Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays; Vol. 3: With a Memoir and IndexMacaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
History
Critical, Historical, and Miscellaneous Essays; Vol. 3: With a Memoir and Index
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
English literature -- History and criticism; Great Britain -- History
The style of this Fragment is weighty, manly, and unaffected. There are,
as we have said, some expressions which seem to us harsh, and some which
we think inaccurate. These would probably have been corrected, if Sir
James had lived to superintend the publication. We ought to add that the
printer has by no {262}means done his duty. One misprint, in particular,
is so serious as to require notice. Sir James Mackintosh has paid a high
and just tribute to the genius, the integrity, and the courage of a
good and great man, a distinguished ornament of English literature,
a fearless champion of English liberty, Thomas Burnet, Master of the
Charter-House, and author of that most eloquent and imaginative work,
the _Tellaris Theoria Sacra_. Wherever the name of this celebrated man
occurs, it is printed “Bennet,” both in the text and in the index.
This cannot be mere negligence. It is plain that Thomas Burnet and his
writings were never heard of by the gentleman who has been employed
to edite this volume, and who, not content with deforming Sir James
Mackintosh’s text by such blunders, has prefixed to it a bad Memoir, has
appended to it a bad Continuation, and has thus succeeded in expanding
the volume into one of the thickest, and debasing it into one of the
worst that we ever saw. Never did we fall in with so admirable an
illustration of the old Greek proverb, which tells us that half is
sometimes more than the whole. Never, did we see a case in which the
increase of the bulk was so evidently a diminution of the value.
Why such an artist was selected to deface so fine a Torso, we cannot
pretend to conjecture. We read that, when the Consul Mummius, after
the taking of Corinth, was preparing to send to Rome some works of the
greatest Grecian sculptors, he told the packers that if they broke his
Venus or his Apollo, he would force them to restore the limbs which
should be wanting. A head by a hewer of mile-stones joined to a bosom by
Praxiteles would not surprise or shock us more than this supplement.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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