stility to
him was never in the smallest degree tainted by personal ill-will. After
his fall from power a cordial reconciliation took place between us: I
admired the wisdom, the moderation, the disinterested patriotism, which
he invariably showed during the last and best years of his life; I
lamented his untimely death, as both a private and a public calamity;
and I earnestly wished that the sharp words which had sometimes been
exchanged between us might be forgotten.

Unhappily an act, for which the law affords no redress, but which I
have no hesitation in pronouncing to be a gross injury to me and a gross
fraud on the public, has compelled me to do what I should never have
done willingly. A bookseller, named Vizetelly, who seems to aspire to
that sort of distinction which Curll enjoyed a hundred and twenty years
ago, thought fit, without asking my consent, without even giving me any
notice, to announce an edition of my Speeches, and was not ashamed to
tell the world in his advertisement that he published them by special
license. When the book appeared, I found that it contained fifty-six
speeches, said to have been delivered by me in the House of Commons. Of
these speeches a few were reprinted from reports which I had corrected
for the Mirror of Parliament or the Parliamentary Debates, and were
therefore, with the exception of some errors of the pen and the press,
correctly given. The rest bear scarcely the faintest resemblance to
the speeches which I really made. The substance of what I said
is perpetually misrepresented. The connection of the arguments is
altogether lost. Extravagant blunders are put into my mouth in almost
every page. An editor who was not grossly ignorant would have perceived
that no person to whom the House of Commons would listen could possibly
have been guilty of such blunders. An editor who had the smallest
regard for truth, or for the fame of the person whose speeches he had
undertaken to publish, would have had recourse to the various sources of
information which were readily accessible, and, by collating them, would
have produced a book which would at least have contained no absolute
nonsense. But I have unfortunately had an editor whose only object was
to make a few pounds, and who was willing to sacrifice to that object my
reputation and his own. He took the very worst report extant, compared
it with no other report, removed no blemish however obvious or however
ludicrous, gave to the wor