House of Lords, April 3, 1835.

MY DEAR PROFESSOR,-What you say of any alienation between us here is almost all groundless. The underlings of the party had been persuaded by such lies as the papers circulate, that the King and Court turned them out of their places because I was too strong a reformer, and I believe those underlings would throw their own fathers and mothers overboard to get back to their mess of pottage. If they had known my extreme aversion to office, and my all but irrevocable determination never again to hamper myself with it, and thereby and by party connection to tie up my right arm, and prevent me from working my own appointed work,these gentlefolks might have saved themselves the trouble of wishing to get rid of me as an obstacle to their restoration. But Lord Althorp's fixed and immovable resolution to remain out, shakes mine; for, in truth, I hardly see how a Government (a Liberal one) can show itself with nobody in it whom the people care or even know anything about. However, all this is not to be talked of. Those underlings have kept in, and are keeping in, the Tories.-Yours ever,

H. B.

London, April 4, 1835.

MY DEAR PROFESSOR,-There is one remark in your letter yesterday which I don't at all concur in,-that the Review should be silent at this moment, and that you have been advised to be so. Rely on it, the Review suffered most severely in the opinion of every honest man by the last Number being silent. It was ascribed (and naturally) to the worst motives of trimming and waiting to see how the cat jumped. I know the contrary, and that it was owing to the base intrigues of one or two people here, who kept back what I had sent because my opinions were too decided for the Court, and because those vermin I allude to are basely and meanly looking to some junction with the Stanleys and Grahams, and want to throw the honest and single-hearted Reformers overboard the moment they have helped us to turn the Government out. You would, I know, have printed those articles had you got them. But they were intercepted.

One of them is the first of this Number. Another I have not sent, because it is long, and you have enough.

As to repeating the same mistake now, it will give immediate rise to a new and really liberal and honest Quarterly Review. This I know. A man of very large fortune has provided the money for a work about to be published as a “European Quarterly Review," in order to support liberal principles respecting foreign countries. But it would instantly take a home view of politics and literature, if it found the Edinburgh Review deserting those who ought to be far dearer to us than Poles and Germans. Perhaps I have taken a false alarm, but there are some people so lost, at this crisis, to all sense of honesty, or even of common decency towards the Reformers, some people who have been making Reform a stalking-horse, that I suspect anything and everything of them. These were always till 1831 anti-Reformers, had written and spoken and voted against it for twenty years, so that no wonder they should now go back to their old scent, upon which, please God, they never more shall hunt, but shall rather be hunted. What harm can result from holding our own liberal and reform ground? Don't be afraid of committing any new liberal Government. There are so many difficulties in the way of forming one at all, and so many more of forming one that can last out the Session, that this needs not weigh with us at all. However, why should an honest Government be afraid of intending to do what it is disgraced if it hesitates in doing? Not that measures should be much dwelt upon-only this I hold essential on every account: that we should plainly speak what is right and true of Peel and Wellington's Government, and of the Section, and in favour of the honest and true-hearted reformers, who form 250 of our majority, and would annihilate in a day any coalition.2-Yours ever, H. B.

1

The Number for April, 1835,-to which Lord Brougham contributed six Articles :-" The British Constitution-Recent Political Occurrences." Thoughts upon the Aristocracy." Newspaper Tax." "Memoirs of Mirabeau." "French Parties and Politics." "State of Parties."

2 The Peel and Wellington Government resigned on the 8th of April, 1835. Lord Melbourne then resumed office with all his former colleagues except one. What," asks Earl Russell, was the nature of the objections which prevented

London, June 9, 1835. MY DEAR SIR,-I wish to know whether or not Mr. Allen has undertaken to give the character of Bolingbroke's style, eloquence, &c., or only the political and factious portion of the subject, because, if he is possessed of both parts, I shall beg leave to decline interfering with him. I hope you may take in good part what I must now in fairness to you, and in common justice to myself, add.

Ever since you succeeded to the management of the Edinburgh Review, I have found that my assistance was reckoned, justly God knows, a very secondary object, and that one of the earliest friends of the Journal, and who had (Jeffrey will inform you) enabled it to struggle through its first difficulties as much as any one or even two of the contributors, was now next thing to laid upon the shelf. This is the common lot of those who, in any concern, outlive their contemporaries, and no one, I must say it for myself, in this world has less of personal punctilio about him, or cares less for such trifles when in pursuit of a great object. But, at the same time, I really do feel that I ought not to be merely made a hack of, and "offered" such and such books; that is, whatever nobody else likes to do. Yet it does so happen that of late years this is my position. Dr. Southey, I assure you, is considered in a very different way by the Quarterly Review. However, let that pass. My resolution now is, that I shall review such things as suit my taste and my views on subjects

Lord Melbourne from offering to return the Great Seal into the hands of Lord Brougham? The objections came first from Lord Melbourne, and were frankly communicated by him to Lord Brougham. His faults were a recklessness of judgment, which hurried him beyond the bounds of prudence, an omnivorous appetite for praise, a perpetual interference in matters with which he had no direct concern, and, above all, a disregard of truth. His vast powers of mind were neutralized by a want of judgment, which prevented any party from placing entire confidence in him, and by a frequent forgetfulness of what he himself had done or said but a short time before. It was for these reasons that, many weeks before the change of Government, Lord Melbourne resolved not to offer the Great Seal to Lord Brougham. He told me of his fixed resolution on this head many weeks before the dissolution of Sir Robert Peel's Ministry. Observing as I did the characters of the two men, I thought Lord Melbourne justified in his decision, and I willingly stood by him in his difficulties."-(" Recollections and Suggestions," pp. 138-140.) The Melbourne Ministry, with Lord John Russell as Leader of the House of Commons, held office from April, 1835, to August, 1841.

and on public affairs, and if there is any kind of objection in any quarter (which I am well aware in these times of intrigue and jobbery is very possible), I cannot help it, and I shall interpose no obstacle to the conductors and contributors of the Journal, and should be very sorry to stand in the way of any other arrangements or connections. Ex-ministers are always in the wrong, I know full well. However, if the base and truly jobbing plan of some would-be ministers and their adherents (in London) had taken effect, and you had, “for fear of giving offence," kept all politics out of the last, as you had done out of the Number before, my belief is that the Review would have died in the course of the Spring. I am sure the political character of the last Number did it much service and no harm, except disappointing the good-for-littles

I allude to.

I had intended to write this to Lord Jeffrey, but I think it a more fair and more friendly course to address it to you at once, and not trouble him on the subject. But if you ever speak to him on Review matters, you may show him this letter. Truly yours, H. B.

House of Lords, June 15, 1835.

MY DEAR SIR,-I am sorry to perceive you are not only astonished but hurt at my letter, because I do assure you that nothing could be further from my wish or intention. I never blamed you. I was quite aware of the difficulties of your position, and I think no one can charge you with any kind of blame, or, indeed, error of any sort, in doing your best for the important charge under your care. I assure you I very sincerely and most unaffectedly acquit you of all blame, and I will add, that I wish well to the Edinburgh Review, and to your administration of it, while it supports its old honest principles, and does not let itself be turned into a tool of Holland House, or any other class of place-loving politicians.

I must add that it is your clear and imperative duty to see that the best aid be secured for it, and I speak openly and frankly when I say, that the only charge I have against you is furnished by yourself, when you say you risked the loss of

a very first-rate contributor to meet my wishes; for I do assure you I think you ought to have let me know your difficulty, and I should at once have released you from all risk, and it should have made no difference in my subsequent conduct, always supposing that no principle was involved, and no shabby motive was at work in the quarter alluded to. That I never quarrelled with trifles you may suppose when you remember how little it is my way to care for great offences of a merely personal kind where men are co-operating for a common cause. I took no offence at Professor Pillans for inserting an attack upon my education views and calculations, though his gross ignorance of the a, b, c of political arithmetic was then seen by all, and is now demonstrated by the returns. Nor did I complain when M'Culloch sneered at my sixpenny sciences,1 as he wittily called the treatises of the Society of Useful Knowledge, which, of course, he hated, because he was not in our pay, and also because he don't like cheap literature.

Let me add that I really do not estimate my assistance at any material value. I write far too easily (even if I did not write too ill) to make me prize the fruits of so small an effort. I believe I wrote the last articles at the rate of sixteen pages of print in one day. You are, therefore, mistaken in fancying I took any offence at your doing freely and exactly what you deemed best for the interests of the Review. But then I thought I should not take things which others did not, and that I had better indulge my fancy in choosing books now and then. You utterly mistake me when you suppose I complained of you for inserting too few articles of mine. God knows, you have put in far too many. But all I wrote (except Mirabeau) were, I believe, without exception-not to amuse myself, but to forward the interests of the Ministry in the cause I have at heart. This of course was my only motive, for though I write very quickly and easily, yet it took so much time from sleep or rest when I was much occupied.

Sixpenny systems" is the phrase used by M'Culloch in his Article on the "Census of the Population," March, 1829. At a later period, M'Culloch wrote a "History of Commerce" and a "Statistical Account of the British Empire" for the Useful Knowledge Society.

M