e title of Baron of
Melcombe Regis, in 1761. The honour was enjoyed for one short year only;
and on the 28th of July, 1762, Bubb Dodington expired. Horace Walpole,
in his 'Royal and Noble Authors,' complains that 'Dodington's "Diary"
was mangled, in compliment, before it was imparted to the public.' We
cannot therefore judge of what the 'Diary' was before, as the editor
avows that every anecdote was cut out, and all the little gossip so
illustrative of character and manners which would have brightened its
dull pages, fell beneath the power of a merciless pair of scissors. Mr.
Penruddocke Wyndham conceives, however, that he was only doing justice
to society in these suppressions. 'It would,' he says, 'be _no_
entertainment to the reader to be informed who daily dined with his
lordship, or whom he daily met at the table of other people.'

Posterity thinks differently: a knowledge of a man's associates forms
the best commentary on his life; and there is much reason to rejoice
that all biographers are not like Mr. Penruddocke Wyndham. Bubb
Dodington, more especially, was a man of society: inferior as a literary
man, contemptible as a politician, it was only at the head of his table
that he was agreeable and brilliant. He was, in fact, a man who had no
domestic life; a courtier, like Lord Hervey, but without Lord Hervey's
consistency. He was, in truth, a type of that era in England: vulgar in
aims; dissolute in conduct; ostentatious, vain-glorious--of a low,
ephemeral ambition; but at the same time talented, acute, and lavish to
the lettered. The public is now the patron of the gifted. What writer
cares for individual opinion, except as it tends to sweep up the gross
amount of public blame or censure? What publisher will consent to
undertake a work because some lord or lady recommended it to his notice?
The reviewer is greater in the commonwealth of letters than the man of
rank.

But in these days it was otherwise; and they who, in the necessities of
the times, did what they could to advance the interest of the _belles
lettres_, deserve not to be forgotten.

It is with a feeling of sickness that we open the pages of this great
Wit's 'Diary,' and attempt to peruse the sentences in which the most
grasping selfishness is displayed. We follow him to Leicester House,
that ancient tenement--(wherefore pulled down, except to erect on its
former site the narrowest of streets, does not appear): that former home
of the Sydneys had