THE "NEW ZEALANDER" AND LORD MACAULAY, [TO THE EDITOR OF
THE "SPECTATOR.'] Sin,—Is it quite fair that Lord Macaulay should have all the honour of having invented the "New Zealander " ? The fol- lowing extracts appear to me to be sufficiently near to the same thought, to make it even probable that he took his idea from one of them. The celebrated essay on Von Ranke's "history of the Popes," containing the "New Zealander," was published in October, 1840. For the sake of direct compari- son, I will quote Lord Macaulay's words :—" And she" (i.e., the Roman Church) "may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge, to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's." In Volney's "Ruins of Empires,"' chap. H., there is this passage :—" Perhaps some traveller may hereafter sit down solitary on the banks of the Thames, the Seine, or the Zuyder Zee, and lament the departed glory of a people now inumed, and their greatness changed into an empty name."
Shelley, in the dedication to "Peter Bell the Third," by " Miching
Mallecho," date December 1, 1819, writes :—" In the firm expecs tation that when London shall be an habitation of bitterns, when St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey shall stand shapeless and name- less ruins in the midst of an unpeopled marsh, when the piers of Waterloo Bridge shall become the nuclei of islets of reeds and osiers,. and cast the jagged shadows of their broken arches on the soli- tary stream, some Transatlantic commentator will be weighing in the scales of some new and now unimagined system of criticism the respective merits of the Bells and the Fudges and their his- torians.—I remain, &c., &c."
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