e was to conclude the
struggle which he had always deprecated and deplored.

It is therefore with no ordinary interest that we welcome the first
installment of a work[C] whose promise--and, we at once cordially add,
performance--heralds a really satisfactory account, a realizable
flesh-and-blood portraiture, of the English prime minister under whose
administration the peace preliminaries of 1782 were signed. The present
biographer comes before us with advantages for the treatment of his
subject never before possessed. He has enjoyed access not only to his
great-grandfather's papers at Lansdowne House, but to those of two other
most important actors in the British drama of a century ago--Lord Bute,
"the favorite," and Henry Fox; and these documents, pieced together and
set side by side, throw upon the events to which they relate, and the
motives and objects of their authors, that light, unquestionable and
convincing, which is the peculiar and happy characteristic of this kind
of evidence. It is all very well for an acrid Walpole, or in our own day
a scandal-mongering Greville, to draw, with plausibly life-like touches,
his version of this or that historical transaction--to tell us, with the
authority of one seemingly in the secret, that in such and such a matter
Lord A. was scheming for this, and that we are to find the key to Mr.
B.'s conduct in the knowledge that he was all along intriguing for that;
but how often it happens that when, by good luck, the contemporaneous
documentary evidence of correspondence, private memoranda and the like
is forthcoming, the off-hand allegations of the memoir-writer are in
infinite particulars tried and found wanting in correctness, and
sometimes fall refuted altogether! More than one notable instance of
this will strike the historical student in reading this first volume of
Lord Shelburne's _Life_; and in the eventful and disputed years which
Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice has yet to chronicle it may safely be assumed
that he will have plenty to say in the way of correction and explanation
of previous histories of the time.

An autobiographical fragment, composed by Lord Shelburne in his closing
years, and found among the Shelburne papers at Lansdowne House, presents
with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be
desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second
George had been ten years on the throne, the Young Pretender, alike the
bugbear and