Transatlantic History

"I...think the fortuitous influence of chance so much more decisive of the success or miscarriage of statesmen's schemes, than the skill or dexterity of the most able and most artful of them, that I am apt to attribute much less to the one, and much more to the other, than the generality of historians, either from prejudice to their heroes or partiality to their own conjectures, are willing to allow." Lord John Hervey, Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second (London, 1855).