The following announcement was published by Mr. Disraeli in reply to certain criticisms of his work:
"I cannot allow myself to omit certain observations of my able critic without remarking that those omissions are occasioned by no insensibility to their acuteness.
"Circumstances of paramount necessity render it quite impossible that anything can proceed from my pen hostile to the general question of Reform.
"Independent however of all personal considerations, and viewing the question of Reform for a moment in the light in which my critic evidently speculates, I would humbly suggest that the cause which he advocates would perhaps be more united in the present pages by being passed over in silence. It is important that this work should be a work not of party but of national interest, and I am induced to believe that a large class in this country, who think themselves bound to support the present administration from a superficial sympathy with their domestic measures, have long viewed their foreign policy with distrust and alarm.
"If the public are at length convinced that Foreign Policy, instead of being an abstract and isolated division of the national interests, is in fact the basis of our empire and present order, and that this basis shakes under the unskilful government of the Cabinet, the public may be induced to withdraw their confidence from that Cabinet altogether.
"With this exception, I have adopted all the additions and alterations that I have yet had the pleasure of seeing without reserve, and I seize this opportunity of expressing my sense of their justness and their value.
"The Author of 'Gallomania.'" [Footnote: Several references are made to "Contarini Fleming" and "Gallomania" in "Lord Beaconsfield's Letters to his Sister," published in 1887.]
The next person whom we shall introduce to the reader was one who had but little in common with Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, except that, like him, he had at that time won little of that world-wide renown which he was afterwards to achieve. This "writer of books," as he described himself, was no other than Thomas Carlyle, who, when he made the acquaintance of Mr. Murray, had translated Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister," written the "Life of Schiller," and several articles in the Reviews; but was not yet known as a literary man of mark. He was living among the bleak, bare moors of Dumfriesshire at Craigenputtock, where he was consoled at times by visits from Jeffrey and Emerson, and by letters from Goethe, and where he wrote that strange and rhapsodical book "Sartor Resartus," containing a considerable portion of his own experience. After the MS. was nearly finished, he wrapt it in a piece of paper, put in it his pocket, and started for Dumfries, on his way to London.
Mr. Francis Jeffrey, then Lord Advocate, recommended Carlyle to try Murray, because, "in spite of its radicalism, he would be the better publisher." Jeffrey wrote to Mr. Murray on the subject, without mentioning Carlyle's name:
Mr. Jeffrey to John Murray. May I, 1831.