tions, I, 74 .
the period . If at an earlier date the Quarterly Review mercilessly
attacked Keats and Leigh Hunt, at a later period the Saturday
Review turned its gunson all thingsAmerican . If Macaulay found that Croker's edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson had “ greatly
disappointed ” him ; that it was “ ill compiled, ill arranged , ill written , and ill printed;" if “ nothing in the work has astonished [him ] so much as the ignorance or carelessness of Mr. Croker with respect to facts and dates ;" if he insists that the editor " shows almost as much ignorance and heedlessness in his criti cismsas in his statements concerning facts;" if he laments that performed in the most capricious manner ;" 27 Macaulay learned later that Croker's memory was a long one. He found, in his turn, that Mr. Croker's hope of enjoying " unalloyed the pleasures reasonably to be expected from Mr. Macaulay's high powers both of research and illustration ” “ has been deceived ;" that
Macaulay's History of England 28 was “ full of political prejudice and partisan advocacy ;' that " there is hardly a page that does
not contain something objectionable either in substance or in
color;" that it is “ impregnated to a really marvellous degree with bad taste , bad feeling, and ” he is under the painful neces sity ofadding - bad faith ;” and that “ Mr.Macaulay's pages are as copious a repertorium of vituperative eloquence as our lan
guage can produce.” Macaulay has explained through forty pages why Croker 's work has “ greatly disappointed ” him and Croker explains in eighty pages why his “ hope has been de
ceived ." Such were the amenities of literary criticism in the Edinburgh
and the Quarterly in the censorious “ thirties ” and “ forties.” Well may a publisher of many such reviews cry out in despair when writing of the “ Magazine which has involved every one
connected with it in alternate anxiety, disgrace , and misery .” 29 Contemporary criticism in America was scarcely more amicable 27 Edinburgh Review , September, 1831, 54: 1 -38.
28 Quarterly Review , March, 1849, 84 : 549-630. 29 John Murray, Letter to Thomas Blackwood , Mrs. Oliphant, Annals of a Publishing House, I, 173 .
R . B . Johnson , in Famous Reviews, pp. xi-xii, has collected some of the most caustic criticisms of criticism and
