is, that you would convey your judgment in measured and (as far as you can honestly) in courteous terms; for he is, for so considerable a man, strangely sensitive.  You must have an odd story to tell of your intercourse with the knights of the Order of the Quill.”

And the letter closed with what an editor values more even than decently Christian treatment, namely the suggestion of a fine subject.  This became the admirable essay on the Clapham Sect.

The author of one of the two or three most delightful biographies in all literature has published the letter to Mr. Napier in which Macaulay speaks pretty plainly what he thought about Brougham and the extent of his services to the Review.  Brougham in turn hated Macaulay, whom he calls the third or greatest bore in society that he has ever known.  He is furious—­and here Brougham was certainly not wrong—­over the “most profligate political morality” of Macaulay’s essay on Clive.

“In my eyes, his defence of Clive, and the audacious ground of it, merit execration.  It is a most serious, and, to me, a painful subject.  No—­no—­all the sentences a man can turn, even if he made them in pure taste, and not in Tom’s snip-snap taste of the lower empire,—­all won’t avail against a rotten morality.  The first and most sacred duty of a public man, and, above all, an author, is to keep by honest and true doctrine—­never to relax—­never to countenance vice—­ever to hold fast by virtue.  What?  Are we gravely to be told, at this time of day, that a set-off may be allowed for public, and, therefore, atrocious crimes, though he admits that a common felon pleads it in vain?  Gracious God, where is this to end!  What horrors will it not excuse!  Tiberius’s great capacity, his first-rate wit, that which made him the charm of society, will next, I suppose, be set up to give a splendour to the inhabitants of Capreae.  Why, Olive’s address, and his skill, and his courage are not at all more certain, nor are they qualities of a different cast.  Every great ruffian, who has filled the world with blood and tears, will be sure of an acquittal, because of his talents and his success.  After I had, and chiefly in the Edinburgh Review, been trying to restore a better, a purer, a higher standard of morals, and to wean men from the silly love of military glory, for which they are the first to pay, I find the Edinburgh Review preaching, not merely the old and common heresies, but ten thousand times worse, adopting a vile principle never yet avowed in terms, though too often and too much taken for a guide, unknown to those who followed it, in forming their judgments of great and successful criminals.”

Of the essay on Warren Hastings he thought better, “bating some vulgarity and Macaulay’s usual want of all power of reasoning.”  Lord Cockburn wrote to Mr. Napier (1844) a word or two on Macaulay.  “Delighting as I do,” says Lord Cockburn, “in his thoughts, views,