Supporting Documents

SD1557.1.  Thomas Babington Macaulay to Thomas Flower Ellis

Addendum to The Brownings’ Correspondence, vol. 18.

Albany London

March 12. 1852

Dear Ellis,

I write because I promised to write: for I have very little to tell you. …

And what do you say to the newly discovered manufactory of literary forgeries. Your minters and smashers are nothing to the artists who deal in bales of Byron, Shelley and Keats. …

Moxon has been done for four hundred pounds, it is said; Murray for nearly as much. The joke is that Browning, a ranting fool whom Moxon employed to write a preface to the works of the Pseudo Shelley, pronounces these letters invaluable, because they could proceed from no mind but that which produced the Revolt of Islam and the Cenci. There has been nothing so good of the kind since Ireland’s Vortigern. …

Ever yours,

T B Macaulay

Publication: The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge, 1974–81), 4, 221–223.

Manuscript: Trinity College, Cambridge.

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