iticism, or discovered and corrected. Two or three sentences
relating to private individuals were omitted, but nothing which
concerns public personages or public events has been withdrawn.

Eight and forty years have now elapsed since the date at which
the narrative contained in the former volumes was suspended, and
I am led by several considerations to the opinion that the time
has arrived when it may be resumed. We are divided by a long
interval from the administrations of Lord Melbourne, Sir Robert
Peel, and Lord John Russell, and, with a very small number of
exceptions, no one survives who sat in the Cabinets of those
statesmen. Nearly half a century has elapsed since the occurrence
of the events recorded in the earlier pages of these volumes, and
in a few months from the publication of them, the nation and the
empire may celebrate with just enthusiasm the jubilee of the
reign of Queen Victoria. Those who have had the good fortune to
witness this long series of events, and to take any part in them,
may well desire to leave behind them some record of a period,
unexampled in the annals of Great Britain and of the world for an
almost unbroken continuance of progress, prosperity, liberty, and
peace. It is not too soon to glean in the records of the time
those fugitive impressions which will one day be the materials of
history. To us, veterans of the century, life is in the past, and
we look back with unfading interest on the generations that have
passed away.

As far as I am myself concerned, I am desirous to complete,
whilst I am able, the task allotted to me by Mr. Greville in his
last hours, which indeed I regard as a sacred duty, since I know
that in placing these Journals in my hands his principal motive
and intention was that they should not be withheld from
publication until the present interest in them had expired. The
advance of years reminds me that if this duty is to be performed
at all by me, it must not be indefinitely delayed, and if any
strictures are passed on the Editor of these volumes, I prefer to
encounter them in my own person rather than to leave the work in
other hands and to the uncertainty of the future.

If I turn to precedent and the example of other writers, it will
be found that the interval of time which has elapsed since the
latest date included in these volumes, embracing the period from
1837 to 1852, is considerably greater than that which marked the
publication of similar contribut