Mr. Macvey Napier, who succeeded Francis Jeffrey in the editorship of the great Whig Review, had, of course, a perfect right to preserve the letters which are published in this volume, and to study them in private as much as he pleased. Indeed, for anything that appears to the contrary in the "Introduction" by his son, the present Mr. Macvey Napier, they may have been bequeathed by the original recipient with instructions that they should some day be published. An edition, privately circulated a short time ago, led to "representations that a correspondence of so much interest ought to be made more accessible," and the present volume is the result; but it might be maintained that the writers of such letters would, if they could have been consulted, have objected to their publication; and that to send them forth to the world in all their nakedness was, at all events, not a delicate or magnanimous thing to do. "Much might be said on both sides." Paley, in his chapter on the original character of the Christian Morality, remarked that though a thousand cases might be supposed in which the use of the golden rule might mislead a person, it was impossible in fact to light on such a case. That was a hazardous observation, for the truth is that when we once get beyond elementary conditions of being and doing, we find human beings differ so very widely, and in such utterly incalculable ways, that it is in vain to poll the monitor in the breast on questions that do in fact arise daily--five hundred in a thousand will vote one way, and five hundred in another. "How would you like it yourself?" is a question that elicits the most discordant replies. I have a very positive feeling that I should have left many of these letters in the portfolio, or put them into the fire; but when I look about me for a standard which I could take in my hand to Mr. Napier, I am baffled--he might produce one of his own that would silence me on the spot. And when one has taken up a book to comment upon it with as little reserve as may be, it seems idle, if not Irish, to begin by saying that the most amusing or most fertile things in it ought never to have seen the light.