view_. I have long seen
it. Their fury against the article in the last number knows no
bounds, and they will never cease till they worry you out of your
connection with me, and get the whole control of the Review into
their own hands, by forcing you to resign it yourself. A _party
and a personal_ engine is all they want to make it. What possible
right can any of these silly slaves have to object to my opinion
being--what it truly is--against the Holland House theory of Lord
Chatham's madness? I _know_ that Lord Grenville treated it with
contempt. I know others now living who did so too, and I know that
so stout a Whig as Sir P. Francis was clearly of that opinion, and
he knew Lord Chatham personally. I had every ground to believe
that Horace Walpole, a vile, malignant, and unnatural wretch,
though a very clever writer of Letters, was nine-tenths of the
Holland House authority for the tale. I knew that a baser man in
character, or a meaner in capacity than the first Lord Holland
existed not, even in those days of job and mediocrity. Why, then,
was I bound to take a false view because Lord Holland's family
have inherited his hatred of a great rival?"

Another instance is as follows:--

"I solicit your best attention to the fate which seems hastening
upon the _Edinburgh Review_. The having always been free from the
least control of booksellers is one of its principal distinctions,
and long was peculiarly so--perhaps it still has it _nearly_ to
itself. But if it shall become a _Treasury_ journal, I hardly see
any great advantage in one kind of independence without the
rest. Nay, I doubt if its _literary_ freedom, any more than its
political, will long survive. Books will be treated according as
the Treasury, or their under-strappers, regard the authors....
But, is it after all possible that the Review should be suffered
to sink into such a state of subserviency that it dares not insert
any discussion upon a general question of politics because it
might give umbrage to the Government of the day? I pass over the
undeniable fact that it is _underlings_ only whom you are scared
by, and that the Ministers themselves have no such inordinate
pretension as to dream of interfering. I say nothing of those
underlings generally, except this, that I well know the race, and
a more despicable, a