[‘It is never desirable to say any thing on the subject’: Charles Greville, diarist.] Autograph Letter Signed regarding the desirability of allowing ‘poor Douglas’ (i.e. John Douglas of Newmarket Palace) to rest in peace.

See Greville’s entry in the Oxford DNB, and Douglas’s in the History of Parliament, which explains the context: ‘Gambling losses, largely accruing from his turf accounting activities at Newmarket - Douglas laid the blame on ‘Peel and Huskisson ... tampering with the currency’, problems raising capital from his property and ‘keeping too large establishment of servants’ - had reduced his fortune’. 4pp, 4to. Bifolium. 44 lines of text. In good condition, lightly aged, with negligible remains of windowpane mount neatly adhering to reverse of second leaf. Folded three times for postage. Signed ‘F Greville’. Recipient not named. An excellent letter, exhibiting all the tact of the politician. Begins: ‘My dear Sir / I am very sorry that I was out of town when your note & its enclosures were sent to my home; I now return the letter, together with my opinion upon the subject to wh. it refers. I am well aware of your feelings of regard for poor Douglas, and I also well know that they were mutual. He entertained a very sincere esteem & regard for you, mingled with respect & admiration for those great powers wh. he always thought were so beneficially as well as efficiently exercised.’ Turning to ‘the notice’ the recipient has sent him, he states that he would be ‘very sorry to see it appear, and I think it would be a great source of annoyance to his family if it did’. Although the notice is ‘written in a spirit of kindness & to a certain degree complimentary to him’, it appears to Greville ‘to be too much like taking his unfortunate case as the text on which to deliver a homily as to gambling’. The family would be ‘deeply mortified’ by this. Greville’s own opinion is ‘that it is never desirable to say any thing on the subject - it might with great truth be said that He was a most amiable, accomplished, well informed and agreeable man, socially attractive beyond almost any body I have been acquainted with, & full of kind & affectionate feelings, & delightful qualities - but unhappily He is only known to the world at large, by the painful notoriety of those legal proceedings’. He concludes with an elaborate expression of the desirability of letting Douglas ‘depart in peace’.