The portion of the correspondence Of the first Duke of Ormond comprised in the present volume of this Report covers a. Period of exactly two years. For the reasons already given in the Introduction to the fourth volume of this series, the papers preserved at Kilkenny become increas ingly numerous, in comparison with those relating to earlier periods, towards the close of the public career of the great Duke. Whereas in the previous volume the miscellaneous letters of a little more than three years (from January 167 5 — 76 to March 1678 occupy 374 pages, no fewer than 619 pages are here taken up with the correspondence of the still shorter period from March 25, 1679 to March 24, 1680 — 81. And it will be found when the next volume is issued that the abundance of the Duke's letters from 1681 to 1685 is little, if at all, inferior to that of the period embraced in these pages. N 0 one who is familiar with Carte's biography of Ormond, or is fairly conversant with the history Of the time, would pretend that the last years of Ormond's third tenure of the Irish government are the most interesting in the crowded life of that illustrious cavalier — to adopt Macaulay's felicitous description of the Duke. The special prominence which these years receive in these pages is the result of the quite acci dental circumstance that Carte dealt in less detail with this part of the subject than any other, and therefore had no occasion to include many of the Duke's later letters in the materials to which he helped, himself so liberally.