painted, indeed, with such freedom, vividness, and power, that they may be said to enjoy a sort of tacit monopoly of the periods and characters to which they refer, in the estimation of the general public.

-J. COTTER MORISON: Macaulay.

THE ORIGINAL PLAN OF THE ESSAY ON HASTINGS.

Writing to Napier, January 11, 1841, Macaulay says: "I have hardly opened Gleig's book on Warren Hastings, and I cannot yet judge whether I can review it before it is complete. I am not quite sure that so vast a subject may not bear two articles. The scene of the first would lie principally in India. The Rohilla War, the disputes of Hastings and his Council, the character of Francis, the death of Nuncomar, the rise of the empire of Hyder, the seizure of Benares, and many other interesting matters, would furnish out such a paper. In the second the scene would be changed to Westminster. There we should have the Coalition; the India Bill; the impeachment; the characters of all the noted men of that time, from Burke, who managed the prosecution of Hastings, down to the wretched Tony Pasquin, who first defended and then libelled him. I hardly know a story so interesting, and of such various interest. And the central figure is in the highest degree striking and majestic. I think Hastings, though far from faultless, one of the greatest men that England ever produced. He had pre-eminent talents for government, and great literary talents too; fine taste, a princely spirit, and heroic equanimity in the midst of adversity and danger. He was a man for whom Nature had done much of what the Stoic philosophy pretended, and only pretended, to do for its disciples. Mens aequa in arduis is the inscription under his picture in the Government House at Calcutta, and never was there a more appropriate motto. This story has

Mill's account of

never been told as well as it deserves. Hastings's administration is indeed very able - the ablest part, in my judgment, of his work- but it is dry. As to Gleig, unless he has improved since he wrote Sir Thomas Munro's life, he will make very little of his subject. I am not so vain as to think that I can do it full justice; but the success of my paper on Clive has emboldened me, and I have the advantage of being in hourly intercourse with Trevelyan, who is thoroughly well acquainted with the languages, manners, and diplomacy of the Indian courts."

-TREVELYAN: Life and Letters of Macaulay, II, 77.

MACAULAY AS A REVISER.

By 1842 it was evident that Macaulay's reviews should be edited carefully and put into final form for the long life that their immense popularity seemed to insure. Macaulay, however, doubted the wisdom of so doing. He had written most of them with no thought that they would ever be regarded as permanent contributions to literature, and had admitted to them certain showy and exaggerated passages which he knew could not stand the test of time. Writing to Napier who, as editor, had cut out a few such passages from one of his reviews, Macaulay mildly remonstrates as follows: "The omissions seemed to me, and to one or two persons who had seen the article in its original state, to be made on a principle which, however sound in itself, does not, I think, apply to compositions of this description. The passages omitted were the most pointed and ornamented sentences in the review. Now, for high and grave works, a history, for example, or a system of political or moral philosophy, Dr. Johnson's rule that every sentence which the writer thinks fine ought to be cut out - is excellent. But periodical works like ours which, unless they strike at the first reading, are not likely to strike at all, whose whole life

is a month or two, may, I think, be allowed to be sometimes even viciously florid. Probably, in estimating the real value of any tinsel which I may put upon my articles, you and I should not materially differ. But it is not by his own taste, but by the taste of the fish, that the angler is determined in his choice of bait."

-TREVELYAN: Life and Letters of Macaulay, I, 146. Writing to Napier, June 24, 1842, that he had decided not to republish his essays, Macaulay says: "The public judges, and ought to judge, indulgently of periodical works. They are not expected to be highly finished. Their natural life is only six weeks. Sometimes their writer is at a distance from the books to which he wants to refer. Sometimes he is forced to hurry through his task in order to catch the post. He may blunder; he may contradict himself; he may break off in the middle of a story; he may give an immoderate extension to one part of his subject and dismiss an equally important part in a few words. All this is readily forgiven if there be a certain spirit and vivacity in his style. But, as soon as he republishes, he challenges a comparison with all the most symmetrical and polished of human compositions. . . . My reviews are generally thought to be better written, and they certainly live longer, than the reviews of most other people; and this ought to content me. The moment I come forward to demand a higher rank, I must expect to be judged by a higher standard."

TREVELYAN: Life and Letters of Macaulay, II, 101. But the revision was forced upon him by the action of the American publishers in bringing out reprints of the essays without corrections. (Trevelyan, II, 101.) He spent the first weeks of 1843 in preparing for the republication. April 19, 1843, he writes to Napier: "My collected reviews have succeeded well. Longman tells me that he must set about a second edition."

The changes made in the revision of the Essay on Warren Hastings are noted below. The student of Macaulay's workmanship will find it instructive to account for them. Most of them fall in one or another of the three classes following: (1) Changes made apparently in order to reduce exaggeration, or to discard or soften a harsh or too positive judgment; (2) those made apparently for the sake of greater accuracy of statement, or to prevent ambiguity, or to secure a better distribution of emphasis in a sentence or adjacent sentences; (3) those made apparently in order better to satisfy the ear.

The Essay on Warren Hastings, as it first appeared in the Edinburgh Review for October, 1841, began with the two paragraphs that follow. These were omitted in Macaulay's revision (1843)..

"This book seems to have been manufactured in pursuance of a contract, by which the representatives of Warren Hastings, on the one part, bound themselves to furnish papers, and Mr. Gleig, on the other part, bound himself to furnish praise. It is but just to say that the covenants on both sides have been most faithfully kept; and the result is before us in the form of three big bad volumes, full of undigested correspondence and undiscerning panegyric.

"If it were worth while to examine this performance in detail, we could easily make a long article by merely pointing out inaccurate statements, inelegant expressions, and immoral doctrines. But it would be idle to waste criticism on a bookmaker; and, whatever credit Mr. Gleig may have justly earned by former works, it is as a bookmaker, and nothing more, that he now comes before us. More eminent men than Mr. Gleig have written nearly as ill as he, when they have stooped to similar drudgery. It would be unjust to estimate Goldsmith by the Vicar of Wakefield,1 or Scott

1 In the Edinburgh Review for January, 1842, Macaulay said that he meant to write "Goldsmith by the History of Greece" instead of "Goldsmith by the Vicar of Wakefield."

by the Life of Napoleon. Mr. Gleig is neither a Goldsmith nor a Scott; but it would be unjust to deny that he is capable of something better than these memoirs. It would also, we hope and believe, be unjust to charge any Christian minister with the guilt of deliberately maintaining some propositions which we find in this book. It is not too much to say that Mr. Gleig has written several passages, which bear the same relation to the Prince' of Machiavelli that the 'Prince' of Machiavelli bears to the Whole Duty of Man,' and which would excite amazement in a den of robbers, or on board of a schooner of pirates. But we are willing to attribute these offences to haste, to thoughtlessness, and to that disease of the understanding which may be called the Furor Biographicus, and which is to writers of lives what the goitre is to an Alpine shepherd, or dirt-eating to a Negro slave."

[Numbers refer to paragraphs.]

-1. minutely examining, dwelling on the faults of. such adulation, such puerile adulation.

would bear many spots.

The next sentence, omitted in the revision, read as follows: “He would have preferred, we are confident, even the severity of Mr. Mill to the puffing of Mr. Gleig."

2. Bristol Channel, British Channel.

3. overwhelmed by, overwhelmed in.

4. Before this transfer, Before the transfer.

and died in the West Indies, and went to the West Indies, where he died.

6. But forty years later, But many years later.

13. a share in the worst abuses, a share in the abuses.

16. in this project, in his project.

18. It is every day, etc. This and the following sentence were united by a semicolon, in the original. (Similar changes

in punctuation, occurring subsequently in the essay, are numerous and will not be noted.)