Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/13

Rh history of England and of the characters of the leading statesmen of the period and of events up to 1758. What may be called two editions exist, and of these it is difficult to settle which is the earlier in date. Both are imperfect and show a complete absence of revision, especially the less complete of the two, which, however, contains some interesting matter of its own. A further difficulty arose from the chronological order being frequently neglected.

A careful study of the text convinced me that, without altering anything beyond what was absolutely necessary to make the story intelligible, by transposing various parts of the narrative so as to restore the chronological order, and at the same time by eliminating repetitions, in other words, by making those alterations which it may fairly be presumed Lord Shelburne would himself have made, had he lived to revise his own work,—I could present the account of his early life, so far as it exists, in a shape more agreeable to the reader and more just to the memory of my ancestor than if I had simply printed it in the confused and disjointed condition in which he left it. The result is the "Chapter of Autobiography" with which the book opens.

In the present edition a fuller use has been made of the more imperfect of the two autobiographical fragments where some passages in it add vividness to the narrative. A few additional pages, discovered since 1876 and relating mainly to the expeditions to the coast of France in 1757 and 1758, have also been added.

The story of the first election of Colonel Barré at High Wycombe, which stands in the middle of the less finished of the two autobiographical fragments, has been