Memoirs of Nathaniel, Lord Crewe
MEMOIRS NATHANIEL, LOED CEEWE. EDITED BY REV. ANDREW CLARK. PRINTED FOR THE GAMDEN SOCIETY. M.DCCC.XCIII. PREFACE. THESE Memoirs are -published from a quarto MS. which was bought by Lord Crewe's Trustees in the summer of 1891 for the library at Bamborough Castle. The author of 'An examination of the Life and Character of N.O. wherein the writings of his several biographers . are critically reviewed and compared with a manuscript never before published containing curious anecdotes of that Prelate,' published at London in 1790 (119 pages, 8vo), had access to a MS. closely resembling this but apparently not identical with it. With that exception, the matter now published appears to be as yet unprinted. The Memoirs add very little to the facts of Lord Crewe's life as set forth in ordinary biographical works; but they have the interest of being written from the point of view of an admirer, and are therefore in strong contrast to other bio- graphies, which are uniformly depreciatory in tone. At the same time, the conception of a bishop's duties, by reference to which the writer praises his patron, is so widely different from our own, that it furnishes a pleasing example of uncon- scious but bitter satire. I have to thank Lord Crewe's Trustees for permission to transcribe the MS., and their Librarian, the Rev. H. F. Long, for his kind offices in the matter. IV PREFACE. The Memoirs proper occupy 39 folios of the MS., written on one side only of the leaf. The hand is a neat copy-book hand of the eighteenth century, and there are several bad mistakes which show that the scribe had difficulty in reading the original and was without the meagre knowledge of history and geography which would have helped him through.
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