18 SEPTEMBER 1926, Page 16

[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]

Sia,—That Macaulay's New Zealander was not a literary coincidence but a plagiarism you will, I think, regard as established by Abraham Hayward in the following passage in his Essay on The Pearls and Mock Pearls of History : " The embryo of Lord Macaulay's New Zealander has been dis- covered in a letter from Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, ' At last some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's like the editions of

Baalbec and Palmyra.' The New Zealander first came upon the stage in 1840, in a review of Ranke's History of the Popes ; but the same image in a less compact shape was employed by Lord Macaulay in 1824, in the concluding paragraph of a review of Mitford's Grecce."—I am, Sir, &c., Whitfield, Battledown, Cheltenham.

W. H. GLENNY.