Sir James excuses himself in this fashion:-- "I know that many of your contributors must be importunate for a place; that you must be fencing and compromising at a weary rate; that there are many interests of the passing day which you could not overlook; and that we should all have growled like so many fasting bears if denied the regular return of the Macaulay diet, to which we have been so long accustomed." Sir James was an exceedingly busy man, and he was not professedly a man of letters like Macaulay; but we may, if we like, read between the lines in these excuses and find a little pique there, as well as a just sense of an editor's difficulties. Another point which lies broadly and prominently upon the surface in these letters is a very unpleasant one. It is scarcely credible how much dull conceit and sheer ignorant arbitrariness there often is in the minds of able and cultivated men. It does not seem even to occur to them that their own range may be limited, and their judgments upon many (or even a few) topics not worth ink or breath. It should hardly be offensive to an ordinary man to be told, or at least to find it tacitly assumed, that he could not have invented fluxions, painted like Rembrandt, or sung like Pindar. Why, then, should it be difficult for any cultivated specialist, of more than ordinary faculties, to make the reflection that he must be deficient in some direction or other? Yet we find in practice that it is not only difficult, but impossible, in the majority of cases. Mr. Napier seems to have invited, or at all events not to have repelled, free criticisms on his Review from the contributors in general, and the outcome is little short of appalling. If ever there was an able man it was Mr. Senior, yet these are the terms in which he allows himself to speak of an article on Christopher North--or rather of Christopher North himself:--"The article on Christopher North is my abomination. I think him one of the very worst of the clever bad writers who infest modern literature; full of bombast, affectation, conceit, in short, of all the _vitia_, _tristia_, as well as _dulcia_. I had almost as soon try to read Carlyle or Coleridge." Now Mr. Senior was, of course, entitled to dislike Christopher North, and there is plenty to be said against him in the way of criticism; but the charge of "affectation" is foolish, and the whole passage pitched in the most detestable of all literary key-notes. John Wilson was a man of genius, whose personal likings and rampant animal spirits led him most mournfully astray. He was wanting also in love of truth for its own sake; but he was as much superior to Mr. Senior as Shakspeare was to _him_. And the addition about Carlyle or Coleridge--_or_ Coleridge!--is just the gratuitous insolence of one-eyed dulness. There is enough and to spare of blame ready in any balanced mind for either of these great writers, but they can do without the admiration of wooden-headed prigs,