain or to lose by them, and in the opinions he formed, and on
occasion energetically maintained, he cared for nothing but their
justice and their truth. I trust that I do not deceive myself in
the belief that the impressions of such a man, faithfully
rendered at the time, on the events happening around him, will be
thought to possess a permanent value and interest. But I am aware
that opinions governed by no party standard will appear to a
certain extent to be fluctuating and even inconsistent. I have
not thought it consistent with my duty as the Editor of these
papers to suppress or modify any of the statements or opinions of
their Author on public men or public events; nor do I hold myself
in any way responsible for the tenor of them. Some of these
judgments of the writer may be thought harsh