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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



poison life — even if there were no other — and this 

 is disorderly manuscript. Eoipson, Mr. Napier's 

 well-known contributor, was one of the worst 

 offenders ; he would never even take the trouble 

 to mark his paragraphs. I have the misfortune 

 to have a manuscript before me at this moment 

 that would fill thirty of these pages, and yet from 

 beginning to end there is no indication that it is 

 not to be read at a single breath. The paragraph 

 ought to be, and in all good writers it is, as real 

 and as sensible a division as the sentence. It is 

 an organic member in prose composition with a 

 beginning, a middle, and an end, just as a stanza 

 is an organic and definite member in the compo- 

 sition of an ode. " I fear my manuscript is rather 

 disorderly," says another, " but I will correct 

 carefully in print." Just so. Because he is too 

 heedless to do his work in a workmanlike way, 

 he, first, inflicts fatigue and vexation on the edi- 

 tor whom he expects to read bis paper; second, 

 he inflicts considerable and quite needless expense 

 on the publisher ; and, thirdly, he inflicts a great 

 deal of tedious and thankless labor on the print- 

 ers, who are for the most part far more merito- 

 rious persons than fifth-rate authors. It is true 

 that Burke returned such disordered proofs that 

 the printer usually found it least troublesome to 

 set the whole afresh ; and Miss Martineau tells a 

 story of a Scotch compositor who fled from Edin- 

 burgh to avoid a great living author's manuscript, 

 and to his horror was presently confronted with 

 a piece of copy which made him cry, " Lord have 

 mercy ! Have you got that man to print for ! " 

 But most editors will cheerfully forgive such 

 transgressions to all contributors who will guar- 

 antee that they write as well as Burke or Carlyle. 

 Alas ! it is usually the case that those who have 

 least excuse are the worst offenders. The sloven- 

 liest manuscripts come from persons to whom the 

 difference between an hour and a minute is of the 

 very smallest importance. This, however, is a 

 digression, only to be excused partly by the natu- 

 ral desire to say a word against one's persecutors, 

 and partly by a hope that some persons of sensi- 

 tive conscience may be led to ponder whether 

 there may not be, after all, some moral obliga- 

 tions even toward editors and printers. 



Mr. Napier had one famous contributor, who 

 stands out alone in the history of editors. Lord 

 Brougham's traditional connection with the Re- 

 view — he had begun to write either in its first or 

 third number, and had written in it ever since — 

 his encyclopedic ignorance, his power, his great 

 fame in the country, and the prestige which his 

 connection reflected on the Review, all made him 



a personage with whom it would have been most 

 imprudent to quarrel. Yet the position in which 

 Mr. Napier was placed, after Brougham's breach 

 with the Whigs, was one of the most difficult in 

 which the conductor of a great organ could pos- 

 sibly be placed. The Review was the representa- 

 tive, the champion, and the mouth-piece, of the 

 Whig party, aDd of the Whigs who were in office. 

 Before William IV. dismissed the Whigs in 1834 

 as arbitrarily as his father had dismissed the 

 Whigs in 1784, Brougham had covered himself 

 with disrepute among his party by a thousand 

 pranks, and after the dismissal he disgusted them 

 by asking the new Chancellor to make him Chief 

 Baron of the Exchequer. When Lord Melbourne 

 returned to power in the following year, this and 

 other escapades were remembered against him. 

 " If left out," said Lord Melbourne, " he would 

 indeed be dangerous ; but, if taken in, he would 

 simply be destructive." So Brougham was left 

 out, Pepys was made Chancellor, and the premier 

 compared himself to a man who has broken with 

 a termagant mistress and married the best of 

 cooks. Mr. Napier was not so happy. The ter- 

 magant was left on his hands. He had to keep 

 terms with a contributor who hated with a deadly 

 hatred the very Government that the Review ex- 

 isted to support. No editor ever had such a con- 

 tributor as Brougham in the long history of edi- 

 torial torment since the world began. He scolds, 

 he storms, he hectors, he lectures ; he is forever 

 threatening desertion and prophesying ruin ; he 

 exhausts the vocabulary of opprobrium against 

 his correspondent's best friends ; they are silly 

 slaves, base traitors, a vile clique "whose treat- 

 ment of me has been the very ne plus ultra of in- 

 gratitude, baseness, and treachery." He got the 

 Revievt and its editor into a scrape which shook 

 the world at the time (1834), by betraying cabi- 

 net secrets to spite Lord Durham. His cries 

 against his adversaries are as violent as the 

 threats of Ajax in his tent, and as loud as the 

 bellowings of Philoctetes at the mouth of his 

 cave. Here is one instance out of a hundred : 



" That is a trifle, and I only mention it to beg 

 of you to pluck up a little courage, and not be 

 alarmed every time any of the little knot of threat- 

 eners annoy you. They want to break of all hind 

 of connection between me and the Edinburgh Review. 

 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 connec- 

 tion with me, and get the whole control of the Re- 

 view 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 



