al Society of Literature was read to you. I made
the alterations which I conceived that you desired, and submitted
them afterwards to my mother. As to the poetry which you parallel with
Little's, if anything vulgar or licentious has been written by myself,
I am willing to bear the consequences. If anything of that cast has been
written by my friends, I allow that a certain degree of blame attaches
to me for having chosen them at least indiscreetly. If, however, a
bookseller of whom we knew nothing has coupled improper productions with
ours in a work over which we had no control, I cannot plead guilty to
anything more than misfortune; a misfortune in which some of the most
rigidly moral and religious men of my acquaintance have participated in
the present instance.

I am pleading at random for a book which I never saw. I am defending
the works of people most of whose names I never heard. I am therefore
writing under great disadvantages. I write also in great haste. I am
unable even to read over what I have written.

Affectionately yours

T. B. M.

Moved by the father's evident unhappiness, the son promised never to
write again for the obnoxious periodical. The second number was so dull
and decorous that Zachary Macaulay, who felt that, if the magazine
went on through successive quarters reforming its tone in the same
proportion, it would soon be on a level of virtue with the Christian
Observer, withdrew his objection; and the young man wrote regularly till
the short life of the undertaking ended in something very like a quarrel
between the publisher and his contributors. It is not the province of
biography to dilate upon works which are already before the world; and
the results of Macaulay's literary labour during the years 1823 and
1824 have been, perhaps, only too freely reproduced in the volumes which
contain his miscellaneous writings. It is, however, worthy of notice
that among his earlier efforts in literature his own decided favourite
was "the Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton
touching the great Civil War." But an author, who is exempt from vanity,
is inclined to rate his own works rather according as they are free from
faults than as they abound in beauties; and Macaulay's readers will very
generally give the preference to two fragmentary sketches of Roman and
Athenian society which sparkle with life, and humour, and a masculine
vigorous fancy that had not yet learned to obey the rei