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tions, I, 74.

the period. If at an earlier date the Quarterly Review mercilessly

attacked Keats and Leigh Hunt, at a later period the Saturday

Review turned its gunson all thingsAmerican. If Macaulay found that Croker's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson had “ greatly

disappointed ” him ; that it was “ ill compiled, ill arranged, ill written, and ill printed;" if “ nothing in the work has astonished [him ] so much as the ignorance or carelessness of Mr. Croker with respect to facts and dates ;" if he insists that the editor " shows almost as much ignorance and heedlessness in his criti cismsas in his statements concerning facts;" if he laments that performed in the most capricious manner ;" 27 Macaulay learned later that Croker's memory was a long one. He found, in his turn, that Mr. Croker's hope of enjoying " unalloyed the pleasures reasonably to be expected from Mr. Macaulay's high powers both of research and illustration ” “ has been deceived ;" that

Macaulay's History of England 28 was “ full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy ;' that " there is hardly a page that does

not contain something objectionable either in substance or in

color;" that it is “ impregnated to a really marvellous degree with bad taste, bad feeling, and ” he is under the painful neces sity ofadding - bad faith ;” and that “ Mr.Macaulay's pages are as copious a repertorium of vituperative eloquence as our lan

guage can produce.” Macaulay has explained through forty pages why Croker 's work has “ greatly disappointed ” him and Croker explains in eighty pages why his “ hope has been de

ceived ." Such were the amenities of literary criticism in the Edinburgh

and the Quarterly in the censorious “ thirties ” and “ forties.” Well may a publisher of many such reviews cry out in despair when writing of the “ Magazine which has involved every one

connected with it in alternate anxiety, disgrace, and misery .” 29 Contemporary criticism in America was scarcely more amicable 27 Edinburgh Review, September, 1831, 54: 1 -38.

28 Quarterly Review, March, 1849, 84 : 549-630. 29 John Murray, Letter to Thomas Blackwood, Mrs. Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House, I, 173.

R. B. Johnson, in Famous Reviews, pp. xi-xii, has collected some of the most caustic criticisms of criticism and