The New Hampshire Gazette And Historical Chronicle

LONDON, August 21.

Extract of a Letter from Paris, August 8.

The celebrated Mr. Hume has been allowed by the President of the Irish College here to peruse and make extracts from a curious collection of manuscript memoirs, in eleven or twelve volumes in folio, composed by King James the Second, and all written with his own hand. These memoirs not only comprehended the reign of that unworthy and bungling monarch, who sacrificed three kingdoms for a mass, but also that of his brother and predecessor Charles the Second. They contain a variety of curious anecdotes, some important pieces, as-yet scarcely known but by vague conjectures, and throw light upon several parts of the history of that interesting period. They exhibit, among other things, a particular account of the famous treaty between Charles the Second and Lewis the Fourteenth, whose double object was the conquest and partition of the United Provinces, and the establishment of Popery in Great-Britain and Ireland. It is to be hoped, that the learned and ingenious historian, who has been admitted to a view of these arcana of Government, will make a proper and impartial use of them, and thus furnish the friends of both civil and religious liberty, with a new reason for remembering with satisfaction that happy and glorious revolution that delivered the British isles from the bigotry and tyranny of the Stewarts, and placed them under the benign government of patriot Princes of the Brunswick line. If I am not mistaken, or misinformed, there is a copy of the famous, or rather infamous treaty above-mentioned, in the memoirs that Mr. Hume has been allowed to peruse. And this is so much the more interesting, in that the existence of that treaty has been denied by some historians, and never has been hitherto proved, in a demonstrative manner, by any.