Excerpt from Despatches From Paris, Vol. 2 of 19: 1784-1790 I was unable to write a preface to the first volume of these despatches in consequence of a severe illness. I am now writing only a very scanty preface for a different reason. The conditions for the publication of this series demand that each volume shall not contain more than a certain number of pages, and if the whole of these despatches had been printed without omission, the allotted number of pages would have been exceeded. It, therefore, became necessary to leave out some of the less important documents, and, for a stronger reason, to reduce the preface and the notes to the scantiest dimensions. It is surely more important to give to the public as many of these valuable state papers as possible, than to print any observations which the Editor might have to make upon them. The despatches are, of themselves, of such very high interest and importance, that they are likely to receive much attention, and there is no call for me to point out to the historical scholars, for whose immediate benefit they are published, in what direction their attention should be turned. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.