not content with deforming Sir James Mackintosh’s text by such blunders, has prefixed to it a bad Memoir, has appended to it a bad continuation, and has thus succeeded in expanding the volume into one of the thickest, and debasing it into one of the worst that we ever saw.  Never did we fall in with so admirable an illustration of the old Greek proverb, which tells us that half is sometimes more than the whole.  Never did we see a case in which the increase of the bulk was so evidently a diminution of the value.

Why such an artist was selected to deface so fine a Torso, we cannot pretend to conjecture.  We read that, when the Consul Mummius, after the taking of Corinth, was preparing to send to Rome some works of the greatest Grecian sculptors, he told the packers that if they broke his Venus or his Apollo, he would force them to restore the limbs which should be wanting.  A head by a hewer of milestones joined to a bosom by Praxiteles would not surprise or shock us more than this supplement.

The “Memoir” contains much that is worth reading; for it contains many extracts from the compositions of Sir James Mackintosh.  But when we pass from what the biographer has done with his scissors to what he has done with his pen, we can find nothing to praise in his work.  Whatever may have been the intention with which he wrote, the tendency of his narrative is to convey the impression that Sir James Mackintosh, from interested motives, abandoned the doctrines of the Vindiciae Gallicae.  Had such charges appeared in their natural place, we should leave them to their natural fate.  We would not stoop to defend Sir James Mackintosh from the attacks of fourth-rate magazines and pothouse newspapers.  But here his own fame is turned against him.  A book of which not one copy would ever have been bought but for his name in the title-page is made the vehicle of the imputation.  Under such circumstances we cannot help exclaiming, in the words of one of the most amiable of Homer’s heroes,

Nun tis enieies Patroklios deilio
Mnisastho pasin gar epistato meilichos einai
Zoos eun’ nun d’ au Thanatos kai Moira kichanei

We have no difficulty in admitting that during the ten or twelve years which followed the appearance of the Vindicae Gallicae, the opinions of Sir James Mackintosh underwent some change.  But did this change pass on him alone?  Was it not common?  Was it not almost universal?  Was there one honest friend of liberty in Europe or in America whose ardour had not been damped, whose faith in the high destinies of mankind had not been shaken?  Was there one observer to whom the French Revolution, or revolutions in general, appeared in exactly the same light on the day when the Bastile fell, and on the day when the Girondists were dragged to the scaffold, the day when the Directory shipped off their principal opponents for Guiana, or the day when the Legislative Body was driven from its hall at the point of the bayonet?