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 them, his frequently expressed conviction that their conversion would come too late was verified. He had also for many years advocated a measure of parliamentary reform, which would have transferred to the great centres of commerce and industry the seats of decayed and corrupt boroughs. In 1822 he had urged in a letter to Peel the necessity of dealing frankly with this question, and depriving the radicals of complaint against abuses in the parliamentary system which it was impossible to justify, and the outcry against which might force on measures that would prove in the end dangerous to the constitution. The advice was not taken; the democratic spirit which Croker dreaded spread far and fast, and he viewed with dismay the momentum which it received from the French revolution in 1830. When the Wellington ministry retired in November of that year, Croker at once resigned his office at the admiralty, which he had held for twenty-two years, his retirement drawing from Sir James Graham, the new first lord of the admiralty, an expression of regret ‘that the admiralty would no longer have the benefit of his brilliant talents and his faithful services.’ Although released from official life, Croker regarded the issues involved in the Reform Bill as so momentous that he felt bound actively to support the views of his party. Accordingly he threw himself with energy into the debates, and showed a fertility of resource, a copious mastery of facts, and a vigour of statement, which commanded, with one conspicuous exception, the admiration even of his opponents. That exception was Macaulay, who in himself illustrated the truth of his own remark, ‘How extravagantly unjust party spirit makes men!’ He came down to the House of Commons (22 Sept. 1831) with one of his elaborately prepared orations, in which he attacked the House of Lords, pointing to the downfall of the French nobility as a warning of what might result from a ‘want of sympathy with the people.’ Croker at once rose to reply, and argued upon the spur of the moment from the facts of the French revolutionary history that the analogy was baseless, and that it was weak concession and not resistance to popular clamour which had accelerated the downfall of the French noblesse. He carried the house with him. Macaulay's rhetoric was eclipsed, and a man of his egotistical temperament was not likely to forgive the defeat, or the contemptuous reference in Croker's speech to ‘vague generalities handled with that brilliant imagination which tickles the ear and amuses the fancy without satisfying the reason.’ This was not the first discomfiture in the House of Commons which Macaulay had sustained at Croker's hands. In several previous encounters he had come badly off. These defeats rankled, and it is now very obvious from Macaulay's published correspondence that something more than his professed reverence for his author had prompted him to attack Croker's elaborate edition of Boswell's ‘Life of Johnson’ in a recent number of the ‘Edinburgh’ with an asperity of which there are happily few examples in recent literary history. The book was in truth a monument of editorial industry and editorial skill, and enriched by a large amount of curious information, of which subsequent editors have not failed to avail themselves. Macaulay thought that he had, to use his own phrase, ‘smashed the book,’ and destroyed Croker's reputation as a literary man. Croker knew too well that his work would outlive any slashing article, even from Macaulay's hand, to give himself even the trouble of refuting the charges of inaccuracy. But this was done for him very effectively by his friend J. G. Lockhart, in one of the ‘Blackwood’ ‘Noctes Ambrosianæ,’ and the detailed answers to Macaulay's charges were so conclusive that they were subsequently reprinted along with these charges in the single volume popular edition of the book. The success of this refutation did not tend to make Macaulay think better of Croker, and he lost no opportunity of denouncing his literary incapacity. ‘He was,’ he says, ‘the most inaccurate writer that ever lived,’ ‘he was a man of very slender faculties,’ ‘he had nothing but italics and capitals as substitutes for eloquence and reason,’ ‘his morals, too, were as bad as his style,’ ‘he is a bad, a very bad man; a scandal to literature and to politics.’ Such phrases in the mouth of a man so eminent as Macaulay have naturally created prejudice against Croker in the minds of those who have neither cared nor been able to test their accuracy. But in truth they were little more than the ebullitions of a man who, by his own confession, was given to ‘saying a thousand wild and inaccurate things, and employing exaggerated expressions about persons and events,’ and who, moreover, according to his sister Margaret, ‘was very sensitive, and remembered long as well as felt deeply anything in the form of slight.’ Croker had during this session shown himself to be of so much importance to his party in parliament, that during the unsuccessful attempt to form a tory ministry in May 1832 Lord Lyndhurst represented to the Duke of Wellington, that it was absolutely necessary he should come into the cabinet. But Croker valued his own character for consistency too highly to enter