“I solicit your best attention to the fate which seems hastening upon the Edinburgh Review.  The having always been free from the least control of booksellers is one of its principal distinctions, and long was peculiarly so—­perhaps it still has it nearly to itself.  But if it shall become a Treasury journal, I hardly see any great advantage in one kind of independence without the rest.  Nay, I doubt if its literary freedom, any more than its political, will long survive.  Books will be treated according as the Treasury, or their under-strappers, regard the authors....  But, is it after all possible that the Review should be suffered to sink into such a state of subserviency that it dares not insert any discussion upon a general question of politics because it might give umbrage to the Government of the day?  I pass over the undeniable fact that it is underlings only whom you are scared by, and that the Ministers themselves have no such inordinate pretension as to dream of interfering.  I say nothing of those underlings generally, except this, that I well know the race, and a more despicable, above all, in point of judgment, exists not.  Never mind their threats, they can do no harm.  Even if any of them are contributors, be assured they never will withdraw because you choose to keep your course free and independent.”

Mr. Napier, who seems to have been one of the most considerate and high-minded of men, was moved to energetic remonstrance on this occasion.  Lord Brougham explained his strong language away, but he was incapable of really controlling himself, and the strain was never lessened until 1843, when the correspondence ceases, and we learn that there had been a quarrel between him and his too long-suffering correspondent.  Yet John Allen,—­that able scholar and conspicuous figure in the annals of Holland House—­wrote of Brougham to Mr. Napier:—­“He is not a malignant or bad-hearted man, but he is an unscrupulous one, and where his passions are concerned or his vanity irritated, there is no excess of which he is not capable.”  Of Brougham’s strong and manly sense, when passion or vanity did not cloud it, and even of a sort of careful justice, these letters give more than one instance.  The Quarterly Review, for instance, had an article on Romilly’s Memoirs, which to Romilly’s friends seemed to do him less than justice.  Brougham took a more sensible view.

“Surely we had no right whatever to expect that they whom Romilly had all his life so stoutly opposed, and who were treated by him with great harshness, should treat him as his friends would do, and at the very moment when a most injudicious act of his family was bringing out all his secret thoughts against them.  Only place yourself in the same position, and suppose that Canning’s private journals had been published,—­the journals he may have kept while the bitterest enemy of the Whigs, and in every page of which there