For a time James Mill tried, without success, to persuade his friend and fellow Benthamite Etienne Dumont to reply to “the curly-headed coxcomb, who only abuses what he does not understand” (Mill to Dumont, 1829b). In the meantime there appeared Sir James Mackintosh’s Dissertation on Ethical Philosophy (1830) in which Mill’s Essay on Government was singled out for special censure. There was nothing new in this; but what caught Mill’s eye was that Mackintosh’s mode and manner of argument was borrowed, as the author acknowledged, from “the writer of a late criticism on Mr. Mill’s Essay.—See Edinburgh Review, No. 97, March 1829.” “This,” says Mill with evident relish, “is convenient; because the answer, which does for Sir James, will answer the same purpose with the Edinburgh Review” (Mill 1992, 305). Of course, the “writer of a late criticism” to whom Mackintosh refers was none other than Macaulay, whom the elder Mill then proceeds to answer in the guise of replying to Mackintosh.