It has been said of the Dictionary of National Biography that its compilation has permanently put out of employment the writers of what used to be called the Miscellanies. Drudging, uninspired work it was, this labour of the writer of miscellanies, yet one may have a feeling of sympathy for the painstaking and reasonably honest workman who might have earned his bread for a day or two by quarrying in the pages of the Greville Diary.

My edition of Greville is that of Philip Whitwell Wilson, published by Heinemann in 1927. The editor informs us that nothing printable has been suppressed, and that only a rare and irrelevant vulgarity of the stables has been omitted. There is since, I believe, a more complete edition.

Within the limits of the edition before me, there are occasional passages of interest to any Catholic with a relish for the quaint or the unexpected. There are the usual reactions characteristic of the fair-minded Protestant of the period, to Catholic persons and institutions, and to what we may call Catholic aspirations, whether religious or political. We know the kind of thing a Protestant Englishman of the period would think and say about the Popes and the Temporal Power, Daniel O’Connell and the Irish, Mazzim and united Italy. We know all this, and need not trouble to reproduce what Charles Greville thought, said, or wrote on these matters. But it may be at least of passing interest to read of a few of the contacts made with the Catholic Church by a cultured man of affairs in the early Victorian age of the world, the English world.