ury and
his testimonies, since silence in the circumstances is not allowable.
Here is one Excerpt, with the necessary light for reading it:--

... It is on this Romish-King and other the like chimerical errands,
that witty Hanbury, then a much more admirable man than we now find him,
is prowling about in the German Courts, off and on, for some ten
years in all, six of them still to come. A sharp-eyed man, of shrewish
quality; given to intriguing, to spying, to bribing; anxious to win his
Diplomatic game by every method, though the stake (as here) is oftenest
zero: with fatal proclivity to Scandal, and what in London circles he
has heard called Wit. Little or nothing of real laughter in the soul
of him, at any time; only a labored continual grin, always of malicious
nature, and much trouble and jerking about, to keep that up. Had
evidently some modicum of real intellect, of capacity for being wise;
but now has fatally devoted it nearly all to being witty, on those
poor terms! A perverse, barren, spiteful little wretch; the grin of him
generally an affliction, at this date. His Diplomatic Correspondence I
do not know. [Nothing of him is discoverable in the State-Paper
Office. Many of his Papers, it would seem, are in the Earl of Essex's
hands;--and might be of some Historical use, not of very much, could the
British Museum get possession of them. Abundance of BACKSTAIRS
History, on those Northern Courts, especially on Petersburg, and
Warsaw-Dresden,--authentic Court-gossip, generally malicious, often
not true, but never mendacious on the part of Williams,--is one likely
item.] He did a great deal of Diplomatic business, issuing in zero, of
which I have sometimes longed to know the exact dates; seldom anything
farther. His "History of Poland," transmitted to the Right Hon.
Henry Fox, by instalments from Dresden, in 1748, is [See--Hanbury's
Works,--vol. iii.]--Well, I should be obliged to call it worthier of
Goody Two-Shoes than of that Right Hon. Henry, who was a man of parts,
but evidently quite a vacuum on the Polish side!

Of Hanbury's News-Letters from Foreign Courts, four or five,
incidentally printed, are like the contents of a slop-pail;
uncomfortable to the delicate mind. Not lies on the part of Hanbury,
but foolish scandal poured into him; a man more filled with credulous
incredible scandal, evil rumors, of malfeasances by kings and magnates,
than most people known. His rumored mysteries between poor Polish
Maje