r to Mr. Montague, in 1752,
he tells him, that "his memoirs of last year are quite finished," but
that he means to add some pages of notes, "that will not want
anecdotes;" and in answer to Montague, who had ludicrously menaced him
with a messenger from the Secretary's office, to seize his papers, he
says, "I have buried the memoirs under the oak in my garden, where they
are to be found a thousand years hence, and taken perhaps for a Runic
history in rhyme."

In another part of his memoirs of 1758, he says, with reference to the
different stages of his work, "During the former part, I lived in the
centre of business, was intimately acquainted with many of the chief
actors, was eager in politics, and indefatigable in heaping up materials
for my work. Now, detached from those busy scenes, with many political
connexions dropped or dissolved; indifferent to events, and indolent; I
shall have fewer opportunities of informing myself or others." And in
this supposed indolence and ignorance, he sits down to his work without
delay, and fills his volumes with information, inaccessible to
nine-tenths of the ablest and most active in his generation.

But it is not our purpose to give a consecutive view of the contents of
those volumes. Their nature is the reverse of consecutive. They are as
odd, irregular, and often as novel, as the changes of a kaleidoscope.
Nothing can be less like a picture, with its background, and foreground,
its middle tints and its _chiaroscuro_. Their best emblem perhaps would
be the "Dissolving views," where a palace has scarcely met the eye,
before it melts into an Italian lake; or the procession to a Romish
shrine is metamorphosed into a charge of cavalry. The volumes are a
_melange_ of characters, anecdotes, and reflections. We shall open the
pages at hazard, and take, as it comes first, in those "Sortes
Walpolianae," a Westminster election.

There is "nothing new under the sun." What the Irish cry for "Repeal" is
now, the cry for the "Stuarts" was a hundred years ago. Faction equally
throve on both; and the tribe who live by faction in all ages uttered
both cries with equal perseverance--the only distinction between them
being, that as the Jacobite cry was an affair of the scaffold, it was
uttered with a more _judicious_ reserve.

Yet, it is only justice to the men of the older day, to acknowledge that
their motives were of a much higher order than the stimulants of the
modern clamour. With many of