You seem to imagine that the book is edited, or principally written, by friends of mine.  I thought that you had been aware that the work is conducted in London, and that my friends and myself are merely contributors, and form a very small proportion of the contributors.  The manners of almost all of my acquaintances are so utterly alien from coarseness, and their morals from libertinism, that I feel assured that no objection of that nature can exist to their writings.  As to my own contributions I can only say that the Roman Story was read to my mother before it was published, and would have been read to you if you had happened to be at home.  Not one syllable of censure was uttered.

The Essay on the Royal Society of Literature was read to you.  I made the alterations which I conceived that you desired, and submitted them afterwards to my mother.  As to the poetry which you parallel with Little’s, if anything vulgar or licentious has been written by myself, I am willing to bear the consequences.  If anything of that cast has been written by my friends, I allow that a certain degree of blame attaches to me for having chosen them at least indiscreetly.  If, however, a bookseller of whom we knew nothing has coupled improper productions with ours in a work over which we had no control, I cannot plead guilty to anything more than misfortune; a misfortune in which some of the most rigidly moral and religious men of my acquaintance have participated in the present instance.

I am pleading at random for a book which I never saw.  I am defending the works of people most of whose names I never heard.  I am therefore writing under great disadvantages.  I write also in great haste.  I am unable even to read over what I have written.

Affectionately yours

T. B. M.

Moved by the father’s evident unhappiness, the son promised never to write again for the obnoxious periodical.  The second number was so dull and decorous that Zachary Macaulay, who felt that, if the magazine went on through successive quarters reforming its tone in the same proportion, it would soon be on a level of virtue with the Christian Observer, withdrew his objection; and the young man wrote regularly till the short life of the undertaking ended in something very like a quarrel between the publisher and his contributors.  It is not the province of biography to dilate upon works which are already before the world; and the results of Macaulay’s literary labour during the years 1823 and 1824 have been, perhaps, only too freely reproduced in the volumes which contain his miscellaneous writings.  It is, however, worthy of notice that among his earlier efforts in literature his own decided favourite was “the Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton touching the great Civil War.”  But an author, who is exempt from vanity, is inclined to rate his own works rather according as they are free from faults than as they abound in beauties; and Macaulay’s