Lord Acton and his Circle
The greater part of these communications were made by Acton to Simpson during a period of six years from 1858 to 1864, and they relate to the conduct and work of the Rambler and of the quarterly into which it developed, the Home and Foreign Review. The letters of the period from 1867 to 1871 were mostly addressed to Mr T. F. Wetherell in connexion with a weekly paper, the Chronicle, of which he was editor, and in which Acton took great interest. To this he contributed a good deal of literary matter, although it had a brief career of only ten months. In 1869 Mr Wetherell was asked to edit the North British Review, and in this he was supported by Sir John Acton and the same band of brilliant writers who had been connected with the Home and Foreign Review and the Chronicle. In order to understand the purpose of the letters in this volume it is necessary to say something about each of these four literary ventures. The greater part of the letters were given to me by Mr William Simpson, the nephew of the recipient, Mr Richard Simpson; the rest were entrusted to me by Mr Wetherell, to whom they were written.
In the beginning of 1848 the first number of the Rambler was published. Singular misapprehension seems to exist, even in well-informed quarters, in regard to the persons responsible for it in the various stages of its course. Quite recently an attempt[1] has
- ↑ In an article by Father Pollen, "An Error in Simpson's Campion" we read: "He [Mr Simpson] was received into the Church in 1845. A couple of years later he became editor of the Rambler, a noted Catholic magazine of those days. There are always risks when a very recent convert, however sincere, begins to instruct his fellow-Catholics from an editorial chair. In 1848 many subtle questions concerning the position of Catholicism to
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