Another long controversy ensued over the question of whether Brougham or Macaulay should write an article on Chatham for the Edinburgh. Napier wrote Brougham who sent the article, "I know, however, I shall be blamed (but not by Macaulay himself) for taking the subject out of his hands, and that this article will be cited as another proof of what is frequently dinned in my ears,—my supposed subsurviency to your wishes." Brougham testily replied, "That he [Macaulay] has any better right to monopolize Lord Chatham, I more than doubt. That he would have done it better, I also doubt:" and he begs Napier "to pluck up a little courage, and not be alarmed every time any of the little knot of threateners annoy you. They want to break off all kind of connection between me and the Edinburgh Review. I have long seen it." And he again fretfully writes Napier, "I thought the act of not letting Macaulay do an article on Lord Chatham, was nothing out of the way."[1]
Dickens was also a troublesome contributor and when a reviewer of his American Notes[2] had represented him as having gone to America in the cause of international copyright—at this distance in time a somewhat inadequate cause for rousing ire in celestial minds—he wrote to Napier in hot and voluble haste:
"I am at a loss to divine who its author is. I know he read in some cut-throat American paper, this and other monstrous statements, which I could at any time have converted into sickening praise by the payment of some fifty dollars. I know that he is perfectly aware that his statement in the Review, in corroboration of these lies, would be disseminated through the whole of the United States; and that my contradiction will never be heard of. And though I care very little for the opinion of any person who will set the statement of an American editor (almost invariably an atrocious scoundrel) against my character and conduct, such as they may be; still, my sense of justice does revolt from this most cavalier and careless exhibition of me to a whole people, as a traveller under false pretences, and a disappointed intriguer. The better the acquaintance with America, the more defenceless and more inexcusable such conduct is. For I solemnly declare (and appeal to any man but the writer of this
