bove all, in point of judgment, exists not.
Never mind their threats, they _can_ do no harm. Even if any of
them are contributors, be assured they never will withdraw because
you choose to keep your course free and independent."

Mr. Napier, who seems to have been one of the most considerate and
high-minded of men, was moved to energetic remonstrance on this
occasion. Lord Brougham explained his strong language away, but he
was incapable of really controlling himself, and the strain was never
lessened until 1843, when the correspondence ceases, and we learn
that there had been a quarrel between him and his too long-suffering
correspondent. Yet John Allen,--that able scholar and conspicuous
figure in the annals of Holland House--wrote of Brougham to Mr.
Napier:--"He is not a malignant or bad-hearted man, but he is an
unscrupulous one, and where his passions are concerned or his vanity
irritated, there is no excess of which he is not capable." Of
Brougham's strong and manly sense, when passion or vanity did not
cloud it, and even of a sort of careful justice, these letters give
more than one instance. The _Quarterly Review_, for instance, had an
article on Romilly's Memoirs, which to Romilly's friends seemed to do
him less than justice. Brougham took a more sensible view.

"Surely we had no right whatever to expect that they whom Romilly
had all his life so stoutly opposed, and who were treated by him
with great harshness, should treat him as his friends would do,
and at the very moment when a most injudicious act of his family
was bringing out all his secret thoughts against them. Only place
yourself in the same position, and suppose that Canning's private
journals had been published,--the journals he may have kept while
the bitterest enemy of the Whigs, and in every page of which there
must have been some passage offensive to the feelings of the
living and of the friends of the dead. Would any mercy have been
shown to Canning's character and memory by any of the Whig party,
either in society or in Reviews? Would the line have been drawn of
only attacking Canning's executors, who published the papers, and
leaving Canning himself untouched? Clearly and certainly not,
and yet I am putting a very much weaker case, for we had joined
Canning, and all political enmity was at an end: whereas the
Tories and Romilly never had for an hour laid aside t