But for several years Spedding had been a contributor to the _Edinburgh Review_, and the articles which he selected for republication are full of that calm wisdom which distinguished all that he wrote. In 1836 he reviewed his friend Henry Taylor's _Statesman_; in 1838 he wrote on "Negro Apprenticeship"; in 1839 on the "Suspension of the Jamaica Constitution"; in 1840 on the "Wakefield Theory of Colonization"; in 1841 on the "Civilization of Africa and the Niger Expedition," in which his friend John Allen lost a brother; and in 1842 on "South Australia in 1841," a sequel to the article on the "Wakefield Theory of Colonization." And now for the next thirty years of his life he devoted himself to the task of what FitzGerald called washing his blackamoor, "a Tragedy pathetic as Antigone or Iphigenia." His own special work was the arrangement of Bacon's letters and minor writings, which had hitherto been very carelessly edited, and for this purpose he spent his days among the originals in the Lambeth Library and the British Museum. "Spedding devotes his days to Lord Bacon in the British Museum," writes FitzGerald in 1844; and again in 1846, "I saw very little of Spedding in London, for he was out all day at State paper offices and Museums." But he was not so absorbed in his special pursuits as not to take interest in public affairs, and the Maynooth Grant in 1845 and the opposition which it excited caused him to take part in an address to the Chancellor of the Exchequer in its favour. "You will see in the _Morning Herald_ of to-day," he writes to Thompson, "that the great event has already taken place, and though the world continues to move as it did, there does appear to be a change of weather.