remedies do not know the nature of the evil, occasioned in part by heated minds, which, left to themselves, would insensibly be extinguished, rather than rekindle them afresh by the force of contradiction; above all, when the corruption is not confined to a small number, but diffused through all parts of the state; besides, the Reformers said many true things!  The best method to have reduced little by little the Huguenots of my kingdom, was not to have pursued them by any direct severity pointed at them.”

Lady Mary Wortley Montague is a remarkable instance of an author nearly lost to the nation; she is only known to posterity by a chance publication; for such were her famous Turkish letters, the manuscript of which her family once purchased with an intention to suppress, but they were frustrated by a transcript.  The more recent letters were reluctantly extracted out of the family trunks, and surrendered in exchange for certain family documents, which had fallen into the hands of a bookseller.  Had it depended on her relatives, the name of Lady Mary had only reached us in the satires of Pope.  The greater part of her epistolary correspondence was destroyed by her mother; and what that good and Gothic lady spared, was suppressed by the hereditary austerity of rank, of which her family was too susceptible.  The entire correspondence of this admirable writer and studious woman (for once, in perusing some unpublished letters of Lady Mary’s, I discovered that “she had been in the habit of reading seven hours a day for many years”) would undoubtedly have exhibited a fine statue, instead of the torso we now possess; and we might have lived with her ladyship, as we do with Madame de Sevigne.  This I have mentioned elsewhere; but I have since discovered that a considerable correspondence of Lady Mary’s, for more than twenty years, with the widow of Colonel Forrester, who had retired to Rome, has been stifled in the birth.  These letters, with other MSS. of Lady Mary’s, were given by Mrs. Forrester to Philip Thicknesse, with a discretionary power to publish.  They were held as a great acquisition by Thicknesse, and his bookseller; but when they had printed off the first thousand sheets, there were parts which they considered might give pain to some of the family.  Thicknesse says, “Lady Mary had in many places been uncommonly severe upon her husband, for all her letters were loaded with a scrap or two of poetry at him."[289] A negotiation took place with an agent of Lord Bute’s; after some time Miss Forrester put in her claims for the MSS.; and the whole terminated, as Thicknesse tells us, in her obtaining a pension, and Lord Bute all the MSS.

The late Duke of Bridgewater, I am informed, burnt many of the numerous family papers, and bricked up a quantity, which, when opened after his death, were found to have perished.  It is said he declared that he did not choose that his ancestors should be traced back to a person of a mean trade, which it seems might possibly have been the case.  The loss now cannot be appreciated; but unquestionably stores of history, and perhaps of literature, were sacrificed.  Milton’s manuscript of Comus was published from the Bridgewater collection, for it had escaped the bricking up!