PBEFACE ix

statesman's brother, to the command in the Mediterranean, as in fact, as soon as the Tories came in again, he was.

Under peculiar circumstances, which have never till now been recorded, Moore very strongly resented certain personal treatment which he had received from the Cabinet to which Castlereagh and Canning belonged. The story is too long for this preface, but it had nothing to do with any party differences. The strange result has followed that, while every separate step that Moore took during the Peninsular campaign was officially approved by that Cabinet, and defended by them in Parliament, good party men have thought themselves in duty bound to condemn almost every one of them.

Moore was no partisan. If I could only persuade my contemporaries to lay aside traditional prejudices, and to understand that it may be possible for us to have had among us a hundred years ago a man who stood loftily apart from the passions and party cries of the hour, who supported Pitt because he had earlier than Burke or Portland discovered that Pitt was the one pilot who could weather the storm for us, who, throughout his life, thought of his country first and of himself last, it might be possible that, reading themselves the plain story I have to lay before them, they would see that this was a man to repudiate whom is folly for any party; that he is one for a nation to claim, Moore's views of life and his criticisms on the events which passed under his eyes are such as none in our time would venture to dispute, though in his own day they were so much in advance of the standard to which public opinion had been educated that they were often " caviare to the general."