seem from recent decisions, to run further risk of being disafforested, and turned to private and selfish use. In France some progress has, we believe, already been made in establishing a college of arboriculture and forestry, at the instance of M. Baltet, the clever author of a volume on 'Grafting and Budding.' The school of Nancy, and that at Tharrand in Germany, might at any rate provoke this country to a peaceful rivalry. Had we space we might notice how ably this project has been broached in the second chapter of the Forester,' a work to which, along with those of Grigor, Prideaux Selby, and Mongredien, we have been greatly indebted in the foregoing remarks. But in earnest, matter-of-fact England, a hobby retains its favour and prestige all the more permanently, if it combines advantage and utility with more æsthetic and sensuous attractions. We have endeavoured to show how far this combination has been achieved, and how much farther it may yet be achieved, in the extension of the science of arboriculture; and the labour will not have been vain if it help in anywise to stimulate a redoubled zeal in planters, great and small, public and private, and such a fashion for planting both deciduous and coniferous trees as may wax stronger and more deeply-rooted continually,

'till Albion smile

One ample theatre of silvan grace.'

ART. III.-1. Boswell's Life of Johnson. Edited by the Right Hon. John Wilson Croker. New Edition. London, 1848. 2. Essays on the Early Period of the French Revolution. By the late Right Hon. John Wilson Croker. Reprinted from the 'Quarterly Review,' with additions and corrections. London, 1857.

AMONG the causes which make biography one of the most

difficult of literary efforts, is the grave and delicate responsibility which the writer of one man's life incurs towards the reputation of many others. The threads of human lives are so closely and marvellously intertwined, that none can be unravelled from the rest without destroying the pattern even of that one. This is a condition of our social existence: we neither live nor die alone, nor can the story of our lives be told alone. The biographer must needs fill in his canvas with the figures of those amongst whom the subject of his memoir moved and acted; and his successive pictures must show them in various relations to the chief figure, in attitudes which truth may

compel him to describe as friendly or hostile, generous or malevolent, noble or contemptible.

But, unless his pen be guided by a rare combination of discretion and of skill, he is in danger of feeling but a secondary sort of responsibility for his introduction and delineation of such characters; and he may draw them less as they were than as they appeared to the friend or hero whose steps he traces with admiring sympathy. In reproducing what is said of others in diaries and letters written with all the freedom of privacy, he may too often act like the manipulator of the lantern which casts upon the screen pictures painted by another hand, but also capable of being thrown into grotesque attitudes at the pleasure of the exhibitor.

Among the figures made to pass across the scene of Lord Macaulay's Life by his nephew-to the merits of which work we have borne testimony in another article-one of the most conspicuous, and, we must say at once, the most recklessly caricatured, is that of the Right Honourable JOHN WILSON CROKER. Adopting the full bitterness of a political and literary feud-political before it became literary-which formed one of the least amiable features of Lord Macaulay's life, Mr. Trevelyan is pleased to class Mr. Croker with 'Sadler and poor Robert Montgomery, and the other less eminent objects of his wrath'to whom Lord Ellenborough is added in the next sentence !who appear likely to enjoy just so much notoriety, and of such a nature, as he has thought fit to deal out to them in his pages.' This flippant judgment of a writer too young to remember those battles of giants on the Reform Bill, from which Macaulay, in the first flush of his parliamentary success, did not always come off victorious over his elder adversary,* may perhaps find its best excuse in the neglect of Mr. Croker's friends for his memory, while many men of less note in politics and letters have had their lives written in full.

His

Mr. Croker was the intimate and trusted friend of the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, consulted by them on the most important measures of state policy; and, when released from the restraints of office, he shone forth at once as one of the leading and most successful debaters in the House of Commons. literary works were numerous, and of a range which proved the breadth and variety of his attainments; while his special knowledge of the most momentous chapter of contemporary history, the great French Revolution, was marked by the same vast scope and keen minuteness which characterised Macaulay. His con

* In 1831 Macaulay was thirty-one years old; Croker was fifty-one.

tributions

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tributions to this 'Review' extended over nearly half a century, from 1809 to 1854. On us, therefore, the duty is imperatively incumbent to redeem his memory from being handed down as a mere victim of Macaulay's affected contempt and unaffected fury; as a poor example of that unduly severe fate of those who crossed his path in the years when his blood was hot,' which, as Mr. Trevelyan confesses, 'teaches a serious lesson on the responsibilities of genius.'

Unfortunately the apology is inadequate; for one of the worst of those offences against good feeling and good taste was committed in Macaulay's mature age, and at the crisis when he had reached a height of renown which might have disposed him to generous forbearance. But, while nobly conspicuous for some forms of generosity, Macaulay's nature was utterly wanting in forbearance, or even common fairness, towards opponents. Of this we need no other evidence than what he and his biographer themselves supply. His own confession is recorded with a frankness which, while doing honour to himself, should have made his nephew very cautious in publishing the free expressions found in his diary and letters. If I say,' he writes in one of his letters, as I know I do, a thousand wild and inaccurate things, and employ exaggerated expressions about persons or events, it is . . . because I have no objection to letting you see my mind in dishabille.'* Mr. Trevelyan confesses Macaulay's faults of vehemence, over-confidence, the inability to recognize that there are two sides to a question or two people to a dialogue; and adds, at college his friends used to tell him that his leading qualities were generosity and vindictiveness.'

If Macaulay's frank avowal, repeated elsewhere, of unreserve in his letters ought to have taught caution in their use, much more, on Mr. Trevelyan's own showing, should the like caution have been observed in dealing with the notices in his private diary. 'It must be remembered that whatever was in Macaulay's mind may be found in his diary. That diary was written, throughout, with the unconscious candour of a man who freely and frankly notes down remarks which he expects to be read by himself alone.' To this is added Macaulay's own judgment on Moore's diary, that it was written to be published, and this destroys the charm proper to diaries.'t Mr. Trevelyan's inference, that the extracts presented in these volumes possess those qualities in which, as he has himself pronounced, the special merit of a private journal lies,' may be the very reverse of a justification for making certain entries in that private journal public; espe

* Macaulay's 'Life,' vol. i. p. 104.

↑ Ibid. vol. ii. p. 242.

cially its wild and inaccurate' and 'exaggerated expressions about persons or events,' which can only lower the reputation of the writer, and give pain to those of whom he writes, if living, and still more pain to those who love and honour them, alive or dead. With what feelings must Mr. Croker's widow, and his adopted daughter, Lady Barrow, both of whom are alive, have read the following passage from the diary of 1849? The allusion is to a review in our pages of the first two volumes of Macaulay's "History of England.'

'April 13.-To the British Museum. I looked over the Travels of the Duke of Tuscany, and found the passage the existence of which Croker denies. His blunders are really incredible. The article has been received with general contempt. Really Croker has done me a great service. I apprehended a strong reaction, the natural effect of such a success; and, if hatred had left him free to use his very slender faculties to the best advantage, he might have injured me much. He should have been large in acknowledgment; should have taken a mild and expostulatory tone; and should have looked out for real blemishes, which, as I too well know, he might easily have found. Instead of that, he has written with such rancour as to make everybody sick. I could almost pity him. But he is a bad, a very bad man: a scandal to politics and to letters.'-vol. ii. p. 259.

Does Mr. Trevelyan think that Lord Macaulay's fame will be enhanced by publishing to the world such a rancorous tirade? This outburst of spleen is the climax, and happily the last known expression of that feud which, begun in the party conflicts of the House, was wantonly transferred to the serener region of letters by Macaulay's well-known article in the Edinburgh Review,' on Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson. Macaulay's republication of the article in his collected Essays may perhaps have made it difficult for his biographer to have taken the wisest course, and buried the quarrel in oblivion; but at least, for the sake of Macaulay's reputation, it should have been touched as lightly as possible. Not thus has Mr. Trevelyan judged his duty alike to his relative and to Mr. Croker, as well as to the surviving friends of both. He pursues Mr. Croker's memory with the vindictiveness which died with the distinguished man whom once it moved, but which is brought to life again in a biography that will be read wherever Lord Macaulay's works are known and admired, that is to say, over all the world.

Mr. Trevelyan's error, grave as it is, has acquired fresh prominence from the still graver indiscretion of another. A writer in the last number of the Edinburgh Review,'* not content with

No. 292, p. 573.

quoting

quoting the specially offensive passage of Macaulay's diary, uses it to stir up a quarrel with us :

From that day to this, the same Journal has never lost an opportunity of launching shafts against the literary reputation of Lord Macaulay. Mr. Croker is dead, but the race of Crokers is not extinct, nor is it likely to expire as long as the principal organ of the Tory party sedulously keeps it alive.'

Imputations of this kind admit of no reply. They may safely be left to the calm judgment of society. We only notice them in so far as they affect Mr. Croker's memory and character.

it is not Mr. Croker alone who is attacked: the chief leaders of the Tory party, as well as their 'principal organ,' are involved in the same sweeping and uncompromising charge of having encouraged and co-operated with a bad, a very bad man, a scandal to politics and to letters;' and the Quarterly Review' has aggravated the scandal by sedulously keeping alive the race'!

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'Mr. Croker is dead'a fact which might have suggested other thoughts than the wanton reiteration of false and scandalous charges against his memory. We accept the challenge to show what manner of man he really was. He left no progeny, few of his friends survive, and it is full time that the work were done before the rest are gone.

John Wilson Croker, the son of John Croker and Hester, daughter of the Rev. R. Rathbone, was born in Galway on the 20th of December, 1780. It would be sufficient for the purpose of a personal record simply to state that he was a person of gentle blood, winning his way to fame and fortune with the ordinary aid of a good education; but it is necessary to enter a little more into detail in order to correct the falsehoods in the political pasquinades published in 1809, the year in which he was appointed Secretary of the Admiralty. In the true spirit of the democratic press his supposed low birth was charged against him as a crime; he is described as a man of 'no family,' a low-bred Irish attorney,' and the son of a 'country gauger.' The fact is that his father filled for many years the important office of Surveyor-General both of Customs and Excise in Ireland, and by his activity and energy detected and suppressed much peculation in his extensive department. According to Edmund Burke, he was 'a man of great abilities and most amiable manners, an able and upright public steward, and universally respected and beloved in private life.' He was descended from an old English family settled for many generations at Lineham in South Devon. A cadet of this family distinguished himself greatly at the capture