had
sometimes practised mean and dishonourable deceptions. It is in these
legacies of honourable men, of whatever party they may be, that we
expect to find truth and sincerity; but thus it happens that the last
hope of posterity is frustrated by the artifices, or the malignity, of
these party-passions. Pulteney, afterwards the Earl of Bath, had also
prepared memoirs of his times, which he proposed to confide to Dr.
Douglas, bishop of Salisbury, to be composed by the bishop; but his
lordship's heir, the General, insisted on destroying these authentic
documents, of the value of which we have a notion by one of those
conversations which the earl was in the habit of indulging with Hooke,
whom he at that time appears to have intended for his historian. The
Earl of Anglesea's MS. History of the Troubles of Ireland, and also a
Diary of his own Times, have been suppressed; a busy observer of his
contemporaries, his tale would materially have assisted a later
historian.

The same hostility to manuscripts, as may be easily imagined, has
occurred, perhaps more frequently, on the continent. I shall furnish one
considerable fact. A French canon, Claude Joly, a bold and learned
writer, had finished an ample life of Erasmus, which included a history
of the restoration of literature at the close of the fifteenth and the
beginning of the sixteenth century. Colomies tells us, that the author
had read over the works of Erasmus seven times; we have positive
evidence that the MS. was finished for the press: the Cardinal do
Noailles would examine the work himself; this important history was not
only suppressed, but the hope entertained, of finding it among the
cardinal's papers, was never realised.

These are instances of the annihilation of history; but there is a
partial suppression, or castration of passages, equally fatal to the
cause of truth; a practice too prevalent among the first editors of
memoirs. By such deprivations of the text we have lost important truths,
while, in some cases, by interpolations, we have been loaded with the
fictions of a party. Original memoirs, when published, should now be
deposited at that great institution, consecrated to our national
history--the British Museum, to be verified at all times. In Lord
Herbert's history of Henry the Eighth, I find, by a manuscript note,
that several things were not permitted to be printed, and that the
original MS. was supposed to be in Mr. Sheldon's custody, in 1687.
Cam