SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

Mum-morsel:Ts LrrEasroax,

Critical and Historical Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review by Thomas

Babington Macaulay. In three volumes Longman and Co. norms, Ragland Castle; a Tale of the Great Rebellion. By Mrs. Thomson. Author of • Widows and Widowers„' Anne Boleyn," &c. In three volumes.....Bendey.

MACAULAY'S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EDINBURGH REVIEW.

IN a proper and unpretending preface, Mr. MACAULAY states he " is so sensible of the defects" of these papers, that he has hitherto refused to permit their republication ; nor would he now have con- sented to it, but for the injury the proprietors of the Edinburgh Review are likely to suffer from American reprints, copies of which are continually brought into this country, while a "still larger im- portation is expected." This enforced edition contains no papers that have not been reprinted in America, but excludes a few to which the author attaches little value. Mr. MACAULAY has also been strongly urged, he says, - - - " to insert three papers on the Utilitarian Philosophy, which when they first appeared, attracted some notice, but which are not in the American editions. He has, however, determined to omit these papers ; not because he is disposed to retract a single doctrine which they contain, but because he is unwilling to offer what might be regarded as an affront to the memory of one from whose opinions he still widely dissents, but to whose talents and virtues he admits that he formerly did not do justice. Serious as are the faults of the Essay on Government, a critic, while noticing those faults, should have abstained from using contemptuous language respecting the historian of British India. It ought to be known that Mr. Mill had the generosity, not only to forgive, but to forget the unbecoming acrimony with which he had been assailed, and was, when his valuable life closed, on terms of cordial friendship with his assailant." No attempt has been made to remodel any of the papers : the principle of the revision has been to make such changes only as might originally have been made had time and opportunity per- mitted a leisurely correction of the proofs. The three volumes contain upwards of twenty articles, arranged in chronological order : an easy plan, which may have been adopted by the American reprinters, and which furnishes more variety to the steadily-progressing reader, as it may also enable him to judge of Mr. MACAULAY'S improvement during the seventeen years over which the lucubrations extend—from 1825 to 1842. A classified arrangement of the articles, however, as they relate to history, politics, philosophy, and criticism reaching to morals and manners as well as to books, would have displayed the subjects in a more luminous mode, and more distinctly have impressed the versatility of Mr. Macauwor's pen, and the variety of his accomplishments and reading, if not of his studies. In history, he ranges from Italy to England, and front England to Spain and India ; taking up some of the most remarkable epochs, and treating them with greater re- gard to individuals and to national characterestics than to events. Thus, MACHIAVELLI is a text which furnishes a critical account of the great Italian's works, a sketch of his life and character, and a comparison of the Italian characteristics of that period with those of the Northern nations, deduced from an examination of the history and social state of Italy. In England, the life and times of Lord BURLEIGH, the lives of HAMPDEN and TEMPLE, the history of Lord CHATHAM, and the historical fragment of Sir James MACKINTOSH, enable Mr. MACAULAY to handle some leading crises in our annals,—the reign of ELIZABETH; the follies and tyrannies of the two first STUARTS, that led to the Civil War ; the misgovern- ment of CHARLES the Second ; the tyranny of his brother JAMES, which ended in the Revolution ; and the corrupt yet not uninte- resting political struggles that took place under the two first Sovereigns of the house of Brunswick. The letters of HORACE WALPOLE serve to exhibit another phase of the same period ; Lord MAHON'S War of the Succession almost embraces civilized Eu- rope during the times of WILLIAM and ANNE; as the lives of CLIVE and WARREN HASTINGS display our Indian empire at the two important periods of its foundation and consolidation. And all these different topics are treated with the variety and ad libitum character which distinguish the MACHIAVELLI article : the book, the hero or his contemporaries, the state of society, and sometimes, but more rarely, the particular events of history, are handled by turns.

As the articles of which history is the essence rarely take a strict historical shape, but are biographical, disquisitional, or critical, so those of which the basis is critical or philosophical are by no means entirely exhibited in that form. MILTON, BUNYAN, JOHNSON, BACON, the Colloquies of SOUTHEY, MOORE'S Life of Byron, and LEIGH HUNT'S edition of Wycherly, and the other Comic Dramatists, contain history or descriptive disquisition in their biography, or biography in their philosophy and criticism. The subject-matter of HALLasi's Constitutional History and VON RANEE'S History of the Popes extends over the longest time, and perhaps their treatment is the closest to the subject ; unless we except four inferior articles,—ROBERT MONTGOMERY'S Poetry, a panegyric on Lord HOLLAND, GLADSTONE on Church and State, and the trashy trifle on the Disabilities of the Jews—a subject out of Mr. MACAULAY'S way, and too logically difficult for his mind to settle.

In point of structure and composition, these essays may be said to be sui generis. We do not mean that there is nothing else like them in the world, for all good articles in periodicals approach their standard ; but that they have no prototypes in books. They are not essays after the fashion of the older essays, which, though desultory and digressive, had always a connexion with their theme. They are not disquisitions in the sense of our ancestors,—such dui.

quisitions as RomaIrsom wrote on Ancient India, or GIBBON on the Antiquities of the House of Brunswick or the Man with the Iron mask ; where a critical examination of the subject and a general description of its matter superseded a narrative of particular facts : nor have they even a pretension to a critical account of a book or of books. They resemble nothing so much as those musical pieces called Fantasias, in which the author gives free scope to his ideas without regard to the systematic and symmetrical forms which regulate other compositions ; and where any number of themes of any kind may be strung together, provided they tell. Such productions, in literature, have these defects—they must be incomplete, and they can teach nothing fully ; for, whatever the cause may be, we have never seen an article, however large its extent or however limited in its subject, that could be put forward as superseding a book, or be used as a complete exposition, although common articles in Quarterlies constantly exceed in length Dr. Join/so/es disquisition on the Metaphysical Poets in the Life of COWLEY, and frequently equal SALLusx's History of the Catiline Conspiracy. So far, in- deed, from being able to teach, it may be doubted whether they do not require as much general knowledge in the reader as in the writer; without which, their rapid and glancing style could not always be followed. On the other hand, they are better adapted to answer their purpose than better works. They take a sub- ject or a book about which a contemporary interest is excited, and whose very title will most probably arrest attention : from a crude and ill-digested chaos ofmatter, expanded by the skill of the compiler and the mercenary folly of the bookseller into an ap- palling mass of printed volumes, they draw the pith of the more striking and interesting parts ; they add to this such fit and telling points as the reading of the reviewer may furnish, or such topics and illustrations as conversation, observation, and tradi- tion may have supplied. The result, when highly successful, is an article which answers the purpose of the publisher and the public. Cliques can cackle over it ; journals of the party may quote it ; the listless may be roused by it ; those who are too busy or too lazy to read for themselves may fill up their abhorred vacuum and cram for conversation; and even those who are ac- quainted with the subject may read the article with pleasure, for the cleverness of its treatment, the fluency, force, or brilliancy of the style, and occasionally the novelty of the remarks or of the additional illustrations. It is true that such persons will often trace conveyed ideas, expressed in a more condensed and graphic form, and sometimes meet with improvements upon Mr. Bayes's Rule of Transversion—being prose turned into prose of another kind : but even the detection and observation of the plagiarism will furnish a not unpleasant employment.

The species of literature we are describing is peculiar to the age, simply because of the wants and peculiarities of the age. With the present century mechanical improvement greatly facilitated both the production and circulation of books ; the extension of education with the increase of people in "genteel" if not in easy circumstances, greatly multiplied readers ; and various causes rendered it impossible they should read for themselves. Hence arose a necessity for publications which should enable the differ- ent classes of society to keep up with the stream of publication, and alike originated the elaborate articles of the larger periodicals and the scissors-and-paste compilation of the minor hebdomadal.

Among this peculiar class of writers, the creation of the present century, we are inclined to rate Mr. MACAULAY as the first. His reading is various and extensive ; he has picked up a good deal of floating information, and been familiar with celebrated men : ad- dicted by nature to the galvanic and inflated style which charac- terizes so many popular writers of the day, his Cambridge edu- cation and legal studies have prevented this tendency from degenerating into bombast ; and though, perhaps, devoid of imagination, he has so quick a perception of the striking points of a subject, and so skilful a mode of personifying them, that an effect of imagination is produced. In assigning this eminence to Mr. MACAULAY, it will be understood that we are speaking only of that peculiar kind of periodical literature which we have endea- voured to describe. Articles might be picked out from the greater Reviews, that, critically speaking, would excel any single article of his, especially when men, not mere litterateurs, have written upon a subject in which their life has been employed. In wit, finish, and pith, as well as in worldly knowledge, sagacity, and sense, Mr. MACAULAY'S compositions are excelled by those of SYDNEY SMITH ; in depth and variety of attain- ment, curious speculation, and originality of view, they may be surpassed by some of Colonel THOMPSON'S : but all other writers are left at an immeasurable distance, except, perhaps, his prototype BROUGHAM, and the Adam of the whole race, JEF- FREY. The qualities of the writers enumerated are not, how- ever, so peculiar to the article, as available, according to their qualities, in any other mode of composition. MACAULAY is the facile princeps of quarterly reviewers, but is perhaps not so well fitted for any thing else. His flashy, brilliant, and powerful style—his expansive range which looks like comprehensive grasp— his occasionally stilted swagger that wears the air of loftiness—and his skilful variations on common themes which belong essentially to the beaten track of literature—are eminently favourable to the "article"; and it is as articles we read these "essays" though printed in a book. Although, as JOHNSON has remarked, "to a reader a book be not worse or better for the circumstances of the author, yet there is always a silent reference of human works to human abilities "—and, it may be added, to the object with which they were exercised. Faults in these essays are comparatively disregarded, which would have militated greatly against their suc- cess had they now appeared for the first time.

The general qualities of Mr. MACAULAY have been indicated in this general description of the class to which he belongs. But his great and peculiar merit is that of a stater • his great and con- spicuous defect is a carelessness about logical truth, or an inca- pacity of discovering it. If any reader, given to " hunting a thought through Greece and Rome, ' were to take up these volumes with the books they profess to review, and other common works on the subject, he might readily track out the primordia, not of the conclusions, which are true or otherwise as it may happen, but of the images, the ideas, and the facts. For example, Srs- MONDI has been laid under contribution for the view of Italy in the article on MACHIAVELLI ; if, indeed, the germ of it is not really contained in Hums's brief digression upon the French in- vasion under CHARLES the Eighth. It is the skill with which striking points are brought together, and still more the rhetorical art with which they are impressed, that give character and attrac- tion to this article ; and so of all the rest.

From various circumstances, the vocation of the class of writers we have endeavoured to describe is not well fitted to discover truth : but Mr. MACAULAY does not appear to be gifted by nature with the faculty necessary for its discovery ; as, whenever he broaches an opinion, the chances are that it is tainted with false- hood or unsoundness. We do not, of course, mean that his articles are full of false conclusions. In every work, whose writer does not aim at absurd paradox, much must of necessity be popular truths, as well established, if not as demonstrable, as any thing in arith- metic or geometry. In compositions like these, whose sub- stance is generally taken bodily from other authors, and made the writer's own by his manner of dressing it, the particular judgment or the general conclusion is either derived from them or from axioms of political science. Our meaning is, that where the writer puts forth a new opinion, it is highly probable that it will be altogether false ; or that there is a larger truth beyond it; or that the opinion, if completely true, is only part of a wider conclusion, the lesser truth only leading to error without a know- ledge of' the greater. Much of this may be attributed to haste, or to a mind illogical by nature. Some, we think, arises from the author's ambition to be splendid and effective. In looking at a fact or an opinion, he does not consider it with a view to its truth, but how it can be stated with effect. This vice is inherent, and shows itself in other things besides conclusions in composition. It was the swelling rhetorician, not a parvenu with his head turned, which prompted the impropriety of dating from Windsor Castle. The reader of the debates may remember the glowing appeal to the English standard, whose appearance floating in the breeze drew the Sepoys, despite of superstition, across the Indus. Unluckily, as Macbeth says of the air-drawn dagger, " there's no such thing." The reader who turns to Mr. ATKINSON'S book on Afghanistan, besides other little inaccuracies, will find that fortress, flag, and Sepoys, were much in the relative position of Tilburina and the Spanish fleet.

For variety and rapidity of narrative, largeness of subject, and a practical knowledge of the country, if not of the precise locality, the two best articles are those on CLIVE and HASTINGS. That on CHOKER'S " Boswell" is the cleverest : the blunders of the editor are detected with a microscopic keenness which he himself might envy ; but this part dismissed, the subject is treated with a breadth and power that CHOKER could never attain. The article we like the best is that on MACHIAVELLI. And though the readers of the Edinburgh Review may perhaps have some of the more striking illustrations indelibly imprinted on their memory, yet the following extract, at once a finished picture and a defence, may be read and reread with pleasure.

THE ITALIAN OF THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES.

A vine sanctioned by the general opinion is merely .a vice. The evil ter- minates in itself. A vice condemned by the general opinion produces a perni- cious effect on the whole character. The former is a local malady, the latter a constitutional taint. When the reputation of the offender is lost, he too often flings the remains of his virtue after it in despair. The Highland gentleman who, a century ago, lived by taking black mail from his neighbours, commit- ted the same crime for which Wild was accompanied to Tyburn by the huzzas of two hundred thousand people. But there can be no doubt that he was a much less depraved man than Wild. The deed for which Mrs. Brownrigg was hanged sinks into nothing when compared with the conduct of the Roman who treated the public ton hundred pair of gladiators. Yet we should greatly wrong such a Roman if we supposed that his disposition was as cruel as that of Mrs. Brownrigg. In our own country, a woman forfeits her place in society by what in a man is too commonly considered as an honourable distinction, and, at worst, as a venial error. The consequence is notorious. The moral prin- ciple of a woman is frequently more impaired by a single lapse from virtue than that of a man by twenty years of intrigues. Classical iniquity would furnish us with instances stronger, if possible, than those to which we have referred. We must apply this principle to the case before us. Habits of dissimula- tion and falsehood, no doubt, mark a man of our age and country as utterly worthless and abandoned. But it by no means follows that a similar judgment

would be just in the case of an Italian of the middle ages. *

The character of the Italian statesman seems, at first eight, a collection of contradictions, a phantom as monstrous as the portress of Hell in Milton—balf divinity, half snake, majestic and beautiful above, grovelling and poisonous be- low. We see a man whose thoughts and words have no connexion with each other, who never hesitates at an oath when he wishes to seduce, who never wants a pretext when he is inclined to betray. His cruelties spring not from the heat of blood, or the insanity of uncontrolled power, but from deep and cool meditation. His passions, like well-trained troops, are impetuous by rule, and in their most headstrong fury never forget the discipline to which they have been accustomed. His whole soul is occupied with vast and complicated . schemes of ambition : yet his aspect and language exhibit nothing but philoso- I phical moderation. Hatred and revenge cat into his heart : yet every look is& cordial smile, every gesture a familiar caress. He never excites the suspicion of his adversaries by petty provocations. His ;tarpon is disclosed only when it is accomplished. His face is unruffled, his speech is courteous, till vigilance is laid asleep, till a vital point is exposed, till a sure aim is taken ; and then he strikes, for the first and last time. Military courage, the boast of the sottish German, of the frivolous and prating Frenchman, of the romantic and arrogant Spaniard, he neither possesses nor values. He shuns danger, not because he is iusensible to shame, but because, in the society in which he lives, timidity has ceased to be shameful. To do any injury openly is, in his estimation, as wicked as to do it secretly, and far less profitable. With him the most honourable means are those which are the surest, the speediest, and the darkest. lie cannot compre- hend how a man should scruple to deceive those whom he does not scruple to destroy. He would think it madness to declare open hostilities against rivals whom he might stab in a friendly embrace, or poison in a consecrated wafer.

Yet this man, black with the vices which we consider as most loathsome, traitor, hypocrite, coward, assassin, was by no means destitute even of those virtues which we generally consider as indicating superior elevation of character. In civil courage, in perseverance, in presence of mind, those barbarous warriors, who were foremost in the battle or the breach, were far his inferiors. Even the dangers which he avoided with a caution almost pusillanimous never confused his perceptions, never paralyzed his inventive faculties, never wrung out one secret from his smooth tongue and his inscrutable brow. Though a dangerous enemy, and a still more dangerous accomplice, he could be a just and beneficent ruler. With so much unfairness in his policy, there was an extraordinary de- gree of fairness in his intellect. Indifferent to truth in the transactions of life, he was honestly devoted to truth in the researches of speculation. Wanton cruelty was not in his nature. On the contrary, where no political object was at stake, his disposition was soft and humane. The susceptibility of his nerves and the activity of his imagination inclined him to sympathize with the feel- ings of others, and to delight in the charities and courtesies of social life. Per- petually descending to actions which might seem to mark a mind diseased through all its faculties, he had nevertheless an exquisite sensibility both for the natural and the moral sublime, for every graceful and every lofty concep- tion. Habits of petty intrigue and dissimulation might have rendered Lim in- capable of great general views, but that the expanding effect of his philosophical studies counteracted the narroo ing tendency. He had the keenest enjoyment of wit, eloquence, and poetry. The fine arts profited alike by the severity of his judgment and by the liberality of his patronage. The portraits of some of the remarkable Italians of those times are perfectly in harmony with this description. Ample and majestic foreheads, brows strong and dark, but not frowning, eyes of which the calm full gaze while it expresses nothing seems to discern every thing, cheeks pale with thought and sedentary habits, lips formed with feminine delicacy, but compressed with more than masculine decision, mark out men at once enterprising and timid, men equally skilled in detecting the purposes of others, and in concealing their own, men who must have been formidable enemies and unsafe allies, but men, at the same time, whose tempera were mild and equable, and who possessed an amplitude and subtlety of intel- lect which would have rendered them eminent either in active or in contem- plative life, and fitted them either to govern or to instruct mankind. Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches ; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

This picture, powerful as it is, illustrates the characteristics we have already spoken of in Mr. MACAULAY'S Writings- The pleas set up for defending the Italian character from the odium at- tached to it are, that vices tolerated by society do not taint the individual, and that all nations have national faults. No reader imagines that these maxims have any novelty ; no one can deny the clearness and force with which they are presented, or rather fin- pressed. The truth of the positions is undoubted, but limited; and, as left by Mr. MACAULAY, leads to a practical and mis- chievous error. Although vices tolerated do not taint the general character of the individual, the standard of general character in society is lowered by the nature and extent of the vices society tolerates; and although all nations have national faults, it does not follow, as Mr. MACAULAY would appear to conclude, that all national faults are alike.

Let us pass to another subject, that of SAMUEL JOHNSON, for a comparison between

THE AUTHOR, OF THE LATER STuARTS AND THE EARLY BRuNSWIcits.

Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when the condition of a man of letters was most miserable and degraded. It was a dark night between two sunny days. The age of patronage had passed away, the age of general curiosity and intelligence had not arrived. The number of readers is at present so great, that a popular author may subsist in comfort and opulence on the Fonts of his works. In the reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First, even such men as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have been able to live like gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the deficiency of the natural demand for literature was, at the close of the seven- teenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, more than made up by artificial encouragement, by a vast system of bounties and premium.. There was, perhaps, never a time at which the rewards of literary merit were so splendid, at which men who could write well found such easy admittance into the most distinguished society, and to the highest honours of the state. The chiefs of both the great parties into which the kingdom was divided patronized literature with emulous munificence. Congreve, when he had scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for his first comedy with places which made him independent for life. Smith, though his Hippolytus and Plimdra failed, would have been consoled with 3001. a year but for his own folly, Rowe was not only Poet Laureate, but also land-surveyor of the Customs in the port of Lon- don, Clerk of the Council to the Prince of Wales, and Secretary of the Pre- sentations to the Lord Chancellor. Hughes was Secretary to the Commissions of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was Judge of the Prerogative Court in Ire- land. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of the Board of Trade. New- ton was Master of the Mint. Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity and importance. Gay, who commenced life as apprentice to a silk-mercer, became a Secretary of Legation at five-and-twenty. It was to a poem on the Death of Charles the Second, and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his introduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his Auditorship of the Exchequer. Swift, but for the unconquerable pre- judice of the Queen, would have been a Bishop. Oxford, with his white staff in his hand, passed through the crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell when that ingenious writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a Commissioner of Stamps and a Member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was a Commis- sioner of the Customs and Auditor of the Imprest. Tickell was Secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison was Secretary of State.

Now for Mr. MACAULAY'S contrast-

" At the time when Johnson commenced his literary career, a writer had

little to hope from the patronage of poser:ill individuals. The patronage of the public did not yet furnish the means of comfortable subsistence. The prices paid by booksellers to authors were so low, that a man of considerable talents and unremitting industry could do little more than provide for the day which was passing over him. The lean kine had eaten up the fat kine. The thin and withered ears had devoured the good ears. The season of rich har- vests was over, and the period of famine had begun. All that is squalid and miserable might now be summed up in the word poet. That word denoted a creature dressed like a scarecrow, familiar with compters and sponging-houses, and perfectly qualified to decide on the comparative merits of the Common Side in the King's Bench Prison and of Mount Scoundrel in the Fleet. Even the poorest pitied him ; and they well might pity him. For if their condition was equally abject, their aspirings were not equally high, nor their sense of insult equally acute. To lodge in a garret up tour pair of stairs, to dine in a cellar among footmen out of place, to translate ten hours a day for the wages of a ditcher, to be hooted by bailiffs from one haunt of beggary and pestilence to another, from Grub Street to St. George's Fields, and from St. George's Fields to the alleys behind St. Martin's Church, to sleep on a bulk in June and amid the ashes of a glass-house in December, to die in an hospital and to be buried in a parish-vault, was the fate of more than one writer, who, if he had lived thirty years earlier, would have been admitted to the sittings of the Kitcat or the Scriblerus Club, would have sat in Parliament, and would have been intrusted with embassies to the High Allies; who, if he had lived in our time, would have found encouragement scarcely less munificent in Albemarle Street or in Paternoster Row.

" As every climate has its peculiar diseases, so every walk of life has its pe- culiar temptations. The literary character, assuredly, has always had its share of faults, vanity, jealousy, morbid sensibility. To these faults were now super- added the faults which are commonly found in men whose livelihood is preca- rious, and whose principles are exposed to the trial of severe distress. All the vices of the gambler and of the beggar were blended with those of the author. The prizes in the wretched lottery of bookmaking were scarcely less ruinous than the blanks. if good fortune came, it came in such a manner that it was almost certain to be abused. After months of starvation and despair, a full third night or a well received dedication filled the pocket of the lean, ragged, unwashed poet with guineas. He hastened to enjoy those luxuries with the images of which his mind had been haunted while he was sleeping amidst the cinders and eating potatoes at the Irish ordinary in Shoe Lane. A week of taverns soon qualified him for another year of night-cellars. Such was the life of Savage, of Boyse, and of a crowd of others. Sometimes blazing in gold- laced hats and waistcoats ; sometimes lying in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper cravats because their linen was in pawn ; sometimes drinking champagne and tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house iu Porridge Island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste : they knew luxury, they knew

beggary, but they never knew comfort. These men were irreclaimable. They looked on a regular and frugal life with the same aversion which an old gipsy or a Mohawk hunter feels for a stationary abode, and for the restraints and securities of civilized communities. They were as untameable, as much wedded to their desolate freedom, as the wild ass. They could no more be broken in to the offices of social man than the unicorn could be trained to serve and abide by the crib. It was well if they did not, like beasts of a still fiercer race, tear the hands which ministered to their necessities. To assist them was impossible; and the most benevolent of mankind at length became weary of giving relief which was dissipated with the wildest profusion as anon as it had been received. If a sum was bestowed on the wretched adventurer, such as, pro- perly husbanded, might have supplied him for six months, it was instantly spent in strange freaks of sensuality ; and before forty-eight hours had elapsed, the poet was again pestering all his acquaintance for twopence to get a plate of shin of beef at a subterraneous cook-shop. If his friends gave him an asylum in their houses, those houses were forthwith turned into bagnios and taverns. All order was destroyed, all business was suspended. The most good-natured host began to repent of his eagerness to serve a man of genius in distress, when he heard his guest roaring for fresh punch at five o'clock in the morning."

The power of this as a statement is unquestionable. Any one acquainted with the life of SAVAGE and the novels of SMOLLETT will not only remember the passages which have furnished the original picture, but could mark the identical periods that have been transprosed. Nothing in the description belongs to Mr. MACAULAY but the dressing : the conclusions are his own, and, if not untrue, are not correct. The age of the First and Second GEORGES was not more discouraging for authors than the age of ELIZABETH and of all the &rumors. The lives and deaths of MARLOW, GREENE, LOVELACE, and OTWAY, differ in nothing that we know of from the condition of the two writers, SAVAGE and BOYSE, whom Mr. MACAULAY mentions, unless it be in greater abilities and a sadder fate. Nor, compared with DRYDEN and BUTLER, was their poverty greater than in proportion to their deficiency in conduct and in genius. Strictly analyzed, indeed, it was not authorship alone that caused the sufferings of one class or the fortunes of the other of whom Mr. MACAULAY gives such a list. CONGERVE and RowE were of ancient and respectable families, and both were Templars studying for the bar. HUGHES was also of a respectable City family, and a man of business, who did not allow literature to divert hint from his duties in the Ordnance, where he had a place nearly twenty years before the appointment Mr. MACAULAY mentions, and pro- bably before he published at all. Purmars was not indebted to his literature for his preferments, (his party neglected him,) but to the friendship of Archbishop Bour.ma. MONTAGUE was of a noble family ; STEPNEY, it is conjectured, of an ancient and knightly family ; and both were politicians by trade : patronage, however, had something to do with their success in life, but it was the patronage of an individual, SACKVILLE Earl of DORSET. Swarr was a protege of TEMPLE, who was connected with his family : he took orders, and got preferment before he published any thing ; and it may be said that literature—the "Tale of a Tub"—pre- vented him from being a Bishop. PARNELL inherited an este e, and had a living in the church : he got no patronage through literature beyond the empty honour paraded by Mr. MACAULAY, and the in- timacy of OXFORD. Trexm.r. and ADDISON were both sons of clergymen ; both gained their first preferments from the Univer- sities where they were educated, and were patronized into poli- ticians before they became eminent as authors. Paw& was not patronized because he wrote, but was able to write by being patronized; and his fellowship was the thing which rendered him independent, and which he had prudence enough to retain for this purpose. Locus and NEWTON were both connected with Univer- sities : STEELE was a politician ; so was MAIN WANING ; and GAY was made secretary to CLARENDON through private friendship, though no doubt his literature procured him his friends. In pointing out these circumstances, we would not be understood as denying that it was a fashion to patronize literature in the reign of Queen ANNE and to neglect it under GEORGE the Second, (though a list might be drawn up of writers patronized during his reign,) but to point out that it was not literature alone that pro- cured the rewards so pompously enumerated. An illustration will make our meaning clearer : had Mr. MACAULAY not been an Edinburgh Reviewer, he would not have gone to Parliament, to Bombay, or to Windsor Castle ; neither would he, had he been only an Edinburgh Reviewer.

Let us now turn to the other side, and take the case of SAVAGE—the only one, by the by, that is true to the picture Mr. MACAULAY has drawn ; and which in its most offensive parts JOHNSON seems to consider an exception while he is narrating it. If the life of SAVAGE be investigated, it will be found that it was less his authorship than his vices and irregularities that produced his misfortunes. Whether he was the son of Earl RIVERS or of an obscure individual, authorship found SAVAGE a shoemaker's apprentice and procured him distinction in the world, gained him money, a pension, and had he not been grossly imprudent, would have given him a provision for life, and when condemned for murder it obtained him a pardon. In adducing these facts, we are not endeavouring to maintain that authorship, when readers were few, was not at best but a profession of risk and poverty, and that its followers were almost of necessity men of irregular habits ; but to show that, though authority may be adduced for every particular statement of Mr. MACAULAY, every impression he would leave or every conclusion he draws is incorrect in some shape or other.

For purposes of instruction, and we think for permanent endu- rance, a logical vice of the kind we have attempted to illustrate materially diminishes the value of the work ; but has slender effect on its powers of temporary attraction. For powerful composition, and the interest it inspires, we know of no publication equal to these volumes. Compared with MACAULAY, CHATEAUBRIAND is a rhetorical petit-maitre ; BULWER a glittering jack &lantern ; whilst DISRAELI the younger suggests the idea of the trinkets and other finery of a gentleman of the swell-mob. A selection from the periodical literature of the century, displaying better taste, sounder judgment, greater finish, and more felicitous illustration, might be made ; but for power of statement and readable attraction, The Critical and Historical Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review by THOMAS Beim:Gros MACAULAY stand unrivalled and alone, or can be rivalled only by Lord Bstouonaat's " Characters."