Welsh Journals

So, despite the defensiveness of the preface to volume VI, Mrs. Macaulay ended as impenitently partisan as she had begun. Who, she asked in her concluding words, are the real friends of the constitution? Those who, by refusing to take sides in writing history, leave the reader confused and unable to judge? 'Or those writers who, like myself, have closely adhered to the purest principles of civil and religious freedom; have marked every deviation from constitutional rectitude; and have not only pointed out the destructive enormities of marked tyrants, but have endeavoured to direct the judgment of the public to the detection of those masked hypocrites, who, under the specious pretence of public good, have advanced their private interest and ambition on the ruin of all that is valuable to man'.101 It is no ignoble Finis to her magnum opus. A man who had been an assistant librarian at the British Museum when Mrs. Macaulay worked there wrote to thd^Gentleman's Magazine in 1794 to defend her against D'Israeli's attack. 'There is another characteristic of Mrs. Macaulay's History, still more respectable than her love of liberty', he insisted, 'and that is her love of truth'.102 St. Hilda's College and Balliol College, Oxford. 101 History. VIII, 339. 108 Gentleman's Magazine. LXIV, part 2, 805. BRIDGET AND CHRISTOPHER HILL.