“You can probably tell me how I could transmit a copy of Kehama to your friend Leyden, for whom, though I do not personally know him, I have always felt a very high respect, regarding him, with one only exception (which might be more properly expressed to any person than to you,) as a man of more true genius and far higher promise than any of his contemporary countrymen.
“No doubt you have seen Pasley’s Essay. It will be, in the main, a book after your own heart, as it
is after mine. He talks sometimes of conquest when he should talk of
emancipation. A system of unlimited conquest leads at last to the consequences
which we have seen exemplified in the fate of the Roman empire. For ourselves,
I would wish no other accession of dominion than Danish Zealand and Holland in
the North, with as many islands as you please in the Mediterranean; Italy to be
formed into one independent state under our protection, as long as it needed
it. I believe, that the Ministry do not want the inclination to act vigorously;
but they want public opinion to go before and protect them against the
opposition. These men, and their coadjutors, the Morning Chronicle and the Edinburgh Review, have neither patriotism, nor
principle, nor feeling, nor shame, to stand in their way. They go on predicting
the total conquest of the Peninsula, with as much effrontery as if they had not
predicted it two
| 308 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 36. |
“Longman’s new Review will interfere with the Quarterly; and so far as it succeeds, so far will it prevent the extension of our sale. I have not learnt who are the proprietors of it,—not Longman himself, for he wrote to me some eight or ten weeks ago, wishing me to bear a part in it, and giving me to understand that it was set on foot by some independent M.Ps., so at least I understood his language. Of course I returned a refusal, upon the ground of my previous connection with the Quarterly. They have set out better than we did, though they have a considerable portion of heavy matter, and their first article ought to have been in a very different tone.
