which could scarcely have been written before the 27th December, 1673, when Lord Cornwallis married Sir Stephen Fox's daughter, and the reference in the last page but one to the publication of Ovid's Epistles, "translated into English verse by the greatest wits at Court;" when it is known that the earliest printed edition of Ovid's Epistles in English verse was published in 1680, sixteen years too late to have suggested to Miss Jennings her parody on the "Epistle of Ariadne to Theseus," addressed to the perfidious Jermyn, and containing a description of the perils and monsters that awaited him in Guinea. Perhaps, after all, no reference whatever was intended to a printed edition; and that the word published must be taken in its ordinary sense of circulated, though now commonly applied to what is printed:—and this, I see every reason to think, was the case.
The Count de Grammont, who died on the 30th January, 1707, is said to have dictated these Memoirs to his vivacious brother-in-law. "I only hold the pen," says Hamilton, "while he directs it to the most remarkable and secret passages of his life." This is in Chapter I.; in the eleventh and last chapter he says, "We profess to insert nothing in these Memoirs but what we have heard from the
