been put to a heavy strain; but he never departed from it, except in one instance, and then he showed how much Macaulay and his other enemies probably owed to his forbearance. He was in his 74th year, and the assailant was Lord John Russell. Mr. Croker had commented, in this Review,' with justifiable severity, on the disregard of private feeling and the rules of good taste, with which 'Moore's Diaries' had been edited by Lord John. Moore had owed much to Mr. Croker's kindness, and professed warm friendship for him to the last. There was proof positive in the published Diaries that, while pretending friendship to Mr. Croker, he was habitually vilifying him; but Mr. Croker did not allow personal feeling to interfere with his literary estimate of this, any more than of any other book. Stung by the censure of his share in the work, Lord John, in an evil hour for himself, appended a note to the sixth volume, in which, after saying that to Moore it was unnecessary to address a request to spare a friend,' he asked what would have been the result, if a request to spare Moore had been addressed to Croker? 'Probably,' he continued, while Moore was alive, and able to wield his pen, it might have been successful. Had Moore been dead, it would have served only to give additional zest to the pleasure of safe malignity.' Such an attack from such a quarter on Croker's moral character and personal honour at once brought the old man into the field in a letter to his assailant, published in the 'Times.' Lord John made a feeble reply, the main gist of which was, that he had suppressed some passages in the Diary still more offensive. This gave Croker an opportunity of driving home the charge against him of compromising Moore, while traducing the man who had believed Moore to be the friend he professed himself to be.

'There is another very serious consideration arising out of this surprising confession, which is, that for the purpose, I suppose, of attributing to yourself the gloriole of a generous delicacy towards me, as well as others, you sacrifice not only your argument, but the character of your poor friend, by revealing, what I never suspected, that during the many years in which he was living on apparently the most friendly terms with me, and asking,and receiving, and acknowledging such good offices, both consultative and practical, as my poor judgment and interest were able to afford him, he was making entries in his " Diary" concerning me so offensive," that even the political and partisan zeal of Lord Joha Russell shrank from reproducing them.

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'I must be allowed to say, under such strange circumstances, that I reject your Lordship's indulgence with contempt, and despise the menace, if it be meant for one, that you have such weapons in your sleeve; I not only dare you, but I condescend to entreat you to

publish all about me that you may have suppressed. Let me know the full extent of your crooked indulgence, and of Moore's undeviating friendship. Let us have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, while I am still living to avail myself of it. Let it not be said that " poor dear Moore" told such things of Croker that even Lord John Russell would not publish them. I feel pretty confident that there will not be found any entry of Moore's derogatory of me against which I shall not be able to produce his own contemporaneous evidence of a contrary tendency.'

'It would be useless for us,' Lord John rejoined, to attempt to persuade one another.' But Croker was not to be so silenced. I had no motive and no intention,' he replied, to persuade your Lordship to anything. I did not meddle with your opinions. I charged you with a gross and wilful offence against me. public is now the judge whether I have proved the charge.' And the verdict of the public was with Croker.

The

It was not, we believe, a zest for 'the pleasure of safe malignity,' but the incurable heedlessness of party malevolence, which induced Miss Martineau, in an article on the unhappy old man who has just departed,' which appeared in the Daily News' the day after Mr. Croker's death, and which, if we mistake not, has since been republished in her 'Political Sketches,' to write of him thus:-'When he had been staying at Drayton Manor, not long before Sir R. Peel's death, had been not only hospitably entertained, but kindly ministered to under his infir mities of deafness and bad health, and went home to cut up his host in a political article for the forthcoming "Quarterly," his fellow-guests at Drayton refused as long as possible to believe the article to be his.'

'There is not,' says Mr. Jennings (vol. iii. p. 93), 'a word of truth in this statement from beginning to end. Any one who was likely to be a guest at Drayton Manor knew perfectly well who wrote the articles in the Quarterly Review"; Peel himself knew; and Mr. Croker was not at Drayton Manor for several years prior to Peel's death.'

Indeed, all personal intercourse between them had ceased in 1846, nearly four years before that event, after a close and affectionate intimacy of thirty years, and for reasons which, as these volumes show, were certainly not otherwise than honourable to Mr. Croker.

The silence with which Mr. Croker's friends treated these and similar calumnies became no longer possible, when they were adopted and enforced by Mr. Trevelyan in his Life of Lord Macaulay,' published in 1876, and supported by extracts from Lord Macaulay's Letters and Diaries. The story of that

life, and the remarkable skill with which it was told by Mr. Trevelyan, made his book sure of a circulation as wide as that of Lord Macaulay's own works; and in no place could the misrepresentations it contained be more fitly met than in this Review,' with which Mr. Croker had been from its earliest days actively associated. With access to the documents which are included in the present volumes, it was an easy as well as grateful task to show how little either Lord Macaulay or his biographer knew of the man whom they had maligned. No attempt was made by Mr. Trevelyan to shake the vindication of Mr. Croker in the article to which we have referred, which appeared in the number of this 'Review' for July 1876. The task would indeed have been a hopeless one. But Macaulay's words have produced an unfair impression on innumerable minds, to which the true character of Croker can never be made known. That mischief can never be wholly undone; but those, at least who come with open minds to the perusal of the records brought together with great ability by Mr. Jennings in the present volumes, will not be likely to form such an estimate either of Mr. Croker's character or his abilities. The man who, without the advantage of family or fortune, early raised himself to the high official position which Mr. Croker maintained with distinction through a long series of years, and who won for himself the close friendship and respect of many of the men of whom the country was and is most proud, must have possessed faculties not slender,' even in comparison with those of Lord Macaulay. To the charge against his moral nature, his happy domestic life, his unblemished public character, the honour, love, obedience' of those with whom he worked, and the troops of friends' that surrounded him till his death, are a conclusive answer.

John Wilson Croker was born in Galway on the 20th of December, 1780. His father, John Croker, of an old Devonshire stock, was for many years Surveyor-General of Customs and Excise in Ireland, and is spoken of by Burke as a man of great abilities and most amiable manners, an able and upright public steward, and universally beloved and respected in private life.' His mother was the daughter of the Rev. R. Rathbone, of Galway. He was obviously a bright clever boy, and amiable also, if we are to credit Sheridan Knowles, to whose father's school in Cork young Croker was sent when very young, to be cured of a stutter, which he never entirely conquered. You were my dear mother's favourite,' Knowles wrote in 1865. 'She loved you for your constant good spirits and a cordial Vol. 158.-No. 316.

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