Again, speaking of Dr. Dodd's execution, he says

'I have heard Lord Sackville recount the circumstances that took place in the council held on the occasion, at which the King assisted. To the firmness of the Lord Chief-Justice, Dodd's execution was due: for, no sooner had he pronounced his decided opinion that no mercy ought to be extended, than the King, taking up the pen, signed the death-warrant.'—vol. ii. p. 25.

Lord Sackville never could have told him any such thing—the King never signs any death-warrant-his pleasure on the Recorder's report is in ordinary cases verbally, and in fatal cases silently, signified-and it is always guided by the opinion of the legal members of the Privy Council.

Of the same class is the account given of the elevation of Dr. Manners Sutton to the see of Canterbury—

In 1805, on the death of Dr. Moore, Archbishop of Canterbury, Pitt, who was then first minister for the second time, made the strongest exertions to raise Pretyman to the metropolitan see. But his Majesty pertinaciously refused his consent. I know from a near relative of the present Archbishop of Canterbury, that when the minister urged the matter warmly, George III. replied, " Mr. Pitt, don't press me further on the subject; for I am determined to confer it on Sutton, whom you brought under my eye, when he was made Dean of Windsor at your recommendation. And it would be indecorous that we should be known to differ on this point." As the best proof of his unalterable resolution to raise Dr. Manners Sutton to the vacant archiepiscopal see, the King authorized the distinguished individual who related to me the abovementioned particulars, one of his oldest servants,-to write to Mrs. Manners Sutton, Dr. Sutton's wife, assuring her, in his Majesty's name, of his fixed determination on the subject.'-vol. ii. pp. 232, 233.

We cannot pretend to say what may have passed between the King and Mr. Pitt in the closet, but as Wraxall vouches the same authority for the first part of the story as for the second, and as we know the latter part to be utterly false, we suppose the whole is equally so. We can state, on the best authority, that no such letter was ever written to Mrs. Manners Sutton. Wraxall then proceeds to give some details of the narrowness of the archbishop's circumstances in early life, of the probable veracity of which we can judge by that of the statement with which he winds up—

It is a fact that the archbishop still preserves the pair of brass candlesticks which, when curate of Canwick, he constantly had in use. His own son, Lieutenant-Colonel Sutton, so assured me.'—vol. ii. pp. 234, 235.

Now we will venture to assert that Lieutenant-Colonel Sutton never told him so, because there never was, in fact, the least colour or pretence for such a statement. A narrow income in early life, and an humble and grateful recollection of it in subsequent pros

perity,

perity, would not be (as the mean soul of Wraxall evidently thought) discreditable to any man, and least of all to a Christian prelate; and we are therefore rather sorry to say that there is no truth whatsoever in these domestic anecdotes of the amiable humility of the late Archbishop of Canterbury.

--

Whenever Wraxall thinks he has an opportunity of indulging this species of vulgar malevolence, even where there can be no pretence for bringing such matters before the public,—he relates details and circumstances of private life, which are always impertinent and offensive, and generally inaccurate.

For instance, he affects to give an account of the rapid elevation of the Burrell family' as one of the most singular events of our time,' and he enlarges on this theme with a great deal of impertinence, and lends his gossip an air of authority by adding that he knew well the first Lord Gwydyr, the chief pinnacle of this prodigious elevation,'-whereas, it is clear, he knew less of him or his family than he might have learned from the common peerages. The father of Lord Gwydyr was not, as Wraxall represents him, a Commissioner of Excise,-on the contrary, he sat in parliament (which a Commissioner of Excise could not have done) for Haslemere-a borough, the nomination of which was in his family-and he filled the political office of SurveyorGeneral of the Woods and Forests.' He was descended from an old and highly respectable family,-enriched, indeed, by trade in the person of Lord Gwydyr's grandfather: nor was his peerage, as Wraxall represents it, an unprecedented favour. Mr. Burrell married Lady Elizabeth Bertie, eldest daughter of the Duke of Ancaster, who ultimately, by the death of her brother, inherited the ancient barony of Willoughby de Eresby, the greater part of the Ancaster estates, and the hereditary office of Great Chamber lain of England. Was it unprecedented, or contrary to the 'exclusive and invariable rule,' that a gentleman of personal merit, united to the heiress of an illustrious house, and having to execute in her right one of the great hereditary offices of the Crown, should be raised to the peerage?

Sometimes his allusions to the private life of persons whom he thinks proper to introduce are still more impertinent, and, if possible, still more false. He says of the late Lord Rokeby, when Mr. Montague,

"Yet thus highly favoured by fortune and presumptive heir to an Irish barony (Rokeby), he has always resembled Pope's Curio, of whom the poet says that

This slanderous quotation is wholly à propos de bottes-for, Wraxall adds, it was not for a medal of Otho but a British peerage that Mr. Montague sighed;' and as to the neglected bride, there is not the slightest colour for the application of Pope's sneer. The peerage book might have told Wraxall, as it does all the world, that Mr. Montague was married just about the time that Wraxall speaks of, and that a very large family of ten or twelve sons and daughters are evidences that his bride was not neglected. In fact, everybody at all acquainted with London society knows that there could not possibly be a more inappropriate quotation.

Still more impudent, and more circumstantially false, is a very long story of the late Earl Whitworth and his wife, the Duchess Dowager of Dorset, in relation to a Russian lady whom Wraxall calls the Countess Gerbetzow. His statement is this-that when Sir Charles Whitworth was ambassador in Russia he won the affections of the Countess Gerbetzow,

'who, though married, possessed a considerable property at her own disposal. Such was her partiality for the English envoy, that she, in a great measure, provided, clothed, and defrayed his household from her own purse. In return for such solid proofs of her attachment he engaged to give her his hand in marriage; a stipulation the accomplishment of which was necessarily deferred till she could obtain a divorce from her husband.'-vol. i. p. 189.

He then proceeds to state, with much cynical embroidery, that Sir Charles Whitworth, on his return to England, married the widow of the Duke of Dorset, but

'meanwhile the Countess Gerbetzow having succeeded in procuring a divorce from her husband, left Petersburg for England. On her arrival, however, she learned that his union [with the Duchess] had already taken place. Irritated by disappointment and indignation, she had recourse to various expedients for obtaining restitution of the sums that she had advanced to her former lover on the faith of his assurances of marriage. Her reclamations, which were of too delicate and too serious a nature to be despised, at length compelled the Duchess to pay her Muscovite rival no less a sum than ten thousand pounds, thus purchasing the quiet possession of her husband.'-ibid. p. 192.

Now, of all this circumstantial story nothing is true, except that a certain Russian countess had a partiality for Sir Charles Whitworth while ambassador at St. Petersburg; but Wraxall has not even the lady's name correctly, which was Gerepzof. Sir Charles's influence with the Emperor Paul did certainly, on one occasion, save Madame de Gerepzof—who was sister of the celebrated Zubof-from exile; but that either was ever under any pecuniary obligation to the other, beyond the interchange of presents usual between lovers, is utterly incredible,-so is the story

of

of the matrimonial engagement;' for the husband was little older than the lady and as to the expected divorce,' it is well known that marriage is in the Greek church indissoluble. But what affixes the mark of falsehood to the whole is-that-so far was the Russian Countess from having obtained the divorce and coming to England to claim the performance of Lord Whitworth's matrimonial engagement, and being bought off by the duchess-she never was divorced;—and that her husband, the Count Gerepzof, actually accompanied her on her visit to England, as those who mingled in the fashionable society of that day must recollect.

All this story, which is told with many other offensive details (which we omit), was thus misrepresented, we have reason to believe, from the personal spite of Wraxall, who had some differences, not very creditable to him, with her Grace about the papers of the Duke of Dorset, of which Wraxall had obtained possession, and which he would not, as we have heard, resign without receiving a sum of money, on pretext of his expense and trouble in arranging them.

But he is still more gravely inaccurate in matters of more public notoriety. He talks a great deal of Charles Jenkinson, the first Lord Liverpool, and of his political influence with Mr. Pitt so early as the very dawn of his administration; but in all he says on this topic he is so strangely ignorant that he dates the height of this supposed influence (which never existed at all) at a period when Mr. Jenkinson and Mr. Pitt were scarcely acquainted, certainly not intimate in private nor connected in office; but, on the other hand, as if he thought that one blunder might be compensated by another, he more than once (particularly in vol. ii. p. 153) asserts that Lord Liverpool never in his whole life sat in the Cabinet, though it is notorious that he was in the Cabinet from 1788 down to the close of Lord Sidmouth's administration in 1804.Again

If Mr. Pitt [the father] had not been supplanted by Lord Bute, we doubtless should have retained at the treaty of Fontainebleau some of those valuable possessions in the West Indies which were restored by us to France and Spain.'-vol. iii. p. 3.

This is a continuation of a calumny in his former publication against Lord Bute, of having been bribed by France to consent to that treaty; but the supposition here advanced is highly improbable, and indeed only shows Wraxall's ignorance of what he was writing about; because the terms of Lord Bute's treaty, as respected France, were precisely the same with those proposed by Mr. Pitt in his abortive negotiation in 1761.

When speaking of the invasion of the Low Countries by the Prussians in 1787, he says,

'Louis XVI. wanted not the inclination to support his party [in Holland] with all the power of the French monarchy. He even made demonstrations of opposing the Prussians, assembled a considerable body of troops on the frontier not far from Liege, menaced the courts of Berlin and of London with immediate interference if they did not desist, issued an order to equip a fleet, and performed every act announcing hostility except actually commencing war.'-vol. ii. p. 359.

So far is this from true, that if there had been any, the slightest, show of resistance, the Duke of Brunswick would have stopped. The Duke was heard to say, Le Roi de Prusse, qui hésitait à poursuivre une entreprise qui pouvait l'embarquer dans une guerre avec la France, m'enjoignit la plus grande circonspection. En conséquence j'envoyai deux officiers pour reconnaître la place et les environs de Givet. S'ils y avaient trouvé l'apparence d'un camp, je me serais arrété. Ils ne virent ni un seul drapeau ni une seule tente; ainsi j'accelerai ma marche, et la Hollande fut conquise!'

Smarting under, but not corrected by, the punishment for his former libel accusing the Empress Catherine of poisoning a princess of her own family, he now produces a similar accusation against her of having endeavoured to make away with one Mr. Ewart, the then British minister at Berlin, who had, it seems, incurred Catherine's enmity by the zeal and success with which he did his sovereign's business at that court.

'It is said that she did not hesitate having recourse to effective means for preventing his presence at the conferences of Reichenbach. A potion, it is added, was administered to him at the time when he was setting out from Berlin; but Sutherland, physician to the empress, a countryman of Ewart's, who knew or suspected Catherine's intention, had sent him a hint to be on his guard. He escaped by means of emetics and medicines.'-vol. i. p. 430.

Wraxall then proceeds to state that he would not advance so serious an imputation lightly,' but that his authority for it was

a person now no more, who might challenge belief on very strong grounds. He was,' it is added, ' a man of calm, superior understanding, neither credulous nor prejudiced against the empress: add to this that he was intimately acquainted with Ewart, from whom, I have no doubt, he received the particulars of Catherine's attempt.'-p. 431.

Now, besides the manifest incredibility of all the circumstances -of the atrocity of the design under any provocation-of so much personal resentment against a subordinate foreign minister on such slight grounds-of a poisoning to be executed in Berlin, yet known to a physician in Petersburg, who gave notice to the person to be on his guard, but which notice was of so little avail that the poison was taken, and the patient saved only by emetics and medicines,'