Ever yours

T. B. M

To Macvey Napier, Esq.

London:  October 21, 1833.

Dear Napier,—­I am glad to learn that you like my article.  I like it myself; which is not much my habit.  Very likely the public, which has often been kinder to my performances than I was, may on this, as on other occasions, differ from me in opinion.  If the paper has any merit, it owes it to the delay of which you must, I am sure, have complained very bitterly in your heart.  I was so thoroughly dissatisfied with the article, as it stood at first, that I completely re-wrote it; altered the whole arrangement; left out ten or twelve pages in one part; and added twice as many in another.  I never wrote anything so slowly as the first half, or so rapidly as the last half.

You are in an error about Akenside, which I must clear up for his credit, and for mine.  You are confounding the Ode to Curio and the Epistle to Curio.  The latter is generally printed at the end of Akenside’s works, and is, I think, the best thing that he ever wrote.  The Ode is worthless.  It is merely an abridgment of the Epistle executed in the most unskilful way.  Johnson says, in his Life of Akenside, that no poet ever so much mistook his powers as Akenside when he took to lyric composition.  “Having,” I think the words are, “written with great force and poignancy his Epistle to Curio, he afterwards transformed it into an Ode only disgraceful to its author.” ["Akenside was one of the fiercest and the most uncompromising of the young patriots out of Parliament.  When he found that the change of administration had produced no change of system, he gave vent to his indignation in the ’Epistle to Curio,’ the best poem that he ever wrote; a poem, indeed, which seems to indicate that, if he had left lyrical composition to Cray and Collins, and had employed his powers in grave and elevated satire, he might have disputed the pre-eminence of Dryden.”  This passage occurs in Macaulay’s Essay on Horace Walpole.  In the course of the same Essay, Macaulay remarks that “Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he would have done if his letters had never been published.”]

When I said that Chesterfield had lost by the publication of his letters, I of course considered that he had much to lose; that he has left an immense reputation, founded on the testimony of all his contemporaries of all parties, for wit, taste, and eloquence; that what remains of his Parliamentary oratory is superior to anything of that time that has come down to us, except a little of Pitt’s.  The utmost that can be said of the letters is that they are the letters of a cleverish man; and there are not many which are entitled even to that praise.  I think he would have stood higher if we had been left to judge of his powers,—­as we judge of those of Chatham, Mansfield, Charles Townshend, and many others,—­only by tradition, and by fragments of speeches preserved in Parliamentary reports.