London: January 9, 1832.
Dear Napier,—I have been so much engaged by bankrupt business, as we are winding up the affairs of many estates, that I shall not be able to send off my article about Hampden till Thursday the 12th. It will be, I fear, more than forty pages long. As Pascal said of his eighteenth letter, I would have made it shorter if I could have kept it longer. You must indulge me, however; for I seldom offend in that way.
It is in part a narrative. This is a sort of composition which I have never yet attempted. You will tell me, I am sure with sincerity, how you think that I succeed in it. I have said as little about Lord Nugent's book as I decently could.
Ever yours
T. B. M.
London: January 19, 1832.
Dear Napier,—I will try the Life of Lord Burleigh, if you will tell Longman to send me the book. However bad the work may be, it will serve as a heading for an article on the times of Elizabeth. On the whole, I thought it best not to answer Croker. Almost all the little pamphlet which he published, (or rather printed, for I believe it is not for sale,) is made up of extracts from Blackwood; and I thought that a contest with your grog-drinking, cock-fighting, cudgel-playing Professor of Moral Philosophy would be too degrading. I could have demolished every paragraph of the defence. Croker defended his thuetoi philoi by quoting a passage of Euripides which, as every scholar knows, is corrupt; which is nonsense and false metre if read as he reads it; and which Markland and Matthiae have set right by a most obvious correction. But, as nobody seems to have read his vindication, we can gain nothing by refuting it. ["Mr. Croker has favoured us with some Greek of his own. 'At the altar,' say Dr. Johnson. 'I recommended my th ph.' 'These letters,' says the editor, (which Dr. Strahan seems not to have understood,) probably mean departed friends.' Johnson was not a first-rate Greek scholar; but he knew more Greek than most boys when they leave school; and no schoolboy could venture to use the word thuetoi in the sense which Mr. Croker ascribes to it without imminent danger of a flogging."—Macaulay's Review of Croker's Boswell.]
Ever yours
T. B. MACAULAY. [ [!-- H2 anchor --] ]