at the sale of military appointments by his mistress, Mrs. Clarke [see Clarke, Mary Anne], brought Croker to the front. Speaking in answer to Sir Francis Burdett (14 March) he dissected the evidence adduced against the duke with a dexterity which showed how much he had profited by his legal experience. The speech was a brilliant success, and assisted so materially in the vindication of the duke, that it drew down upon Croker much obloquy and scurrilous abuse. Meanwhile Croker had no income but what he derived from his profession and from literary work; but Perceval told him that the government would gladly recognise his services by any suitable appointment. He had shared the counsels of Canning and George Ellis in arranging for the establishment of the ‘Quarterly Review’ in February 1809, and was enlisted among its contributors. His first article was a review of Miss Edgeworth's ‘Tales of Fashionable Life.’ He did not contribute again till the tenth number in 1811, but from that time to 1845, excepting for an interval between 1826 and 1831, scarcely a number appeared without one or more papers by him. In all he wrote about two hundred and sixty articles upon the most varied topics, legal, ecclesiastical, historical (especially connected with the French revolution), Ireland, contemporary history, reviews of novels, travels, and poetry, the then new school of which, as represented by Leigh Hunt, Shelley, and Keats, was especially uncongenial to his taste, trained as it had been upon the measured precision of Pope. For the appreciation of such writers he was especially unfitted, not only by want of sympathy but by incapacity to appreciate their struggle to bring feeling and language into closer harmony by forms of expression more simple and unconventional than those of the preceding century. His well-known review of Keats's ‘Endymion’ (Quarterly Review, No. 32, September 1818) is an instructive specimen of that worst style of so-called criticism which starts with the assumption that, because the writer does not like the work, it is therefore bad, and proceeds to condemn whatever does not fall in with the critic's individual ideas. The poem was brought out under the patronage of Leigh Hunt, a circumstance sufficient in those days to seal its condemnation in the eyes of a tory journalist. No list of Croker's reviews has ever been made public, and the secret of the authorship of papers in the ‘Quarterly’ as they appeared was as a rule so well kept, that conjecture on the subject supplied the place of knowledge, and, as commonly happens, conjecture was generally wrong. Croker being from his political position obnoxious to the whig press, they credited all the political articles in the ‘Quarterly Review’ to his account, while the truth was that, as he wrote to Mr. Lockhart in 1834, ‘for the twenty years that I wrote in it, from 1809 to 1829, I never gave, I believe, one purely political article—not one, certainly, in which politics predominated.’ The battle of Talavera (28 July 1809) stirred the poetic vein of the young politician. The poem bearing the name of the battle appeared in the autumn of 1809. More for the enthusiasm which reader shared with writer than for any superlative merit in the poetry, as poetry is now understood, the book had a signal success, greater, according to the publisher, Mr. Murray, ‘than any short poem he knew, exceeding Mr. Heber's “Palestine” or “Europe,” and even Mr. Canning's “Ulm” and “Trafalgar.”’ Sir Walter Scott, in the measures of whose ‘Marmion’ it was written, praised it both by letter and in the ‘Quarterly;’ and in a letter to Croker from Badajoz (15 Nov. 1809) Wellington wrote that he had read the poem with great pleasure, adding, characteristically, ‘I did not think a battle could be turned to anything so entertaining.’ Perceval, who had by this time become premier, proved his sense of the value of Croker's services to his party by appointing him secretary of the admiralty. It was a higher office than Croker aspired to; but, the duration of the Perceval administration being most precarious, Croker at first hesitated in abandoning for it his professional career, of which he was fond and which was now yielding him a fair income. But on learning that Perceval in his unsuccessful negotiations with Lords Grenville and Grey to take office with him, while offering to take the seals of the home office himself, had made no other stipulation than that Croker should be his under-secretary, he felt he could do no otherwise than yield to the wish of so generous a friend. ‘In that situation,’ wrote Wellington, ‘I have no doubt you will do yourself credit, and more than justify me in any little exertion I may have made for you while I was in office.’ The anticipation was amply fulfilled. The appointment of a young and untried man to so important an office was of course violently attacked. But in less than a month Perceval's estimate of the fitness of his young friend for the duties of his responsible office was fully justified. Croker had, with his wonted acumen, at once set to work to master all the details of his department as the first step to sound administration, and in doing so he found reason to suspect a serious defalcation in the accounts of an official of high rank and reputation which had escaped the notice of his predecessors. He therefore refused to sign a
