The production of the essay seems in the first instance to have been due to Macaulay’s own initiative. For on April 29, 1830, a little over three weeks after the 1830 debate, he wrote to Macvey Napier, the editor of the _Edinburgh Review_: “If, as I rather fear, we should be beaten in Parliament this year about the Jews, a short pungent article on that question might be useful and taking. It ought to come within the compass of a single sheet” (_Selection from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier_, London, 1879, p. 80). In the course of the next few months Macaulay was strengthened in his conviction of the probable efficacy of an essay on the Jewish case by the representations which were made to him in the interval, apparently as an indirect result of Lord Holland’s original suggestion for the reprint in pamphlet form of the debate in the House of Commons on April 5, 1830. Thus in another letter to Macvey Napier, dated October 16, 1830, he stated: “The Jews have been urging me to say something about their claims; and I really think that the question might be discussed, both on general and on particular grounds, in a very attractive manner. What do you think of this plan?” (ibid., pp. 93, 94). On November 27, 1830, he wrote again: “I have only a minute to write. I will send you an article on the Jews next week” (ibid., p. 97). And finally on December 17, 1830, Macaulay sent the article as promised. “I send you an article on the Jews.... I am very busy, or I should have sent you this Jew article before. It is short, and carelessly written, perhaps, as to style, but certainly as to penmanship” (ibid., p. 98). The essay appeared in the _Edinburgh Review_ in the following month, January 1831, and thus stands in date between the maiden speech of 1830 and the speech of 1833. In the latter year the House of Commons passed Mr. Grant’s Bill through all its stages, though it was not till 1860 that the victory was formally won, after a practical triumph in 1858. It is curious to note that, in the debate of 1830, Mr. Grant appealed to the Commons to concede justice to the Jews promptly, and not let the matter hang in the balance for thirty years, as had been done with Catholic Emancipation. The very interval feared by Mr. Grant separated his original motion from its final ratification. Macaulay’s essay played a great part in converting English public opinion. So popular had this essay become, so convincing its plea, that it was regarded as the main statement of the Jewish case. Edition after edition of the volume containing the essay was called for and exhausted. So late as September 1847, when the Tory organ, the _Quarterly Review_, futilely attempted to set up a reasonable case against the Jewish claim, the whole of the argument was directed towards rebutting Macaulay’s essay.