Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/15

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PREFACE
ix

Lansdowne had promised to supply a Supplement to Mr. Marshall's Life of General Washington, in which he intended to give the secret history of the Peace of 1783, which he told the writer of the article was not understood by the public. The anecdote related in Vol. II., page 434, in regard to the authorship of Junius points in the same direction.

Further study of the correspondence of Horace Walpole has convinced me that in the first edition I was mistaken in referring his hostility to Lord Shelburne to an earlier date than 1783, and I have altered the text accordingly.

The letter from Lord Chatham of 1777 relating to the battle of Saratoga (Vol. II. p. 9); the full text of the conversation between Lord Lansdowne and Mr. Pitt in 1785 (Vol. II. pp. 294-298), and between the Prince of Wales and Mr. Grey in 1798 (Vol. II. pp. 425-426), did not appear in the first edition. Use has also been made of a Memorandum by the Abbé Morellet of some conversations in 1783 with Lord Shelburne, which was found subsequently to 1876 among the papers at Lansdowne House.

Among the documents in the Appendix will be found a paper by Lord Shelburne on Sepulchral Monuments, to which my attention was drawn by Mr. G. F. Russell Baker, the author of the article on Lord Shelburne which appeared in 1896 in the Dictionary of National Biography. It was originally printed in the Gentleman's Magazine in 1791, in connection with a proposal to erect a memorial to Howard the philanthropist, and was subsequently printed in the Life of Mr. Coakley Lettsom, M.D. (1817).

Since 1876 much valuable information on the political