and knowledge, I feel too often compelled to curse and roar at his words and the structure of his composition.  As a corrupter of style, he is more dangerous to the young than Gibbon.  His seductive powers greater, his defects worse.”  All good critics now accept this as true.  Jeffrey, by the way, speaking of the same essay, thinks that Macaulay rates Chatham too high.  “I have always had an impression,” he says, “(though perhaps an ignorant and unjust one), that there was more good luck than wisdom in his foreign policy, and very little to admire (except his personal purity) in any part of his domestic administration.”

It is interesting to find a record, in the energetic speech of contemporary hatred, of the way in which orthodox science regarded a once famous book of heterodox philosophy.  Here is Professor Sedgwick on the Vestiges of Creation:—­

“I now know the Vestiges well, and I detest the book for its shallowness, for the intense vulgarity of its philosophy, for its gross, unblushing materialism, for its silly credulity in catering out of every fool’s dish, for its utter ignorance of what is meant by induction, for its gross (and I dare to say, filthy) views of physiology,—­most ignorant and most false,—­and for Its shameful shuffling of the facts of geology so as to make them play a rogue’s game.  I believe some woman is the author; partly from the fair dress and agreeable exterior of the Vestiges:  and partly from the utter ignorance the book displays of all sound physical logic.  A man who knew so much of the surface of Physics must, at least on some one point or other, have taken a deeper plunge; but all parts of the book are shallow....  From the bottom of my soul, I loathe and detest the Vestiges.  ’Tis a rank pill of asafoetida and arsenic, covered with gold leaf.  I do, therefore, trust that your contributor has stamped with an iron heel upon the head of the filthy abortion, and put an end to its crawlings.  There is not one subject the author handles bearing on life, of which he does not take a degrading view.”

Mr. Napier seems to have asked him to write on the book, and Sedgwick’s article, the first he ever wrote for a review, eventually appeared (1845),—­without, it is to be hoped, too much of the raging contempt of the above and other letters.  “I do feel contempt, and, I hope, I shall express it.  Eats hatched by the incubations of a goose—­dogs playing dominos—­monkeys breeding men and women—­all distinctions between natural and moral done away—­the Bible proved all a lie, and mental philosophy one mass of folly, all of it to be pounded down, and done over again in the cooking vessels of Gall and Spurzheim!” This was the beginning of a long campaign, which is just now drawing near its close.  Let us at least be glad that orthodoxy, whether scientific or religious, has mended his temper.  One among other causes of the improvement, as we have already said, is probably to be found in the greater self-restraint which comes from the fact of the writer appearing in his own proper person.