PREFACE.

It has been thought desirable by some of the leading members of our Council that I should avail myself of the opportunity offered by this second Edition of the Select Letters of Columbus, to lay before the Society a correspondence in which I have endeavoured to vindicate the character of the Society’s early productions, and especially the first edition of this work, from a most unjustifiable attack made upon them by Mr. Froude in the Westminster Review in 1852, and repeated in the second volume of that gentleman’s Short Studies on Great Subjects, printed in 1867, and reprinted in a popular edition in the same year. The letters themselves will convey to the reader the whole of the facts, minus only the bitterness and ferocity of Mr. Froude’s attack.

The Athenæum, July 13th, 1867.

“British Museum, July 3rd, 1867.

“Will you allow me to appeal against a wrong done to the Hakluyt Society in general, and to myself in particular, in a work now very extensively read?

“In the second volume of Mr. Froude’s Short Studies on Great Subjects, at page 102, is an article on ‘England’s Forgotten Worthies,’ in which the author makes an attack on the Hakluyt Society, the bitter expressions of which need not be repeated here. It is headed by the titles of three of the Society’s early publications, and the first he states to be The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt., in his Voyage in the South Sea in 1593. Reprinted from the edition of 1622, and edited by R. H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum; whereas I had nothing to do with the editing of that work. This done, at page 108, Mr. Froude says: ‘The Editor of the Letters of Columbus (which I did edit in 1847) apologizes for the rudeness of the old seaman’s phraseology. Columbus, he tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him. We are put on our guard, and, warned not to be offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which a man of the highest order was staggering towards the end of his earthly calamities; although the inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art, by the side of which literary pathos is poor and meaningless.’ I warmly deny that I apologized for Columbus’s language. So far from it, I repeatedly expressed my sympathy with and admiration of his manly and touching record of his sufferings. What I did apologize for was any mischievous result which might possibly have accrued, though I do not think it did accrue, to my own diction from that occasional want of connectedness in the original which I had to contend with in translating. The two things are manifestly different, and it is not pleasant to find the reader’s highest sympathies appealed to in order to bring down greater condemnation on me for a fault that I had never committed. But I should not trouble you with such a personal matter, were it not that, having fabricated this handle for censure on me, Mr. Froude makes it a hook for the following criticism on the Hakluyt Society: ‘And even in the subjects which they select, they are pursued by the same curious fatality,’ the selection blamed being that of Drake’s Last Voyage in 1595, edited from the original MSS. Then, after magisterially condemning this elsewhere unblamed selection as a ‘fatal’ sin, Mr. Froude proceeds to say, at the foot of page 109, ‘But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is the Editor of “Hawkins’s Voyage to the South Sea,”’—and if the reader refers to the head of the article for the name of this most offensive editor, he will, as I have already said, find my name, who never had anything to do with it. It is true that on page 110 the name of the real editor, Admiral Bethune, occurs; but as Mr. Froude’s article is a reprint from the Westminster Review of 1852 (not 1853, as Mr. Froude again blunders in saying), there has been time enough for that gentleman to correct the injurious errors into which he had fallen. Although naturally annoyed at this treatment of my name, I left the offence unnoticed at the time; but now that, after a lapse of fifteen years, it is reprinted, with all faults in a widely-circulated publication, I call on Mr. Froude to correct his mis-statements.

“I am, happily, able to state, from the experience of twenty years, that the estimate of the Hakluyt Society’s publications by the literary world is far from supporting Mr. Froude in his supercilious treatment of that Society. Whatever opinion, however, those publications may deserve, it is the duty of a critic to be correct, and the greater the severity, the greater the need of correctness; but when a critic lashes not only one’s self, but one’s friends, by means of misrepresentations and blunders of his own making, what does that critic deserve?

R. H. Major.”

The Athenæum, July 20th, 1867.

“5, Onslow Gardens, July 15, 1867.

“I am sorry to have given Mr. Major cause to complain of me. Should my Essays be reprinted, the mistake which he points out shall be corrected; and I can only regret the injustice which meanwhile is done to his name. At the same time the only error which I can acknowledge is confined to the title of a work which stands at the head of the article. In the article itself the volumes criticised are assigned to their proper editors.

J. A. Froude.”

The Athenæum, July 27th, 1867.

“British Museum, July 23, 1867.

“I beg to thank Mr. Froude for his courteous expression of regret for what, I am quite sure, was done inadvertently, and I would thankfully accept his promise of reparation if it were extended to all the mischief that is being done to me. Unfortunately for me, two editions of Mr. Froude’s Essays have been issued this year, the second this very month, in a cheap and popular form; thus diffusing and prolonging, in the most effectual manner, an injustice to my name which has existed for fifteen years, and postponing indefinitely the chance of reparation in a future edition.

“Under such circumstances, I read with regret that, while acknowledging one error, Mr. Froude does not also acknowledge what everyone else sees clearly and condemns, the injustice of his censure on me with respect to Columbus, and which he makes a ground for censure on the Hakluyt Society. That Society stands too high to need any defence from its former Honorary Secretary, but I may be excused for specially asking that this censure may be expunged; for I have a letter from Mr. Bancroft, who was Ambassador here at the time, in which he eulogizes, in terms so warm that I may not repeat them, the spirit in which I had written both of the sufferings of Columbus, and of the touching language in which he had recorded them. This is exactly the contrary of what Mr. Froude’s two editions are telling everybody that I have done.

R. H. Major.”

Now that, in revising my translation for this second edition, I have again gone through the texts of Columbus’s letters, I uncompromisingly repeat the expression which in 1847 I used solely in exculpation of any mischievous result to my own diction from the disconnectedness of the original, viz., that “Columbus was not so great a master of the pen as of the art of navigation.” Whether my judgment on this point be of more or less weight than Mr. Froude’s is of no moment whatever; but it is of moment that the mischievous effect of a savage criticism, built up on the critic’s own blunders, should be neutralized as far as possible. The reader has the realities of the whole case before him, and may judge for himself.

R. H. M.