The Sun.
London, England, 1855-10-18 00:00:00

LITERATURE.

Speeches of the Bight Flonourable T. B. Macaulay,
M.P. Corrected by himself. Longman and
Company.

It is tolerably well known by this title that the
authentic edition of the " Speeches"-ok. Macaulay
appears before us in this goodly tome, published
by the Longmans, and that the spurious edition
had been previously issued from the press, in two
volumes, by Vizetelly. The appearance of the
latter unauthorised publication, it will be remem-
bered, elicited the work now before us—a work
compiled and printed under the author's own per-
sonal supervision. To the scarcely justifiable en-
terprise of Mr. Vizetelly,. therefore, the English
public are, in a manner, directly indebted for these
538 pages, " corrected" by the hand of the orator
himself ; the hand grudgingly so employed by one
who is at once the most brilliant and the most
fastidious of living rhetoricians. Wherefore, if
Macaulay, as the intellectual fabricator of these
speeches, can quarrel with the printer and pub-
lisher of the first, and it seems wholly unauthorised
collection of them, we can with difficulty find it in
our hearts to cavil at a proceeding which, how-
ever blameworthy in the abstract, has been to our-
selves, and the rest of the community, the imme-
diate source of what we are fain to regard as little
else than a literary benefaction. In his caustic and
blighting preface—(pp. vii.—xiii.)—Mr. Macaulay
has himself acknowledged that, but for the appear-
ance of the two volumes printed by a " bookseller
named Vizetelly," he should " never have done
willingly" what he has now in the work under no-
tice actually accomplished. He would never have
been tempted, that is to say, otherwise than " most
reluctantly" to suspend a work which he tenderly
speaks of as "the business and pleasure" of his
life, for the purpose of preparing his collected
" Speeches" for publication. Thanks to the some-
what questionable undertaking of Mr. Vizetelly,
we have at length reason to congratulate ourselves
on the opportunity thus, as it were by a distressful
necessity, afforded us of welcoming from the press
of the Messrs. Longman, an accurate version of the
speeches of the Right Hon. T. B. Macaulay—
corrected by himself—and in this tnanner submitted
in this perfected form to the judgment of posterity,
after having been placed in that same shape within
the ken 'of the admiration of the orator's own con-
temporaries. While Mr. Macaulay may regret the
circumstances which have led to this result, we
can, in a selfish point of view, regard them for the
most part with a sort of morbid satisfaction. For
—we repeat it—but for Mr. Vizetelly's unauthor-
ised proceedings we should in all human probabi-
lity have remained without any substantial copy
whatever, correct or incorrect, of the same re-
markable "Speeches"—and this be it observed,
once more, on Mr. Macaulay's own acknowledg-
ment. While, however, the printer and pub-
lisher of the first (notoriously spurious) edi-
tion of these speeches has thus added a new
treasure to the intellectual stores amassed in
the library of the lettered Englishman, he has
been compelled to pay the penalty of his rashness
by bearing the brunt of an onslaught more deadly

and withering of its kind than any unfortunate
wight has been driven to endure since the days
when the same merciless tomahawk fell, crashing,
upon the sconce now of Mr. Wilson Croker, and now
of Mr. Robert Montgomery, in the blue and yellow
bits of the grimly old Edinburgh. It must be con-
fessed, however, by the admirers of the genius of
Mr. Macaulay, whether, as an orator, or as an
essayist, as historian or as astatesman, that in the
instance before us the fary of the attack is so far
disproportioned, both to the object of it and to the
occasion in which it originated, that even the blow
dealt reveals unmistakeably that the wielder of this
pitiless weapon of vituperation had firmly lost his
temper before the onslaught can be said scarcely
to have commenced. The preface breathes from
first to last the language of ttcornful indignation.
In it the Great Author condescends in his wrath
to personal scurrilities, stigmatising a bookseller,
named Vizetelly, as one " who seems to aspire to
that sort of distinction which Carell enjoyed a hun-
dred and twenty years ago." Carell, the scavenger
of publishers, who mingled rapacity and mendacity
in his character as a sort of literary pick-
pocket and social chiffoniers were delineated
not long since with such incomparable humour by
the dramatic pencil of Lytton, to be afterwards im-
personated with such inimitable skill by the histri-
onic genius of Dickens. To return to "a book-
seller name Vizetelly "—he is described by the
irate orator, whose " Speeches" he is charged with
having thus flagitiously pirated, as a publisher who
has been guilty of a "gross fraud," and as an editor
who has shown himself " grossly ignorant." He is
indirectly spoken of as a person without " the
smallest regard for truth," and directly accused as a
man altogether " unprincipled." The fact is, unfor-
tunately, as we have before remarked, Mr. Macau-
lay lost his temper before his pen was well between
his thumb and forefinger—he forgot everything
like self-command before the nib of his goosequill
was well dipped in the standish. He writes, there-
fore, as one not merely irritated but infuriated.
The fact of his having done so is in every way to
be regretted. It is to be especially regretted, in-
asmuch as it is wholly unworthy of our great
Orator-Essayist-Historian-Statesman. It is un-
worthy of his dignity, and entirely beyond what
seems to have been called for by the actual circum-
stances. Other orators before Mr. Macaulay, we
cannot but conjecture, have had their speeches col-
lected together without their sanction or superintend-
ence. Ile is by no means the first so treated. He will
probably not bo the last. Neither has it remained
for him to complain as of an unexampled offence,
of having had his spoken words extravagantly mis-
represented. In an expostulatory letter pretty
generally circulated by the object of Mr. Macau-
lay's ridicule and indignation, it has been denied
boldly enough, but at the same time with the pet-
tiest sneer (considering who is the orator and
statesman here under consideration) that Mr.
Macaulay has any right to " enjoy an immunity
which (observes Mr. Vizetelly, somewhat spite-
fully) has never yet been claimed for greater
orators or more distinguished statesmen." Truth
to tell there are excuses and errors on both sides :
on the part of Mr. Vizetelly, indeed, worse than
mere errors—rather, we should say, very flagrant
culpability. It is unquestionable, of course, that
other orators before the time of Mr. Macaulay have
been subjected by unscrupulous booksellers to the
misery of seeing their "speeches" appropriated by
a sort of wholesale piracy intangible to the grasp of
the law—so that, as we have said, of any such
mendacious appropriation Mr. Macaulay can
scarcely complain as of some altogether unexam-
pled injustice. What appears to us to have been
peculiarly exceptionable in the instance of the two
volumes published by Mr. Vizetelly is the fact of
the latter person having announced, if we recollea
rightly, both upon title-page and through adver-
tisements, that his edition was formally given to
the world by " special licence"—the work itself, on
the contrary, being (as is now notorious) altogether
unauthorised. It appeared, on the contrary, as
Mr. Macaulay tells us in so many words, without
any notice having been given to him, and without,
of course, his consent having been asked. Yet its
adventurous printer had the hardihood to proclaim
it to be issued from the press by "special licence."
This is the " head and front" of Mr. Vizetelly's
offending. Beyond which we cannot but conceive
he renders himself directly answerable for the ad-
ditional " atrocity" of making his pirated orator
talk nonsense—Mr. Vizetely, we say, renders him-
self, to our thinking, personally responsible for. this
supplementary injustice to Mr. Macaulay, by rea-
son of the very statement since put forth, in the
circular letter already mentioned, with a view to
his exculpation from the heinous charge of editor-
ship. "Extravagant blunders are put into my
mouth in almost every page," exclaims Mr. Ma-
caulay, in tones of anguish, adding, in regard to
these blunders—" I could fill a volume with in-
stancesn of the injustice with which I have been
treated." In justification of which assertions, t
orator, therefore, instances four monstrous
all
—" grave faults of substance," he calls
. P.
ekinneisfora
" lying within the compass of seven or eight Pages,
flaws introduced in the course of one solitary ora-
tion I Thereupon the offending.bc!
okselle
has r very
Only SUC-
flip-
pantly insinuates that his vi
ficetwel2onths in point-
ceeded " after an interval of five :ueh a display of in-
ing out just four errors"
glihcit earnestyof
f tinhuep
dignation. DisingeniouScrluiteanlytips
errorsrto te
bs
et
allowed, after Mr. Macaulay.
after he
against the magnitude and mu
scattered throughout the two volumes—after
indignantly (p. xii.) "as to
ay hardly one sentence
has remarked
faults of syntax an
tefreuey firso mt hanxious'em But this is not
all. in a hunrdrevdizise
to repudiate the
M" • being editor
notion of his of this unauthorised
Macaul '
M a. y 8
version of Speeches. He does not
appear in the transaction
arehe protests, as his Pari-
sian brethHren accustomed to do, upon the title-
p,
geS. nameis
is Visible in the affair, not in
any way as editeur or gerant, but simply as printer
and publisher. Yet in proclaiming this in
rebuttal of the high crime and misdemean-
our of editorship,
together with all its con-
sequent responsibilities, Mr. Vizetelly actu-
ally blunders out the acknowledgment that " With-
out professing anything of the kind, I certainty did
correct many errors which in my capacity as printer
I noticed while reading through the proofs of my
own editor for the press : but because I made those
corrections Ido not see that I am to be held respon-
sible for the four other errors which after an inter-
val_ of four months," &c., &c. Wonderful ! So
that Mr. Vizetelly, while speaking of the work a
his own edition, and avowing that he certainly did
illa
correct many' error's, during th• inta _ irluca