Excerpt from Parliamentary Papers of John Robinson, 1774 1784 In the six years between 1774 and 1780 Robinson acquired skill in the duties and methods of his office. The facts that had seemed to be of primary importance when he was making ready for his first general election, he had by the end of that period absorbed as a. Part of his working knowledge as far as he had need of them at all By 1780 he would probably have regarded it as the work of an amateur to list the offices tenable with seats in Lords and Commons or the members of the national legislature holding such offices. He would most certainly have placed a lower estimate on the importance of the Lord Lieutenant, as such, as a factor in county elections. He had learned the real sources of power and he knew whom to approach. When Shelburne requested him in the summer of 1782 to furnish an accurate state of the House of Commons and the connections of each of them as far as can be ascertained,1 he could speak with a large degree of authority. Unfortunately only a fragment of this statement is preserved in this collection of papers in the entire document we would have an intimate picture of an eighteenth-century House of Commons such as now exists nowhere in print. 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.