received as a testimony of affectionate friendship. To others the

propriety will be obvious of in

scribing with your name a publication, in which Lord Chatham teaches, how great talents may most successfully be cultivated, and to what objects they may most honourably be directed.

THE

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

THE following letters were addressed

by the late Lord Chatham to his nephew Mr. Pitt, (afterwards Lord Camelford,) then at Cambridge. They are few in number, written for the private use of an individual during a short period of time, and containing only such detached observations on the extensive subjects to which they relate, as occasion might happen to suggest, in the course of familiar correspondence. Yet even

these imperfect remains will undoubtedly be received by the public with no common interest, as well from their own intrinsic value, as from the picture which they display of the character of their author. The editor's wish to do honour to the memory both of the person by whom they were written, and of him to whom they were addressed, would alone have rendered him desirous of making these papers public. But he feels a much higher motive, in the hope of promoting by such a publication the inseparable interests of learning, virtue, and religion. By the writers of that school, whose philosophy consists in the degrada

tion of virtue, it has often been triumphantly declared, that no excellence of character can stand the test of close observation: that no man is a hero to his domestic servants, or to his familiar friends. How much more just, as well as more amiable and dignified, is the opposite sentiment, delivered to us in the words of Plutarch, and illustrated throughout all his writings! virtue," says that inimitable moralist, "is most loved, where it is most nearly seen: and no respect which it commands from strangers, can equal the never-ceasing admiration it excites in the daily intercourse of domestic life.” Τῆς ἀληθινῆς ἀρἑξῆς κάλ

"Real

λιστα φάινεται τὰ μάλιστα φαινόμενα· καὶ τῶν ἀγαθῶν ἀνδρῶν ἐδὲν ἔλω θαύ μάσιον τοις ἐκ]ὸς, ὡς ὁ καθ ̓ ἡμέραν βίος τοῖς συνᾶσιν.

PLUT. VIT. PERICLIS.

The following correspondence, imperfect as it is, (and who will not lament that many more such letters are not preserved?) exhibits a great orator, statesman and patriot, in one of the most interesting relations of private society. Not, as in the cabinet or the senate, enforcing by a vigorous and commanding eloquence, those councils to which his country owed her pre-eminence and glory; but implanting with parental kind