that Lord Macaulay himself had been exposed to similar calumnies. Referring to the events of 1835, the biographer

states:

'Eighteen months elapsed, during which the Calcutta Press found occasion to attack Macaulay with a breadth and ferocity of calumny such as few public men, in any age and country, have ever endured, and none perhaps have ever forgiven. There were many mornings when it was impossible for him to allow the newspapers to lie about his sister's drawing-room.'-Vol. i. p. 391.

What would Lord Macaulay's friends say if these newspapers were quoted to prove the unsavoury' character of his life?

6

After recapitulating the contents of the singularly powerful' letter, which from his account must have been a singularly libellous one, Mr. Trevelyan sums it up by saying: 'Macaulay's judgment has been confirmed by the public voice, which, rightly or wrongly, identifies Croker with the character of Rigby in Mr. Disraeli's "Coningsby.""

Rightly or wrongly! So that, if the public voice has erred, the confirmation of Macaulay's judgment is the same! Strange reasoning this. And who before ever thought of adducing a satirical portrait in a work of fiction in confirmation of grave charges of any kind? Would Mr. Trevelyan require us to accept the vacillations of 'Lothair' between the rival faiths and beauties as proof positive of weakness and inconstancy in the amiable and estimable nobleman whom, rightly or wrongly, the public voice identifies with the hero of the book? Rigby, moreover, was not drawn from the life. The leading features are obviously taken from Lady Morgan's clever but spiteful and overcharged character of Counsellor Con in O'Donnell;' and the extent of Mr. Disraeli's personal knowledge of his subject may be inferred from his opening sentences :

Rigby was not a professional man: indeed his origin, education, early pursuits and studies, were equally obscure; but he had contrived in good time to squeeze himself into parliament, by means which no one could ever comprehend, and then set up as a perfect man of business.'-Coningsby, chap. ii.

He

It has been shown that all this is untrue of Mr. Croker. was a professional man, and everything relating to him was well known. The caricature has been termed the brevet of celebrity; and (granting the question of identity) for a public man to have occupied a prominent place in two such novels as 'O'Donnell ' and Coningsby,' undoubted productions of genius, is certainly no deduction from his fame.

6

In 1846 Mr. Croker lost another old friend, but alas! not this

time by death. The repeal of the Corn Laws, which severed so many friendships, caused an estrangement, and finally a complete rupture, between Mr. Croker and Sir Robert Peel. Into the details of this painful event we forbear to enter, and will content ourselves by giving an extract from a letter which Mr. Croker wrote to M. Guizot in the last year of his life :

'Peel I knew longer and better, and till the last few years loved more than any other man alive. I was as long and as confidentially connected with the Duke of Wellington, but he was already a great man before I knew him, and his position and employment rendered our intercourse not so frequent and less familiar; but with Peel I lived as a brother from his first entering into life, and either saw him or corresponded with him every week of our lives, in a community of political and an identity of personal feelings.'

His friendship with the Duke of Wellington continued unimpaired till the end of that great man's life. Only a few days before his death the Duke repaired from Walmer Castle to pay a visit to Mr. Croker, then staying at Folkestone; and we have found among Mr. Croker's papers a full account of this visit and of the conversation that took place. It is particularly interesting, as probably the last record ever made of the Duke's sayings, and we regret that we can only find room for a few extracts, which, however, bring him vividly before us :

'Folkestone, 4th September, 1852.-The Duke of Wellington had never expected to see me again, and I, a few months since, had never expected to see him; but as soon as he heard I had come here, he immediately came over to see me; but not having written to apprise me, I had unluckily the same day gone over to see him. But I waited at Dover for his return; when he promised to come again to Folkestone on Saturday (this was Thursday, the 2nd), which he did, and has stayed three hours with us, chatting in the most agreeable manner on all manner of subjects, with a vivacity and memory worth noting of a man in his eighty-fourth year. We are both deaf, I worse than usual to-day, and he, though he walks very well in fact, seems to totter; but this he has done for some years; both our minds, however (D. G.), seem as clear as ever. He talked of the length of our acquaintance, which began in 1806, and reminded me of his having in 1808, when he first went to Portugal, left the parliamentary business of the Irish office in my hands, which led me into political life. He remembered much better than I did the names of some of the bills that I had to manage, even down to some local Dublin bills.

*

In coming to see me (as he had done the day but one before, 2nd September), he had chosen to walk from the station to our house, and without even a guide; he said he had found it a rough walk, and the * The Duke of Wellington died at Walmer on September 14, 1852.

ground

ground intersected in a way he had not expected; so I said to him, "It seems you forgot to guess what was at the other side of the hill." This was in allusion to a circumstance which had occurred between him and me some thirty years before. When travelling on the North road, we amused ourselves by guessing what sort of a country we should find at the other side of the hills we drove up; and when I expressed surprise at some extraordinary good guesses he had made, he said, "Why, I have spent all my life in trying to guess what was at the other side of the hill." I had reminded him of this just as we were driving across the ravine that had impeded him, and he turned round to Mrs. Croker to explain it to her, adding, "All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don't know by what you do that's what I called 'guessing what was at the other side of the hill.'

* ?

'Lady Barrow's five little girls were with us, and he won their hearts by writing his name in their albums; in the signature of one, the best written of the five, he wrote his name with a single l. His good humour and kindness to the children, and indeed to everybody, was very pleasing. To me (evidently on account of my precarious health) he was particularly affectionate. On going away he promised to see me again next week; but as he could not then fix the day, he would write and let me know. Going down out of the house there were two sets of steps, which he went down very leisurely, with Mrs. Croker on his arm, and counted them one, two, three, and one, two, three, four, and then looked back and repeated the numbers as if for my use, for he thought me feebler than, thank God, I really am. How characteristic this trifle is, both of his precision and his kind attention to others!'

Mr. Croker survived his illustrious friend nearly five years. He died on the 10th of August, 1857, and was buried by the side of his long-lost and never-forgotten son.

In vindicating the memory of Mr. Croker from the studied aspersions that have been cast upon him by both Lord Macaulay and his biographer, we shall doubtless be accused again of launching shafts against the literary character of Lord Macaulay.' But some things we have not done, and never will do. We will not launch shafts against the private character of any political or literary opponent. We will not brand an antagonist as 'a bad, a very bad, man: a scandal to politics and letters.' We will not threaten to dust that varlet's jacket for him,' nor will we exult in beating him black and blue.' We will not recite in detail any unsavoury portions of a gentleman's private life, which are part of the stock-gossip of every bow-window of St. James's Street.' We will not plead incompatibility of moral senti

ments

ments' as an excuse for indulging in political and literary animosity. Mr. Croker was as honourable a man as Lord Macaulay himself, and was equally loved and lamented by his relatives and friends. He was the intimate friend not only of the great men we have mentioned, but also of Lord Stowell, Lord Ashburton, Bishop Wilberforce, Sir William Follett, and of many others equally distinguished in politics and letters. If inferior to Macaulay in brilliancy, he was, as a debater in Parliament and the administrator of a public office, decidedly his superior. It is not to be endured that malevolence should run into dogmatism, and that the authority of Lord Macaulay should be evoked in order to support false and railing accusations against the private life of a writer who for fifty years rendered important service to letters and literary men-of a public servant who for more than twenty years discharged the duties of a high and responsible office with honour to himself and advantage to the nation-and of a politician who was twice offered a seat in the Cabinet, and who played a distinguished part in the House of Commons during one of the most momentous periods of our history.

ART. IV.-1. The Orkneyinga Saga; translated from the Icelandic by Jon A. Hjaltalin and Gilbert Goudie. Edited, with Notes and Introduction, by Joseph Anderson, Keeper of the National Museum of the Antiquaries of Scotland. Edinburgh, 1873.

2. Rude Stone Monuments in all Countries; their Age and Uses. By James Fergusson. London, 1872.

WE

E gladly welcome this translation of the Orkneyinga Saga,' hitherto, as the editor observes, inaccessible to the English reader. It is the chief authority for the history of Northern Scotland during much of the period that it embracesfrom the establishment of the earldom of Orkney by Harald Harfagri, in A.D. 872, to the burning of Bishop Adam by the men of Caithness in 1222; and the greater part of what has been written about the earlier condition of Orkney and Shetland by Torfæus, by Barry, Edmonstone and Hibbert, has been drawn from its stores. In its main narrative the Saga is unquestionably to be received as authentic, although, as in all compositions of the same class, which must have been long preserved orally before they were committed to writing, there are occasional confusions of dates which have to be cautiously disentangled (where that

may

may be possible) by the historical student. But as the Saga nowhere rises to the grand poetry of such a battle-piece as that of Stamfordbridge in the Heimskringla-not more to be trusted, as Mr. Freeman has shown, than the picture of any battle in the Iliad the facts with which it deals, often picturesque and romantic in themselves, retain their ancient simplicity, and invite a far greater confidence than many of the narratives imbedded in the great work of Snorri. There is nothing to show where or by whom the Saga was reduced to writing. We have it in a shortened form; for a 'Jarla Saga,' or 'Saga of the Earls,' existed before it; and portions of that, preserved in the Flateyjarbók, tell the earlier story of Orkney at much greater length. But it was certainly known in Iceland in the first half of the fourteenth century, and its closing chapters could not have been written before 1222. The present translation is clear, accurate, and careful, though it misses the sympathetic rendering of Dr. Dasent's 'Burnt Njal.' Mr. Anderson's introduction is full of valuable illustrations and suggestions; and it supplies, briefly, a continuation of the history of the earldom down to the time (A.D. 1471) when it ceased to form part of the Norwegian dominions.

In the whole range of the countries haunted by the Northmen, and throughout all the seas swept by their 'dragons,' there was no more important Viking station than Orkney. The islands formed a central, gathering-place, open on one side to Norway and easily accessible thence; whilst the northern coasts of Scotland, the Hebrides, Cumbria, Wales, and Ireland on the one hand, and on the other all the eastern shores of Scotland and those of Northumbria, were open to the summer expeditions of the plunderers, many of whom were fugitives from the oppressions, as they then appeared, of Harald Harfagri. Orkney and Shetland had thus fallen into the hands of the Northmen, and the native races which they found there seem to have been either expelled or slain, when in the year 872, Harald, who had forced all men at home to bow to his sway or to leave the land, resolved to attack in their own strongholds the sea-robbers who plundered the coasts of Norway quite as freely as those of other countries. Harald sailed suddenly with a vast fleet. He fell on the Vikings in all the lands where they had established themselves-Faroe, Orkney, the Lewes, the Western Isles, Man and Anglesea-rooted them out or brought them into subjection, and established, in all, earldoms to be held under himself as King of Norway. The fortunes of these earldoms were various; but that of Orkney grew into a powerful State, the rule of which extended over Caithness and much of Northern Scotland,