ΤΟ THE RIGHT HONOURABLE WILLIAM PITT. 7 Dropmore, Dec. 3, 1803. in MY DEAR SIR, WHEN you expressed to me your entire concurrence my wish to print the following letters, you were not apprized that this address would accompany them. By you it will, I trust, be received as a testimony of affectionate friendship. To others the propriety will be obvious of inscribing 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 honour ably be directed. GRENVILLE. 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 cor respondence. Yet even these im perfect 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 |