In his discussion of Robert Southey's Sir Thomas More (1829) in the Edinburgh Review of 1830, Thomas Babington Macaulay takes issue with what he considers Southey's untenable critique of England's economic progress. What Macaulay deems most deplorable is the Poet Laureate's crossing over from ‘those departments of literature in which he might excel’ into the domain of social criticism, where ‘he has still the very alphabet to learn’ (1830: 528). Southey's judgment of modern society proceeds as if ‘politics’ were not ‘a matter of science’ but ‘of taste and feeling’ (1830: 533). His rejection of industrial progress is not derived from such relevant data as ‘bills of mortality and statistical tables’ – which Southey ‘cannot stoop to study’ (1830: 539) – but from a mere aversion to the aesthetics of the changing face of modern England. When Southey implies that the country's cultural illness can be deduced from the ugliness of industrial towns, Macaulay responds with withering sarcasm: