it is not to be read at a single breath.  The paragraph ought to be, and in all good writers it is, as real and as sensible a division as the sentence.  It is an organic member in prose composition, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, just as a stanza is an organic and definite member in the composition of an ode, “I fear my manuscript is rather disorderly,” says another, “but I will correct carefully in print.”  Just so.  Because he is too heedless to do his work in a workmanlike way, he first inflicts fatigue and vexation on the editor whom he expects to read his paper; second, he inflicts considerable and quite needless expense on the publisher; and thirdly, he inflicts a great deal of tedious and thankless labour on the printers, who are for the most part far more meritorious persons than fifth-rate authors.  It is true that Burke returned such disordered proofs that the printer usually found it least troublesome to set the whole afresh, and Miss Martineau tells a story of a Scotch compositor who fled from Edinburgh to avoid Carlyle’s manuscript, and to his horror was presently confronted with a piece of the too familiar copy which made him cry, “Lord, have mercy!  Have you got that man to print for!” But most editors will cheerfully forgive such transgressions to all contributors who will guarantee that they write as well as Burke or Carlyle.  Alas! it is usually the case that those who have least excuse are the worst offenders.  The slovenliest manuscripts come from persons to whom the difference between an hour and a minute is of the very smallest importance.  This, however, is a digression, only to be excused partly by the natural desire to say a word against one’s persecutors, and partly by a hope that some persons of sensitive conscience may be led to ponder whether there may not be after all some moral obligations even towards editors and printers.

Mr. Napier had one famous contributor, who stands out alone in the history of editors.  Lord Brougham’s traditional connection with the Review,—­he had begun to write either in its first or third number, and had written in it ever since—­his encyclopaedic ignorance, his power, his great fame in the country, and the prestige which his connection reflected on the Review, all made him a personage with whom it would have been most imprudent to quarrel.  Yet the position in which Mr. Napier was placed after Brougham’s breach with the Whigs, was one of the most difficult in which the conductor of a great organ could possibly be placed.  The Review was the representative, the champion, and the mouthpiece of the Whig party, and of the Whigs who were in office.  Before William IV. dismissed the Whigs in 1834 as arbitrarily as his father had dismissed the Whigs in 1784, Brougham had covered himself with disrepute among his party by a thousand pranks, and after the dismissal he disgusted them by asking the new Chancellor to make him Chief Baron of the Exchequer.  When Lord Melbourne returned to power in the following