shall go. However, a few days will decide
the matter.

I have heard from Napier. He praises my article on Walpole in terms
absolutely extravagant. He says that it is the best that I ever
wrote; and, entre nous, I am not very far from agreeing with him. I
am impatient to have your opinion. No flattery pleases me so much as
domestic flattery. You will have the Number within the week.

Ever yours

T. B. M

To Macvey Napier, Esq.

London: October 21, 1833.

Dear Napier,--I am glad to learn that you like my article. I like it
myself; which is not much my habit. Very likely the public, which has
often been kinder to my performances than I was, may on this, as on
other occasions, differ from me in opinion. If the paper has any merit,
it owes it to the delay of which you must, I am sure, have complained
very bitterly in your heart. I was so thoroughly dissatisfied with the
article, as it stood at first, that I completely re-wrote it; altered
the whole arrangement; left out ten or twelve pages in one part; and
added twice as many in another. I never wrote anything so slowly as the
first half, or so rapidly as the last half.

You are in an error about Akenside, which I must clear up for his
credit, and for mine. You are confounding the Ode to Curio and the
Epistle to Curio. The latter is generally printed at the end of
Akenside's works, and is, I think, the best thing that he ever wrote.
The Ode is worthless. It is merely an abridgment of the Epistle executed
in the most unskilful way. Johnson says, in his Life of Akenside, that
no poet ever so much mistook his powers as Akenside when he took to
lyric composition. "Having," I think the words are, "written with great
force and poignancy his Epistle to Curio, he afterwards transformed it
into an Ode only disgraceful to its author." ["Akenside was one of
the fiercest and the most uncompromising of the young patriots out of
Parliament. When he found that the change of administration had produced
no change of system, he gave vent to his indignation in the 'Epistle to
Curio,' the best poem that he ever wrote; a poem, indeed, which seems to
indicate that, if he had left lyrical composition to Cray and Collins,
and had employed his powers in grave and elevated satire, he might have
disputed the pre-eminence of Dryden." This passage occurs in Macaulay's
Essay on Horace Walpole. In the course of the same Essay, Macaulay
remarks that "Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the esti