Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
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Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 2
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
English essays
If these lines are not Mr Sadler's, we heartily beg his pardon for our
suspicion--a suspicion which, we acknowledge, ought not to be lightly
entertained of any human being. We can only say that we never met with
them before, and that we do not much care how long it may be before we
meet with them, or with any others like them, again.
The spirit of this work is as bad as its style. We never met with a book
which so strongly indicated that the writer was in a good humour with
himself, and in a bad humour with everybody else; which contained so
much of that kind of reproach which is vulgarly said to be no slander,
and of that kind of praise which is vulgarly said to be no commendation.
Mr Malthus is attacked in language which it would be scarcely decent to
employ respecting Titus Oates. "Atrocious," "execrable," "blasphemous,"
and other epithets of the same kind, are poured forth against that able,
excellent, and honourable man, with a profusion which in the early part
of the work excites indignation, but after the first hundred pages,
produces mere weariness and nausea. In the preface, Mr Sadler excuses
himself on the plea of haste. Two-thirds of his book, he tells us, were
written in a few months. If any terms have escaped him which can be
construed into personal disrespect, he shall deeply regret that he had
not more time to revise them. We must inform him that the tone of his
book required a very different apology; and that a quarter of a year,
though it is a short time for a man to be engaged in writing a book, is
a very long time for a man to be in a passion.
The imputation of being in a passion Mr Sadler will not disclaim. His
is a theme, he tells us, on which "it were impious to be calm;" and he
boasts that, "instead of conforming to the candour of the present age,
he has imitated the honesty of preceding ones, in expressing himself
with the utmost plainness and freedom throughout." If Mr Sadler really
wishes that the controversy about his new principle of population should
be carried on with all the license of the seventeenth century, we can
have no personal objections. We are quite as little afraid of a contest
in which quarter shall be neither given nor taken as he can be. But we
would advise him seriously to consider, before he publishes the promised
continuation of his work, whether he be not one of that class of writers
who stand peculiarly in need of the candour which he insults, and who
would have most to fear from that unsparing severity which he practises
and recommends.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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