The editor of this ‘Diary’ remarks, ’that he will no doubt be considered a very extraordinary editor; the practice of whom has generally been to prefer flattery to truth, and partiality to justice.’  To understand, not the flattery which his contemporaries heaped upon Bubb Dodington, but the opprobrium with which they loaded his memory—­to comprehend not his merits but his demerits—­it is necessary to take a brief survey of his political life from the commencement.  He began life, as we have seen, as a servile adherent of Sir Robert Walpole.  A political epistle to the Minister was the prelude to a temporary alliance only, for in 1737, Bubb went over to the adverse party of Leicester House, and espoused the cause of Frederick, Prince of Wales, against his royal father He was therefore dismissed from the Treasury.  When Sir Robert fell, Bubb expected to rise, but his expectations of preferment were not realized.  He attacked the new Administration forthwith, and succeeded so far in becoming important that he was made Treasurer of the Navy; a post which he resigned in 1749, and which he held again in 1755, but which he lost the next year.  On the accession of George III., he was not ashamed to appear altogether in a new character, as the friend of Lord Bute; he was, therefore, advanced to the peerage by the title of Baron of Melcombe Regis, in 1761.  The honour was enjoyed for one short year only; and on the 28th of July, 1762, Bubb Dodington expired.  Horace Walpole, in his ‘Royal and Noble Authors,’ complains that ’Dodington’s “Diary” was mangled, in compliment, before it was imparted to the public.’  We cannot therefore judge of what the ‘Diary’ was before, as the editor avows that every anecdote was cut out, and all the little gossip so illustrative of character and manners which would have brightened its dull pages, fell beneath the power of a merciless pair of scissors.  Mr. Penruddocke Wyndham conceives, however, that he was only doing justice to society in these suppressions.  ‘It would,’ he says, ’be no entertainment to the reader to be informed who daily dined with his lordship, or whom he daily met at the table of other people.’

Posterity thinks differently:  a knowledge of a man’s associates forms the best commentary on his life; and there is much reason to rejoice that all biographers are not like Mr. Penruddocke Wyndham.  Bubb Dodington, more especially, was a man of society:  inferior as a literary man, contemptible as a politician, it was only at the head of his table that he was agreeable and brilliant.  He was, in fact, a man who had no domestic life; a courtier, like Lord Hervey, but without Lord Hervey’s consistency.  He was, in truth, a type of that era in England:  vulgar in aims; dissolute in conduct; ostentatious, vain-glorious—­of a low, ephemeral ambition; but at the same time talented, acute, and lavish to the lettered.  The public is now the patron of the gifted.  What writer cares for individual opinion, except as it tends to sweep up the gross amount of public blame or censure?  What publisher will consent to undertake a work because some lord or lady recommended it to his notice?  The reviewer is greater in the commonwealth of letters than the man of rank.