It does not appear that Lord Stanhope ever knew who the writer was.
Meantime the Journal notes:—
This was the year of the second Great Exhibition.
May 15th.—The Binets came to see us. On the 21st the Duc d'Aumale's fête to the Fine Arts Club; took Binet there. Went to the Derby with Binet and Stewart Hodgson. Xavier Raymond came.
July 22nd.—Dined at the Clarendon with the Comtes de Paris and Chartres, on their return from the American war. Prince Edward of Saxe Weimar and the Due d'Aumale were there.
July 31st.—Left London for Germany. By Ostend and Cologne to Wiesbaden, where the Boothbys and Hathertons were. Then to Nuremberg, Munich, Salzburg, and through the Tyrol to Venice. Stayed there till the 24th.
August 25th.—Went to Arquà to see Petrarch's house and tomb. Milan; Italian lakes. Back over the St. Gothard, Lucerne, Paris. Home, September 9th.
To Lord Brougham
C. O., September 11th.—Your very kind letter of last month would certainly not have remained so long unanswered if I had been in England. But we have been travelling for the last five weeks in the Tyrol and the north of Italy; my letters were not forwarded, and I only received that which you had been good enough to address to me on my return to London yesterday. There is probably no living opinion upon the character and administration of Mr. Pitt so enlightened and valuable as your own, and I am gratified in the highest degree to find that my attempt to place the leading acts of his administration in a somewhat new light meets with your approval. The chief defect in Lord Stanhope's book is, in my opinion, that it does not present any connected view of Mr. Pitt as a statesman at all; and this the reader of the article may infer from every page of it. I began to write with a disposition to place Mr. Pitt rather higher than he had been placed before in the 'Review;' but upon a careful survey of his conduct on each of these questions, I found the ground crumble away under me.
As to the state of the army from 1783 to 1803, it was deplorable. Did you ever see Sir Frederick Adam's notes on what the army was when, at the age of 14, he entered it.[Footnote: In 1795. These notes do not seem to have been published.] When the Duke of Wellington first went to the Peninsula, he gives a wretched account of the forces—ignorant officers and rascally men. One of the grandest services the Duke rendered to his country was that he raised the character of the army and made it a most admirable instrument. But that was long after the days of Pitt.