e in a solitary diary.

The sources of secret history at the present day are so rich and
various; there is such an eagerness among their possessors to publish
family papers, even sometimes in shapes, and at dates so recent, as
scarcely to justify their appearance; that modern critics, in their
embarrassment of manuscript wealth, are apt to view with too
depreciating an eye the more limited resources of men of letters at the
commencement of the century. Not five-and-twenty years ago, when
preparing his work on King Charles the First, the application of my
father to make some researches in the State Paper Office was refused by
the Secretary of State of the day. Now, foreign potentates and ministers
of State, and public corporations and the heads of great houses, feel
honoured by such appeals, and respond to them with cordiality. It is not
only the State Paper Office of England, but the Archives of France,
that are open to the historical investigator. But what has produced this
general and expanding taste for literary research in the world, and
especially in England? The labours of our elder authors, whose taste and
acuteness taught us the value of the materials which we in our ignorance
neglected. When my father first frequented the reading-room of the
British Museum at the end of the last century, his companions never
numbered half-a-dozen; among them, if I remember rightly, were Mr.
Pinkerton and Mr. Douce. Now these daily pilgrims of research may be
counted by as many hundreds. Few writers have more contributed to form
and diffuse this delightful and profitable taste for research than the
author of the "Curiosities of Literature;" few writers have been more
successful in inducing us to pause before we accepted without a scruple
the traditionary opinion that has distorted a fact or calumniated a
character; and independently of every other claim which he possesses to
public respect, his literary discoveries, viewed in relation to the age
and the means, were considerable. But he had other claims: a vital
spirit in his page, kindred with the souls of a Bayle and a Montaigne.
His innumerable imitators and their inevitable failure for half a
century alone prove this, and might have made them suspect that there
were some ingredients in the spell besides the accumulation of facts and
a happy title. Many of their publications, perpetually appearing and
constantly forgotten, were drawn up by persons of considerable
acquirements,