hastened to bring me these letters;' but by whom, for what purpose, and in what manner the despatch really was given to the Count is thus described by Sir Hudson Lowe in his letter of the 9th of July, 1820, to Earl Bathurst. After acknowledging the receipt of the despatch, and stating that, by the same opportunity, accounts had arrived of the death of General Bertrand's father, Sir Hudson says

'I thought it proper, therefore, to lose no time in making known his Majesty's gracious disposition to attend to any desire he (Bonaparte) might have respecting a person to replace Count Montholon or General Bertrand; and, having drawn out a copy of your Lordship's letter, put it under a sealed envelope, marked on the back "Note of information from the Governor," and, proceeding to Longwood, sent the orderly officer to inquire for Count Montholon, and to say to him that I desired an oppor tunity of speaking to him. He was not in his room at the time I first sent to him, but arrived shortly afterwards, when, accompanied by the orderly officer, I called upon him, and delivered him the sealed paper, saying it was upon a point which might be interesting to Napoleon Bonaparte to be personally first informed of, and I begged he would deliver it to him. Count Montholon accepted the paper, and said he would not fail to deliver it.'

Again, though Count Montholon now asserts that he, the Count, received Lord Bathurst's despatch of March 16, 1820, from the Abbé Buonavita on the 7th or 8th of July-and then perceived the astonishment of Bertrand at finding that his wish to leave St. Helena had transpired-yet, in September, two months afterwards, when Count Montholon entreated the Governor's good offices in hastening the nomination of his, the Count's, successor, that he might return to Europe, he told Sir Hudson Lowe that he knew nothing whatever about it (viz., that despatch of Lord Bathurst's); that Bonaparte did not show it him,―il nous l'a caché, il ne nous en a pas dit un mot;' and, from his desire to avail himself of Lord Bathurst's consent to his quitting St. Helena, he asked if there were any means by which Sir Hudson could now inform him and General Bertrand officially of the receipt of that despatch.'

Such are the artifices by which the History of this illustrious Captivity' has been TRAVESTIED.'

We have given but a glimpse or two of the sort of light that may be expected from the Lowe MSS.-nor can we afford to extend this article, which must soon be followed by an ample one on those extraordinary papers. We cannot, however, conclude without drawing attention to the only really important statements in Count Montholon's work, and which, as they censure neither Sir Hudson Lowe nor Lord Bathurst, may be true, monstrous as is the charge which the Count has therein brought

against

against certain subordinate servants of the British Crown. The Count mentions no less than six plans which were formed and proposed for Buonaparte's escape from St. Helena. One of these propositions, he says, came from the commander of an East Indiaman; another scheme, the success of which was certain,' was projected by one of the officers of the garrison; and a third was tabled by a naval Captain on his return from India, who demanded no reward for himself, but a million of francs for his accomplices. The Count states, also, that notwithstanding all the Governor's precautions, the French had little difficulty in corresponding secretly with Europe-adding details which fully justify Sir Hudson Lowe's opinion of the intriguing spirit of at least one of the foreign commissioners, whose presence at St. Helena proved so mischievous, that two of the three were removed long before the Emperor's death.

In these facts, if facts they be, an answer will be found to all the magniloquent reclamations and lamentations touching the wanton and tyrannical rigour of Buonaparte's confinement; and we leave Count Montholon to reconcile as he best may his own distinct avowal in this book of his having had a perfect cognizance of six successive plots for his master's escape - plots formed even by British subjects, and one of them by an officer of the Governor's own garrison-with his, the same Count Montholon's, solemn declaration before God and man, and upon his honour,' in April, 1823, two years after the death of Napoleon, that he always considered the government of Sir Hudson Lowe as arbitrary, unjust, unnecessarily vexatious, and, in short, as that of a Governor bewildered by the vast extent of his responsibility, and swayed by the chimeras of a restless imagination!

IT

ART. VII.-Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second, from his Accession to the Death of Queen Caroline. By John Lord Hervey. Edited, from the Original Manuscript at Ickworth, by the Right Hon. J. W. Croker. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1848. T has been known ever since Walpole published his Catalogue of Royal and Noble Authors in 1757, that John Lord Hervey, the Sporus of Pope, had left Memoirs of the Court of George II.; and it was stated by Bowles, in his edition of Pope, 1806, that Lord Hervey's dying injunction must prevent their appearance during the lifetime of George III. That injunction, however, was not Lord Hervey's, but contained in the will of his son Augustus, third Earl of Bristol, whose nephew, the first Marquis,

VOL. LXXXII. NO, CLXIV.

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Marquis, now at last, twenty-eight years after the death of George III., authorises the publication. Mr. Croker's fitness for the editorial task had no doubt been suggested by his edition of Lady Hervey's Letters, 1821. That lady (the famous Mary Lepell) survived her lord for many years, and several of her friends, among others probably Lord Hailes and Horace Walpole, had been allowed by her to peruse parts of the Memoirs; but Lord Hailes, who in 1778 justly described them as 'written with great freedom,' hinted that whenever they appeared the origin of the antipathy between George II. and his eldest son would be revealed to posterity,'-and that promise is not redeemed in the text now given to the world.

The explanation of this seems to be, that the Marquis, upon the expiring of the testamentary injunction, examined the MS. with a view to publication, and not only conceived that a still longer suppression would be expedient, but that some of its contents ought never to be revealed at all. His Lordship accordingly cut out and burnt various passages; and as he was careful to mark the place and extent of each laceration, the editor concludes from the context that they all bore reference to the feuds in the royal family. It is probable that we have thus lost a clue to what certainly is a very perplexing mystery; for it is evident that the alienation between Prince Frederick and not only his father, but his mother, was strong and decided while he was yet in his early youth-years before he ever saw England; and historical inquirers will now be more than ever puzzled, since Hervey's Memoirs show that the parental animosity did go so far as to contemplate, if possible, his actual disinheritance:—an extravagance alleged by Frederick himself, or at his suggestion, in the scandalous mock fairy-tale of Prince Titi, but not heretofore confirmed by any better authority.

It is to be wished that the noble owner of the MS. had consulted some experienced literary adviser before he made irremediable mutilations, some of them possibly of no ordinary importance. Mr. Croker tells us he has altered nothing of the text confided to him except words or phrases not compatible with modern notions of decorum-a liberty which every recent editor of old letters or journals has (or ought to have) exemplified. No man can be justified in publishing for the first time gross indecencies; and expressions that have this character to every modern eye abounded in the familiar intercourse, oral or epistolary, of the purest men and even women a hundred years ago-as well as in the most classical literature of their age. But Mr. Croker felt that this is a very nice and difficult part of an editor's task. To omit such things wholly and leave no indication

of

of them-is really to destroy historical evidence, both as to individual character and national manners. His rule has been 'to suppress, but not to conceal.' We are to take it for granted, then, that wherever we see Editorial asterisks or brackets there was heinous offensiveness-for the text, as we have it, is still 'written with great freedom' in every sense of that word. We doubt not Mr. Croker's discretion; but there is no small risk, especially in these days of blue-stocking activity, that the scruples of delicacy may be indulged to the serious damage of historical testimony-and we venture to suggest that among all our bookclubs there might well be one to perpetuate unmutilated copies of private memoirs and correspondence. The plan of limited impressions, kept exclusively for a small circle, might in this case be serviceable to purposes of real value.

These Memoirs extend over the first ten years of George the Second's reign (1727—1737), during seven of which the author was domesticated in the palace. Of his personal history before they commence, and after their conclusion, we have eyen now rather slender information; but Mr. Croker has probably given us all that the world will ever have. He has certainly added a good deal to what we formerly possessed, and, we think, enough to pre. pare us very tolerably for the appreciation of Hervey's posthumous narrative, as well as to render intelligible not a few hitherto dark allusions in the prose and the verse of his friend Lady Mary Wortley, and their common enemy, Pope.

John Hervey, the second son of the first Lord Bristol, was born in 1696. His father, the representative of an ancient and wealthy family, was one of the leading Whig commoners at the revolution, created a peer by Queen Anne in 1703 through the influence of Marlborough, and rewarded for his Hanoverian zeal by the earldom on the accession of George I.: a man of powerful talents, elegant accomplishments, and unspotted worth in every relation of life, but not without a harmless share in that hereditary eccentricity of character which suggested Lady Mary Wortley's division of the human race into Men, Women, and Herveys. After his elevation in 1714 he appears to have lived constantly at his noble seat of Ickworth, in Suffolk, where he divided his active hours between his books, his farm, and his country sports, and solaced his leisure with eternal grumblings. The peerage-the earldom-sufficed not; he would fain have had political office, and since this was not tendered him, he would take no further share in the business of Parliament. His wife was a Lady of the Bedchamber to Caroline both as Princess of Wales and as Queen of England, and four of his sons, as they grew up, were provided for by royal favour, two of them with places in the household; 2 L2 but

but still he grumbled; and though the most distinguished of his progeny inherited few or none of his virtues, he imitated and exaggerated all the good man's foibles.

Lord Bristol's eldest son, Carr Lord Hervey, was early attached to the household of the Prince of Wales (George II.), and is said by Walpole to have been endowed with abilities even superior to those of his brother John. He died young and unmarried; but his short life had been very profligate. According to Lady Louisa Stuart (in the Anecdotes prefixed to the late Lord Wharncliffe's edition of Lady Mary Wortley's works), it was generally believed that Carr was the real father of Horace Walpole, and besides various circumstances stated by Lady Louisa in corroboration of that story, it derives new support from the sketches of Sir Robert Walpole's interior life in the Memoirs now before us, but still more, perhaps, from the literary execution of the Memoirs themselves, and the peculiar kind of talent, taste, and temper which they evince. If the virtuoso of Strawberry Hill was not entitled to a place in Lady Mary's third class, he at least bore a most striking resemblance to those of that class with whom she was best acquainted; and certainly no man or woman—or Herveyever bore less likeness than he did, physically, morally, or intellectually, to the pater quem nuptiæ demonstrabant.

John Hervey, on leaving Cambridge in 1715, travelled for some little time on the Continent, and then, not immediately succeeding in his application for a commission in the Guards, attached himself to the young court' at Richmond, where the Prince and Princess had his mother and brother already in their household. Caroline was then a little turned of thirty, comely, high in health and spirits, and, besides the Chesterfields, Scarboroughs, Bathursts, the Howards, Bellendens, and Lepells of her proper circle, had also in her neighbourhood and confidence Pope and the minor literati of his little brotherhood. Lady Mary Wortley, too, occupied a villa at Twickenham. To all this brilliant society John Hervey found ready access, and he soon became one of its acknowledged lights; his person was eminently handsome, though in too effeminate a style-his wit piquant-his literature, considering his station and opportunities, very remarkable—his rhymes above par-his ambition eager-his presumption and volubility boundless-his address and manners, however, most polished and captivating. He by and by stood very high in the favour of the Princess and, perhaps, for a season, in the fancy of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Pope received and cultivated him with most flattering attention, but in what bitter hostility that connexion ended is known to everybody—although it is not to this hour clear in how far the change in Pope's feelings towards