Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. MEMOIRS AND LETTERS. Bishop Burnet in his History of his Own Time had shown the way in which contemporary history, compounded with, plenty of gossip and conjecture, could be rendered highly entertaining. The path which he had traced was followed —much less formally, it is true—by Lord Hervey in his malicious but enlivening Memoirs of the Reign of George II. (written in the early forties of the eighteenth century, though not published until 1848). Hervey's greater successor as a chroniqueur was Horace Walpole. Closely allied to these Memoirs are the chronicles not restricted to politics, but embracing literature and travel, represented by the clever Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. After the middle of the century this kind of work multiplied abundantly. The golden age of letter-writing in England set in, and many of the best writers and the most cultured wits gave off as a by-product, if not a budget of letters, then either memoirs and chronicles or autobiographies, in which history and personal gossip (with its feminine, scandal) are blended with character- drawing and introspective study. If a question of primacy were raised we should be inclined to assign the first place to Cowper, for though he threw his nets far less widely than Walpole, yet in depthof feeling and in artless, spontaneous charm, his letters have no equal.1 Then there are the delightful letters of Gray. We have but few letters of Goldsmith, though we have some interesting fragments of portraiture and a most graceful specimen of biography in his Memoir of Richard Nash. Hume and Gibbon both left autobiographical work of very great, though unequal interest. But as Cowper, Gray, Goldsmith, Hume, and Gibbon were respectively poets, essayists, or historians in the first place, and let...