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OF

STATESMEN

WHO FLOURISHED IN

THE TIME OF GEORGE III.,

TO WHICH ARE ADDED

REMARKS ON THE FRENCH REVOLUTION.

THIRD SERIES.

VOLUME I.

БУ

HENRY, LORD BROUGHAM, F.R.S.,

MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF FRANCE, AND OF THE ROYAL
ACADEMY OF NAPLES.

A NEW EDITION, CORRECTED BY THE AUTHOR.

LONDON:

G. COX, 18, KING STREET, COVENT GARDEN.

B79h.

(ii)

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1845
v.5-6

INTRODUCTION.

THE third series of this work is delivered to the public under a grateful sense of the favour with which the two former were received. It has been my desire to make some small return for such kindness, by redoubling my care to prevent any bias of a party or a personal kind from influencing the opinions pronounced, whether upon men or upon measures. Conscious as every one must feel how naturally our affections are engaged in behalf of those whose opinions agree with our own, and how apt the adversaries of those opinions are to be hardly dealt with in the judgments we form of them, I have most scrupulously made it my endeavour to treat all with whose history I have dealt as if I was ignorant of the principles which professedly guided their conduct, until I came to describe how far it was governed by them.

It has further been the constant object of these pages to record whatever tended to promote the great and united causes of public virtue, free institutions, and universal peace; holding up their friends to the veneration of mankind, their enemies to scorn and aversion; while the glare that success gives to bad actions, and the shade into which good ones are thrown by failure, have, as far as possible, been shown to be temporary only; and mankind

have been constantly warned to struggle against the prepossession thus raised by the event, and to mete out their praise or blame by the just measure of desert.

The first part of the volume now published relates to the French Revolution, and to the men who bore the foremost part in its most trying and interesting crisis. In giving this account I have enjoyed particular advantages, having the pleasure of knowing several worthy and intelligent men who bore a part in the transactions of those times. To one of these, my learned colleague in the National Institute, M. Lakanal, I was introduced by the kindness of my distinguished friend M. Mignet; and I have received from him many important communications. He was not a member of the Committee of Public Safety; but he belonged to the high popular party in the Convention, and he was at the head of the Committee of Public Instruction. He retains, at the advanced age of above fourscore, all the ardent zeal for human improvement and steady devotion to the cause of freedom which so eminently marked his early years.

The reader of these pages is further under obligations to my frend Earl Stanhope for a valuable note respecting Fouché.

BROUGHAM, 1st October, 1843.

M. Lakanal died last spring. General Carnot, whom I also had the pleasure of knowing, died many years ago.

BROUGHAM, 11th September, 1845.

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