Born, at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, 25 Oct. 1800. Early education at a day-school at Clapham; at school at Little Shelford, near Cambridge, and afterwards at Aspenden Hall, Herts., 1812–18. Matric. Trin. Coll., Camb., Oct. 1818; English Prize Poem, 1819 and 1821; Craven Scholarship, 1821; B.A. 1822; Fellow of Trin. Coll., Oct. 1824 to 1831; M.A. 1825. Student of Lincoln’s Inn; called to Bar, 1826. Contrib. to periodicals from 1823. Commissioner in Bankruptcy, Jan. 1828. M.P. for Calne, Feb. 1830. Commissioner of Board of Control, June 1832. Sec. to Board, Dec. 1832. M.P. for Leeds, Dec. 1832. In India, as Mem. of Supreme Council, 1834–38. M.P. for Edinburgh, 1839; re-elected, 1841 and 1846. Sec. for War, 1839–41. Paymaster-General, 1846–48. Defeated at Edinburgh, 1847; withdrew from political life. Lord Rector, Glasgow Univ., Nov. 1849. F.R.S., Nov. 1849. Prof. of Ancient Hist., Royal Acad., 1850. Fellow of University of London, 1850–59. Trustee of British Museum, 1847. Re-elected M.P. for Edinburgh, July 1852. Mem. of Institute of France, 1853. Knight of Prussian Order of Merit, 1853. Hon. D.C.L., Oxford, June 1854. Pres. of Philosophical Inst., Edinburgh, 1854. Member of Academies of Utrecht, Munich, and Turin. Created Baron Macaulay, 10 Sept. 1857. High Steward of Borough of Cambridge, 1857. Died, in London, 28 Dec. 1859. Buried in Westminster Abbey. Works: “Pompeii” [1819]; “Evening” [1821]; “Critical and Miscellaneous Essays” (Philadelphia, 5 vols.), 1841–44; “Lays of Ancient Rome,” 1842; “Critical and Historical Essays” (from Edinburgh Rev.), 1843; “History of England,” vols. i, ii, 1849; vols. iii, iv, 1855; vol. v (posthumous), ed. by Lady Trevelyan, 1861; “Inaugural Address” [at Glasgow], 1849; “Speeches” (2 vols.), 1853 (edn. “corrected by himself,” 1854). Posthumous: “Biographies contributed to the Encyclopædia Britannica,” 1860; “Miscellaneous Writings,” ed. by T. F. Ellis, 1860; vol. v of “History of England” (see above), 1861. Collected Works: ed. by Lady Trevelyan (8 vols.), 1866. Life: By Sir G. O. Trevelyan, 1876.

Personal

  I poke one line into Tom’s vile scrawl to say that he goes on in the usual Pindaric style; much desultory reading, much sitting from bower to bower; Spenser, I think, is the favourite poet to-day. As his time is short, and health, I think, the chief object just now, I have not insisted on much system. He read in the sun yesterday and got a little headache. Since “Childe Hugh,” a long poem on Hunt’s election, really a good parody, has been shown us, I have discovered in the writing-box an Epithalamium of many folio pages on Mr. Sprague’s marriage. I do compel him to read two or three scenes of Metastasio every day, and he seems to like it. His talents are very extraordinary and various, and his acquirements wonderful at his age. His temper is good, and his vivacity a great recommendation to me, but this excess of animal spirits makes some certain studies seem a little dry and dull. I will tell you honestly as a true friend, what indeed you know already and mentioned to me, that his superiority of talents makes competitors necessary for him, for that he is a little inclined to under-value those who are not considerable or distinguished in some way or other. I have talked with him gently on the subject, telling him how valuable and worthy people may be who are neither brilliant in talent nor high in situation.

  I had a most interesting companion in young Macaulay, one of the most promising of the rising generation I have seen for a long time…. He has a good face,—not the delicate features of a man of genius and sensibility, but the strong lines and well-knit limbs of a man sturdy in body and mind. Very eloquent and cheerful. Overflowing with words and not poor in thought. Liberal in opinion, but no radical. He seems a correct as well as a full man. He showed a minute knowledge of subjects not introduced by himself.

  Dined yesterday with Lord Holland; came very late, and found a vacant place between Sir George Robinson and a common-looking man in black. As soon as I had time to look at my neighbor, I began to speculate (as one usually does) as to who he might be, and as he did not for some time open his lips except to eat, I settled that he was some obscure man of letters or of medicine, perhaps a cholera doctor…. Having thus settled my opinion, I went on eating my dinner, when Auckland, who was sitting opposite me, addressed my neighbor, “Mr. Macaulay, will you drink a glass of wine?” I thought I should have dropped off my chair. It was Macaulay, the man I had been so long most curious to see and to hear, whose genius and eloquence, astonishing knowledge, and diversified talents have excited my wonder and admiration for such a length of time, and here I had been sitting next to him, hearing him talk, and setting him down for a dull fellow. I felt as if he could have read my thoughts, and the perspiration burst forth from every pore of my face, and yet it was impossible not to be amused at the idea. It was not till Macaulay stood up that I was aware of all the vulgarity and ungainliness of his appearance; not a ray of intellect beams from his countenance; a lump of more ordinary clay never enclosed a powerful mind and lively imagination. He had a cold and a sore thorax, the latter of which occasioned a constant contraction of the muscles of the throat, making him appear as if in momentary danger of a fit. His manner struck me as not pleasing, but it was not assuming, unembarrassed, yet not easy, unpolished, yet not coarse, there was no kind of usurpation of the conversation, no tenacity as to opinion or facts, no assumption of superiority, but the variety and extent of his information were soon apparent, for whatever subject was touched upon he evinced the utmost familiarity with it; quotation, illustration, anecdote, seemed ready in his hands for every topic.

  An emphatic, hottish, really forcible person, but unhappily without divine idea.

  His memory is prodigious, surpassing any thing I have ever known, and he pours out its stores with an instructive but dinning prodigality. He passes from the minutest dates of English history or biography to a discussion of the comparative merits of different ancient orators, and gives you whole strophes from the dramatists at will. He can repeat every word of every article he has written, without prompting; but he has neither grace of body, face, nor voice; he is without intonation or variety; and he pours on like Horace’s river, while we, poor rustics, foolishly think he will cease; and if you speak, he does not respond to what you say, but, while your last words are yet on your lips, takes up again his wondrous tale. He will not confess ignorance of any thing, though I verily believe that no man would ever have less occasion to make the confession. I have heard him called the most remarkable person of his age; and again the most overrated one. You will see that he has not left upon me an entirely agreeable impression; still I confess his great and magnificent attainments and powers. I wish he had more address in using them, and more deference for others.

  Went to Bowood to dinner…. Macaulay wonderful; never, perhaps, was there combined so much talent with so marvelous a memory. To attempt to record his conversation one must be as wonderfully gifted with memory as himself.

  He is absolutely renowned in society as the greatest bore that ever yet appeared. I have seen people come in from Holland House, breathless and knocked up, and able to say nothing but “Oh dear, oh mercy.” What’s the matter? being asked. “Oh, Macaulay.” Then every one said, “That accounts for it—you’re lucky to be alive,” etc.

  Yes, I take great credit to myself; I always prophesied his greatness from the first moment I saw him, then a very young and unknown man, on the Northern Circuit. There are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as well as great; he is like a book in breeches…. Yes, I agree, he is certainly more agreeable since his return from India. His enemies might perhaps have said before (though I never did so) that he talked rather too much; but now he has occasional flashes of silence, that make his conversation perfectly delightful. But what is far better and more important than all this, that I believe Macaulay to be incorruptible. You might lay ribbons, stars, garters, wealth, titles before him in vain. He has an honest, genuine love of his country, and the world could not bribe him to neglect her interests.

  In Parliament, he was no more than a most brilliant speaker; and in his speeches there was the same fundamental weakness which pervades his writings,—unsoundness in the presentment of his case. Some one element was sure to be left out, which falsified his statement, and vitiated his conclusions; and there never was perhaps a speaker or writer of eminence, so prone to presentments of cases, who so rarely offered one which was complete and true. My own impression is, and always was, that the cause of the defect is constitutional in Macaulay. The evidence seems to indicate that he wants heart. He appears to be wholly unaware of this deficiency; and the superficial fervour which suns over his disclosures probably deceives himself, as it deceives a good many other people; and he may really believe that he has a heart. To those who do not hold this key to the interpretation of his career, it must be a very mysterious thing that a man of such imposing and real ability, with every circumstance and influence in his favour, should never have achieved any complete success. As a politician, his failure has been signal, notwithstanding his irresistible power as a speaker, and his possession of every possible facility. As a practical legislator, his failure was unsurpassed, when he brought home his Code from India.

  Macaulay is the lion. He has been asked to meet us seven times, so that it has got to be a sort of joke. But he is very agreeable, not in perfectly good health, and not, I imagine, talking so much for effect as he used to, or claiming so large a portion of the table’s attention; but well enough to be out a great deal in the evenings, and with fresh spirits.

  I was too much engaged with these personal talks to attend much to what was going on elsewhere; but all through breakfast I had been more and more impressed by the aspect of one of the guests, sitting next to Milnes. He was a man of large presence,—a portly personage, gray-haired, but scarcely as yet aged; and his face had a remarkable intelligence, not vivid nor sparkling, but conjoined with great quietude,—and if it gleamed or brightened at one time more than another, it was like the sheen over a broad surface of the sea. There was a somewhat careless self-possession, large and broad enough to be called dignity; and the more I looked at him, the more I knew that he was a distinguished person, and wondered who. He might have been a minister of state; only there is not one of them who has any right to such a face and presence. At last,—I do not know how the conviction came,—but I became aware that it was Macaulay, and began to see some slight resemblance to his portraits. But I have never seen any that is not wretchedly unworthy of the original. As soon as I knew him, I began to listen to his conversation, but he did not talk a great deal,—contrary to his usual custom; for I am told he is apt to engross all the talk to himself. Probably he may have been restrained by the presence of Ticknor and Mr. Palfrey, who were among his auditors and interlocutors; and as the conversation seemed to turn much on American subjects, he could not well have assumed to talk them down. I am glad to have seen him,—a face fit for a scholar, a man of the world, a cultivated intelligence.

  I sat next him at your table and tried to enter into conversation with him, telling him that he and Livy were under mutual obligations; and that I doubted whether in his ballads of Rome he was most indebted to Livy or Livy to him. It would not do. Yet it was no small compliment, for there was hardly a genius so exalted as Livy’s in all the interval between Æschylus and Dante. But there are some who do not know it, and this was probably the case with Macaulay.

  I cannot describe him better than by saying that he was exactly that kind of a face and figure which by no possibility would be selected, out of even a very small number of persons, as those of a remarkable personage. He is of the middle height, neither above nor below it. The outline of his face in profile is rather good. The nose, very slightly aquiline, is well cut, and the expression of the mouth and chin agreeable. His hair is thin and silvery, and he looks a good deal older than many men of his years—for, if I am not mistaken, he is just as old as his century, like Cromwell, Balzac, Charles V., and other notorious individuals. How those two imposters, so far as appearances go, Prescott and Mignet, who are sixty-two, look young enough, in comparison, to be Macaulay’s sons. The face, to resume my description, seen in front, is blank, and as it were badly lighted. There is nothing luminous in the eye, nothing impressive in the brow. The forehead is spacious, but it is scooped entirely away in the region where benevolence ought to be, while beyond rise reverence, firmness and self-esteem, like Alps on Alps. The under eye-lids are so swollen as almost to close the eyes, and it would be quite impossible to tell the colour of those orbs, and equally so, from the neutral tint of his hair and face, to say of what complexion he had originally been…. His whole manner has the smoothness and polished surface of the man of the world, the politician, and the new peer, spread over the man of letters within. I do not know that I can repeat any of his conversation, for there was nothing to excite very particular attention in its even flow.

  I sympathised with you when I read of Macaulay’s death in the Times. He was, was he not, your next-door neighbor? I can easily conceive what a loss you must have had in the want of his brilliant conversation. I hardly knew him: met him once, I remember, when Hallam and Guizot were in his company: Hallam was showing Guizot the Houses of Parliament then building, and Macaulay went on like a cataract for an hour or so to those two great men, and, when they had gone, turned to me and said, “Good morning, I am happy to have had the pleasure of making your acquaintance,” and strode away. Had I been a piquable man I should have been piqued, but I don’t think I was, for the movement after all was amicable…. Peace be with him.

  One paper I have read regarding Lord Macaulay says “he had no heart.” Why, a man’s books may not always speak the truth, but they speak his mind in spite of himself; and it seems to me this man’s heart is beating through every page he penned. He is always in a storm of revolt and indignation against wrong, craft, tyranny. How he cheers heroic resistance; how he backs and applauds freedom struggling for its own; how he hates scoundrels ever so victorious and successful; how he recognizes genius, though selfish villains possess it! The critic who says Macaulay had no heart, might say that Johnson had none; and two men more generous, and more loving, and more hating, and more partial, and more noble, do not live in our history. Those who knew Lord Macaulay knew how admirably tender and generous, and affectionate he was. It was not his business to bring his family before the theatre footlights, and call for bouquets from the gallery as he wept over them.

  One late grave has been opened in the Historical Aisle of the South Transept, to receive the remains of the poet and historian who, perhaps, of all who have trod the floor of the Abbey or lie buried within its precincts, most deeply knew and felt its manifold interests, and most unceasingly commemorated them. Lord Macaulay rests at the foot of the statue of Addison, whose character and genius none had painted as he; carrying with him to his grave the story of the reign of Queen Anne, which none but he could have told.

  He was the tyrant of the table, and rarely tolerated any talk but his own…. Macaulay sat still only when compelled by sheer force, and then only for a few seconds. A professional talker or a rival he put down in an instant, without the slightest hesitation or compunction, and trampled him into the bargain if he showed any signs of resistance.

  There are some men who gain such mastery over their libraries for practical purposes, that it would be a crime to curtail their collections. Such pre-eminently was Lord Macaulay, of whom one might say what Dryden did of Ben Jonson, “He invaded authors like a monarch.” Surrounded by his many thousand volumes, he could summon any one to his hands in a moment; and, by a felicity of memory which might well be called instinct, could put his finger almost instantly on the passage sought for. How he used this and his other faculties his works sufficiently tell. No writer had ever his intellectual materials more thoroughly in hand. When his memory failed as to facts it told him at once where to look for them.

  He had a massive head, and features of a powerful and rugged cast, but so constantly lit up by every joyful and ennobling emotion that it mattered little if, when absolutely quiescent, his face was rather homely than handsome. While conversing at table no one thought him otherwise than good-looking: but, when he rose, he was seen to be short and stout in figure…. His clothes, though ill put on, were good, and his wardrobe was always enormously overstocked. Later in life he indulged himself in an apparently inexhaustible succession of handsome embroidered waistcoats, which he used to regard with much complacency. He was unhandy to a degree quite unexampled in the experience of all who knew him. When in the open air he wore perfectly new dark kid gloves, into the fingers of which he never succeeded in inserting his own more than half way…. Macaulay’s extreme sensibility to all which appealed to the sentiment of pity, whether in art or in nature, was nothing short of a positive inconvenience to him. He was so moved by the visible representation of distressing scenes that he went most unwillingly to the theatre, for which, during his Cambridge days, he had entertained a passionate, though passing, fondness. I remember well, how, during the performance of “Masks and Faces,” the sorrows of the broken-down author and his starving family in their Grub Street garret entirely destroyed the pleasure which he otherwise would have taken in Mrs. Stirling’s admirable acting. And he was hardly less easily affected to tears by that which was sublime and stirring in literature, than by that which was melancholy and pathetic.

  Lord Macaulay lived a life of no more than sixty years and three months. But it was an extraordinarily full life of sustained exertion—a high table-land without depressions…. For a century and more, perhaps no man in this country, with the exception of Mr. Pitt and of Lord Byron, had attained at thirty-two the fame of Macaulay. His parliamentary success and his literary eminence were each of them enough, as they stood at this date, to intoxicate any brain and heart of a meaner order. But to these was added in his case an amount and quality of social attentions such as invariably partake of adulation and idolatry, and as perhaps the high circles of London never before or since have lavished on a man whose claims lay only in himself, and not in his descent, his rank, or his possessions…. Macaulay was singularly free of vices, and not in the sense in which, according to Swift’s note on Burnet, William III. held such a freedom; that is to say, “as a man is free of a corporation.” One point only we reserve; a certain tinge of occasional vindictiveness. Was he envious? Never. Was he servile? No. Was he insolent? No. Was he prodigal? No. Was he avaricious? No. Was he selfish? No. Was he idle? The question is ridiculous. Was he false? No; but true as steel and transparent as crystal. Was he vain? We hold that he was not. At every point in the ugly list he stands the trial; and though in his history he judges mildly some sins of appetite or passion, there is no sign in his life, or his remembered character, that he was compounding for what he was inclined to.

  So far as we have to speak of Macaulay as a man, the most extreme panegyric will scarcely reach into exaggeration. As a son, and as a brother, as a politician, or as a man of the world, in every position into which he was thrown by the accidents of life, the great historian of England was in all respects without blame.

  He was a boy in spirit all his life long, and yet, when he was a boy, it was one of a queer kind. What would the boys themselves say to a boy who never knew how to skate, or swim, or shoot, or row, or drive, and didn’t care enough about his ignorance to try to mend it? a boy who never liked dogs? What would the boys of an older growth say to a boy who was so clumsy that when a barber said he might pay him whatever he usually gave the person who shaved him, he replied, “In that case, I should give you a great gash on each cheek”? a boy who, when he reached the kid-glove age, always wore out-doors perfect new dark gloves, into which he never got his fingers more than half way; who has left on record only one instance in which he knew one tune from another, and who seems never to have been in love in all his life? And yet he was the exact opposite of a little prig. He was the life and soul of his father’s big family of boys and girls—Selina, Jane, John, Henry, Fanny, Hannah, Margaret, and Charles. In this circle he was king…. Nothing could be more beautiful than Macaulay’s love for his sisters Hannah and Margaret, which they repaid with a devotion all the more profound because the brother they loved was a brother to be very proud of. They were the nearest to him of all the children in sympathies, but not in age, being respectively ten and twelve years younger than he…. It was one of the good things about Tom Macaulay that he was just as fond of his sisters’ society when he was a great and busy man as he was before, and that when his little nephews and nieces began to grow up about him, they never knew that he was any body in particular, except dear Uncle Tom, who was always giving them great treats and taking them to see the shows.

  Macaulay, says his nephew and historian, dressed badly but not poorly. Such was the uncle, already grown famous, of young Otto Trevelyan. But Tom Macaulay, of 1820–1825, was altogether slovenly. He was an undergraduate of Trinity when a certain don sent him an invitation to dinner. Macaulay, who (at that time) hated society, had already written a letter of refusal, when some comrades burst into his room, and being informed of the correspondence pending, told Macaulay that “he must accept.” As the invitation was for that very day, they further decided that Macaulay must be washed, scrubbed for the occasion, for in those days he was excessively negligent of his personal appearance. And the thing was done vi et armis.

  I used … to look in during the course of the day, upon whatever circle might be gathered in the drawing or morning rooms, for a few minutes at a time, and remember, on this occasion of my meeting Macaulay at Bowood, my amazement at finding him always in the same position on the hearth-rug, always talking, always answering everybody’s questions about everything, always pouring forth eloquent knowledge; and I used to listen to him till I was breathless with what I thought ought to have been his exhaustion. As one approached the room, the loud, even, declamatory sound of his voice made itself heard like the uninterrupted flow of a fountain. He stood there from morning till evening, like a knight in the lists, challenging and accepting the challenge of all comers. There never was such a speech-“power,” and as the volume of his voice was full and sonorous, he had immense advantages in sound as well as sense over his adversaries. Sydney Smith’s humorous and good-humored rage at his prolific talk was very funny. Rogers’s, of course, was not good-humored.

  I have much pleasure in giving you any information in my power respecting Lord Macaulay. He died in his library at Holly Lodge. For some time before he had been in ill-health from weak heart. His servant, who had left him feeling rather better, found on his return his master fainting in his chair. I was quickly sent for, got him removed to his couch, where he expired in a few moments. None of his family were with him. His sister, Mrs. Trevelyan, arrived soon after his death, accompanied by her son, then a very young man, but now, I believe, the Irish Secretary. At the time of his seizure Lord Macaulay was reading a number of the “Cornhill Magazine,” then a new publication; and, as far as my memory serves me, he was reading Thackeray’s “Adventures of Philip.” Holly Lodge is still standing and is, I believe, unaltered. You will find it on the top of Campden Hill, next the Duke of Argyll’s.

  In one thing all agree—critics, public, friends, and opponents. Macaulay’s was a life of purity, honour, courage, generosity, affection, was manly perseverance, almost without a stain or a defect. His life, it was true, was singularly fortunate, and he had but few trials, and no formidable obstacles. He was bred up in the comfortable egoism of the opulent middle classes; the religion of comfort, laisser-faire, and social order was infused into his bones. But, so far as his traditions and temper would permit, his life was as honourable, as unsullied, and as generous, as ever was that of any man who lived in the fierce light that beats upon the famous. We know his nature and his career as well as we know any man’s; and we find it on every side wholesome, just, and right.

Oratory

  Tickler.—“An ugly, cross-made, splay-footed, shapeless little dumpling of a fellow, with a featureless face too—except indeed a good expansive forehead—sleek puritanical sandy hair—large glimmering eyes—and a mouth from ear to ear. He has a lisp and a burr, moreover, and speaks thickly and huskily for several minutes before he gets into the swing of his discourse: but after that nothing can be more dazzling than his whole execution. What he says is substantially, of course, mere stuff and nonsense; but it is so well worded, and so volubly and forcibly delivered—there is such an endless string of epigram and antithesis—such a flashing of epithets—such an accumulation of images—and the voice is so trumpetlike and the action so grotesquely emphatic, that you might hear a pin drop in the house. Manners Sutton himself listens. It is so obvious that he has got the main parts at least by heart—but for this I give him the more praise and glory. Altogether, the impression on my mind was very much beyond what I had been prepared for—so much so that I can honestly and sincerely say I felt for his situation most deeply, when Peel was skinning him alive the next evening, and the sweat of agony kept pouring down his well-bronzed cheeks under the merciless infliction.”

  I say, Sir, that I admit the learned gentleman’s eloquence, and feel it peculiarly, not only from the admiration it excites, but from the difficulty it imposes upon the humble individual whose fortune it is—haud passibus æquis—to follow him. But I am relieved, in some degree, by the reflection that, as from the highest flights men are liable to the heaviest falls, and in the swiftest courses to the most serious disasters, so, I will say, it is the most brilliant eloquence sometimes interrupted by intervals of the greatest obscurity, and the most impassioned declamation defeated by the most fatal contradictions; and I must assert that the speech of the learned gentleman had points of weakness which no imprudence or want of judgment ever surpassed, and carried within itself its own refutation beyond any other speech I almost ever heard…. Not satisfied with those vague generalities, which he handled with that brilliant declamation which tickles the ear and amuses the imagination, without satisfying the reason, he unluckily, I think, for the force of his appeal, thought proper to descend to argumentative illustration and historical precedents.—But whence has he drawn his experience? Sir, he drew his weapon from the very armoury to which, if I had been aware of his attack, I should myself have resorted for the means of repelling it.

  His maiden speech electrified the House, and called forth the highest compliments to the speaker from men of all parties. He was careful to preserve the laurels he had thus so easily and suddenly won. He was a man of shrewd mind, and knew that if he spoke often, the probability was, he could not speak so well; and that consequently there could be no more likely means of lowering him from the elevated station to which he had raised himself, than frequently addressing the House. In this he was quite right, for he had no talents for extempore speaking…. His personal appearance is prepossessing. In stature he is about the middle size, and well formed. His eyes are of a deep blue, and have a very intelligent expression. His complexion is dark, and his hair of a dark-brown colour. His face is rather inclined to the oval form. His features are small and regular.

  I cannot read Lord Macaulay’s “Speeches” without feeling that they are more than mere brilliant compositions, such as every one will at once allow them to be. They are, I conceive, documents of very great value for that important portion of English history which is included between the latter years of George IV.’s reign, and the commencement of the reign of Queen Victoria.

  No man ever possessed to a greater degree than Lord Macaulay the real secret of an orator,—the power to enter into, and to arouse at will, the emotions which sway masses of mankind. Rhetorical, in the proper sense of the word, he was not. The distinction is not easy to give exactly; but perhaps we may find it in this, that the strength of the orator lies in power and sincerity; while the rhetorician is an artist only, bent on temporary success, with or without convictions, as the case may be. By the former spirit Macaulay was always actuated; to the latter he was always a stranger. Some wonderful critics have indeed declared that, wanting heart himself, he never reached the hearts of others—that he coloured his characters from the mere love of effective contrasts, heedless of the truth of his portraits. Astonished silence is the only answer to such criticism as this.

  I never heard Macaulay speak in the House, where, although by no means an orator, he always made a strong impression. He spoke as he wrote—eloquently, in the choicest diction—smooth, easy, graceful, and ever to the purpose; striving to convince rather than persuade, and grudging no toil of preparation to sustain an argument or enforce a truth. His person was in his favor; in form as in mind he was robust, with a remarkably intelligent expression, aided by deep-blue eyes that seemed to sparkle, and a mouth remarkably flexible. His countenance was certainly well calculated to impress on his audience the classical language ever at his command—so faithfully did it mirror the high intelligence of the speaker. Yet he never created enthusiasm, and seemed aiming only to convince.

Essays

  “Edinburgh Review” came last night. A smart, vigorous paper by Macaulay on Horace Walpole. Ambitious, too antithetic; the heart of the matter not struck. What will that man become? He has more force and emphasis in him than any other of my British contemporaries (coevals). Wants the root of belief, however. May fail to accomplish much. Let us hope better things.

  What I have said about Bacon’s philosophy is widely at variance with what Dugald Stewart and Mackintosh have said on the same subject…. If I am in the wrong, my errors may set the minds of others at work, and may be the means of bringing both them and me to a knowledge of the truth. I never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written. There is not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been repeatedly re-cast. I have no expectation that the popularity of the article will bear any proportion to the trouble which I have expended on it. But the trouble has been so great a pleasure to me that I have already been very greatly overpaid.

  The Bacon is, as you say, very striking, and no doubt is the work of an extremely clever man. It is so very long that I think you might have cut it in two, there being an obvious division. But (not to trouble you with the superfluous enumeration of its good qualities), it has two grievous defects,—a redundancy, an over-crowding of every one thing that is touched upon, that almost turns one’s head; for it is out of one digression into another, and each thought in each is illustrated by twenty different cases and anecdotes, all of which follow from the first without any effort. This is a sad defect in Macaulay, and it really seems to get worse instead of better. I need not say that it is the defect of a very clever person—it is indeed exuberance. But it is a defect also that old age is liable to.

  Macaulay’s article is splendid. It would have killed Playfair, who took me to task for inserting a similar view of Bacon’s character (written by Dr. Lee) in the “Edinburgh Encyclopædia.” I think the Reviewer has taken an extreme view of Bacon’s conduct.

  We have been much entertained and interested in Macaulay’s “Life of Hastings” in the Edinburgh; but some of it is too gaudily written, and mean gaudiness, unsuited to the subject—such as the dresses of the people at Westminster Hall; and I think Macaulay’s indignation against Gleig for his adulation of Hastings, and his not feeling indignation against his crimes, is sometimes noble, and sometimes mean and vituperative.

  His critical Essays exhibit a wide variety of knowledge, with a great fertility of illustration, and enough of the salt of pleasantry and sarcasm to flavour, and in some degree disguise, a somewhat declamatory and pretentious dogmatism.

  Macaulay’s style, like other original things, has already produced a school of imitators. Its influence may distinctly be traced, both to the periodical and daily literature of the day. Its great characteristic is the shortness of the sentences, which often equal that of Tacitus himself, and the rapidity with which new and distinct ideas of facts succeed each other in his richly-stored pages. He is the Pope of English prose: he often gives two sentiments or facts in a single line. No preceding writer in prose, in any modern language with which we are acquainted, has carried this art of abbreviation, or rather cramming of ideas to such a length; and to its felicitous use much of the celebrity which he has acquired is to be ascribed. There is no doubt that it is a most powerful engine for the stirring of the mind, and when not repeated too often, or carried too far, has a surprising effect. Its introduction forms an era in our historical composition.

  Of all who wrote in the Edinburgh Review, not one contributor stamped his compositions with such inimitable workmanship. The articles were often unequal in power of statement and weight of matter; but they were uniform in brilliancy, and in the resources of a style that could decorate the superficial and hide the sophistical with varied graces, with ingenuity of thought, and variety of allusion, with sparkling fancies, and a sonorous arrangement of words that titillated the ears with luscious cadences.

  His “Essays” make us think of Addison, though at first they rather suggest the amazing difference between the two men and the two periods.

  The most remunerative collection of essays ever published in this or any other country.

  The astonishing success of this celebrated book must be regarded as something of far higher consequence than a mere literary or commercial triumph. It is no insignificant feat to have awakened in hundreds of thousands of minds the taste for letters and the yearning for knowledge; and to have sworn by example that, in the interests of its own fame, genius can never be so well employed as on the careful and earnest treatment of serious themes.

  His “Essays” are as good as a library; they make an incomparable manual and vademecum for a busy, uneducated man who has curiosity and enlightenment enough to wish to know a little about the great lives and great thoughts, the shining words and many-coloured complexities of action, that have marked the journey of man through the ages. Macaulay had an intimate acquaintance both with the imaginative literature and the history of Greece and Rome, with the literature and the history of modern Italy, of France, and of England. Whatever his special subject, he contrives to pour into it with singular dexterity a stream of rich, graphic, and telling illustrations from all these widely diversified sources.

  With the “Essay on Milton” began Macaulay’s career, and, brilliant as the career was, it had few points more brilliant than its beginning…. A style to dazzle, to gain admirers everywhere, to attract imitators in multitude! A style brilliant, metallic, exterior; making strong points, alternating invective with eulogy, wrapping in a robe of rhetoric the thing it represents; not, with the soft play of life, following and rendering the thing’s very form and pressure. For, indeed, in rendering things in this fashion, Macaulay’s gift did not lie.

  Say what we will, Macaulay’s “Essays” remain a brilliant and fascinating page in English literature. The world is never persistently mistaken in such cases. Time enough has elapsed, since their publication, to submerge them in oblivion had they not contained a vital spark of genius which criticism is powerless to extinguish. If not wells of original knowledge, they have acted like irrigating rills which convey and distribute the fertilizing waters from the fountain-head. The best would adorn any literature, and even the less successful have a picturesque animation, and convey an impression of power that will not easily be matched.

  Whatever defects he may have, when that vast work, the history of criticism, is finally written, Macaulay will be sure of a chapter, and a chapter of no small significance.

  In prose more vigorous influences were at work. In 1825, Macaulay marked an epoch in criticism by contributing to the Edinburgh Review his elaborate article on Milton, the earliest example in English of the modern étude, or monograph in miniature, which has since become so popular a province of letters. When our period closes, Macaulay is a cabinet minister. His career as an essayist was mainly prior to 1840, at which date he had shown himself neither ballad-writer nor historian. In his famous reviews he created a species of literature, partly biographical, partly critical, which had an unrivalled effect in raising the average of cultivation. Countless readers found in the pages of Macaulay’s “Essays” their earliest stimulus to independent thought and the humane study of letters.

  Macaulay’s essays are lively and entertaining, but their literary merit has been overestimated. They are really the chips and débris of his history, and though there are brilliant passages among them, they are for the most part carelessly written. The best that can be said of some of them is that they are more interesting than the books which Macaulay pretended to review. In others, serious subjects are treated in a wanton and superficial manner. They are rather dangerous reading for young people, or indeed for any who cannot discriminate readily between the true and false in literature. He has a bad habit of cumulative repetition and deals too frequently in sharp antitheses. His style of argument in reply to what he calls Sadler’s Refutation is in the most domineering parliamentary vein. We feel less compunction in exposing the errors in Macaulay’s writing, for he was always most unmerciful in his criticism of others.

  Macaulay had the unusual good fortune to reach at a bound the highest step in the ladder of fame. The critics were disturbed because he did not stop to show them his passports, and they at once began to call him back, but their shrill notes were lost in the torrents of popular acclaim. He made his debut in the Edinburgh Review with the famous essay on Milton, and nothing that he produced later quite equalled it. While he is not a great critic, he arouses interest in his subject, which is perhaps more important, especially with young readers, and this is the secret of his continued popularity. The contrasts between Carlyle, De Quincey, and Macaulay are very marked. Carlyle is a great poet, muscular, homely, lurid; De Quincey is a great artist, incisive, subtle, brilliant; Macaulay is a great reporter of affairs, aboundingly picturesque—“a symphony in purple and gold.” His art was not evolved, it was cast.

  His want of success was far greater than he knew. It was not merely in the analysis, but in the discovery of genius that he at times failed. The swaggering judgment which he passed on Boswell, in rhetoric as clever as it is swollen, shows that the mind of the man who delighted—and not without good reason delighted—an earlier generation by three volumes of “Critical and Historical Essays,” was something worse than uncritical.

  As an essayist Macaulay occupies an almost unique position in English literature. He created the historical essay, a form of literature exactly suited to the time in which he lived, a brief, clear, and illuminating introduction to some great era or some dominating personality. It is perfectly true that the more one knows about the era or the personality, the less one cares for Macaulay’s introduction; but it is none the less valuable to the beginner for its stimulating quality, its power to awaken the interest in the past and the far away. Macaulay has been well called an almost unsurpassed leader to reading, and his essays have been to hundreds and thousands the door through which they entered into the great world of past politics, history, and literature. Macaulay is seldom a good critic, never an impartial judge; he is always, as in the “Essay on Milton,” an advocate pleading his cause. But—and this is the great merit of his work—his causes are almost always right. He is biased indeed, but in favor of liberty, toleration, decency, and good faith.

Poems

  It is a great merit of these poems that they are free from ambition and exaggeration. Nothing seems overdone; no tawdry piece of finery disfigures the simplicity of the plan that has been chosen. They seemed to have been framed with great artistical skill, with much self-denial and abstinence from anything incongruous, and with a very successful imitation of the effects intended to be represented. Yet here and there images of beauty and expressions of feeling are thrown out that are wholly independent of Rome or the Romans, and that appeal to the widest sensibilities of the human heart. In point of homeliness of thought and language there is often a boldness which none but a man conscious of great powers of writing would have ventured to show.

  These poems, therefore, are not the worse for being un-Roman in their form; and in their substance they are Roman to a degree which deserves great admiration…. We have not been able to detect, in the four poems, one idea or feeling which was not, or might not have been, Roman; while the externals of Roman life, and the feelings characteristic of Rome and of that particular age, are reproduced with great felicity, and without being made unduly predominant over the universal features of human nature and human life. Independently, therefore, of their value as poems, these compositions are a real service rendered to historical literature; and the author has made this service greater by his prefaces, which will do more than the work of a hundred dissertations in rendering that true conception of early Roman history, the irrefragable establishment of which has made Niebuhr illustrious, familiar to the minds of general readers.

  You are very right in admiring Macaulay, who has a noble, clear, metallic note in his soul, and makes us ready by it for battle. I very much admire Mr. Macaulay, and could scarcely read his ballads and keep lying down. They seem to draw me up to my feet as the mesmeric powers are said to do.

  The last publication of Mr. Macaulay—his “Lays of Ancient Rome”—may fairly be called, not an exhumation of decayed materials, but a reproduction of classical vitality. The only thing we might object to, is the style and form of his metres and rhythms, which are not classical, but Gothic, and often remind us of the “Percy Reliques.” There is no attempt to imitate the ancient metres. In other respects these lays are Roman to the backbone; and where not so, they are Homeric. The events and subjects of the poems are chosen with an heroic spirit; there is all the hard glitter of steel about the lines!—their music is the neighing of steeds, and the tramp of armed heels, their inspiration was the voice of a trumpet.

  The most brilliant and rapid of all contemporary writers, his poetry is an array of strong thoughts and glittering fancies bounding along on a rushing stream of feeling. It has almost the appearance of splendid impromptu composition.

  Mr. Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome” differed initially from Mr. Lockhart’s Spanish translations in this, that the latter worked from the native materials, which he refined and improved; the former simply from the general scope and spirit of ancient legends. Taking it for granted, according to the very probable theory of Niebuhr, that the semi-fabulous traditions of all infant nations must have existed primarily in a metrical form, he re-transferred some of the portions of early Roman history back into the shape which might be supposed to have been their original one ere historicized by Livy, and this with great consummate imaginative and artistic ability. He is entirely of the Homer, the Chaucer, and Scott school, his poetry being thoroughly that of action; and sentiment is seldom more than interjectionally introduced—the utmost fidelity being thus shown to the essential characteristics of that species of composition which he has so triumphantly illustrated.

  That he was imbued with the very soul of poetry is sufficiently evinced by his “Battle of Lake Regillus” and his moving “Legends of Rome.”

  His [Maginn’s] “Homeric Ballads” are vigorous and genuine poems in their own way; they are not one continual falsetto, like the pinchbeck “Roman Ballads” of Lord Macaulay.

  Not even in the palmy days of Scott and Byron was such an immediate and enormous circulation attained.

  Lord Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome” was a literary surprise, but its poetry is the rhythmical outflow of a vigorous and affluent writer, given to splendor of diction and imagery in his flowing prose. He spoke once in verse, and unexpectedly. His themes were legendary, and suited to the author’s heroic cast, nor was Latinism ever more poetical than under his thoroughly sympathetic handling. I am aware that the “Lays” are criticised as being stilted and false to the antique, but to me they have a charm, and to almost every healthy young mind are an immediate delight. Where in modern ballad-verse will you find more ringing stanzas, or more impetuous movement and action? Occasionally we have a noble epithet or image. Within his range—little as one who met him might have surmised it—Macaulay was a poet, and of the kind which Scott would have been first to honor. “Horatius” and “Virginius” among the Roman lays, and that resonant battle-cry of “Ivry” have become, it would seem, a lasting portion of English verse.

  Nobody, least of all Macaulay himself, has ever put them forward as constituting a great poem, still his poetical powers, little as he cultivated them, are not inconsiderable. They are quite enough, when supported by the vivid and accurate knowlege of the topics he is handling, and fired by his genuine historical enthusiasm, to create a poem good of its kind and in its degree; a poem, moreover, which, unlike many more ambitious compositions, is alive and not dead. He has at any rate succeeded in making Roman heroes and Roman traditions household words at the average English fireside, and it is not everyone who could have done that.

  Macaulay was, perhaps, at his best in his four “Lays of Ancient Rome.” Whatever else he wrote required some qualities of mind other than those which have made all that he wrote popular. The “Lays of Ancient Rome” called into play just those powers which he had in perfection, and required no more…. Macaulay caught the swing of Scott’s romance measure, made it a little more rhetorical, without loss—some might say rather with increase of energy,—and brought into play his own power of realizing in his mind all that he told.

  “The Lays” are dated 1842; they have passed through edition after edition; and if Matthew Arnold disliked and contemned them, the general [reader] is wise enough to know them by heart. But a book that is “a catechism to fight” (in Johnson’s phrase) would have sinned against itself had it taken no account of them, and I have given “Horatius” in its integrity…. As for “The Armada,” I have preferred it to “The Battle of Naseby,” first, because it is neither vicious nor ugly, and the other is both; and, second, because it is so brilliant an outcome of that capacity for dealing with proper names which Macaulay, whether poet or not, possesses in common with none but certain among the greater poets.

  I believe the critics of the grand style call them “pinchbeck,” which I fancy is meant to be scornful—I can only say that they are still ringing in my ears with a note as fresh as they had fifty years back. I have said them over on their own ground; I have proved the truth of every epithet; and now, with the Sicilian deeds of Pyrrhus as my day’s work, it is the notes of the “Prophecy of Capys” which come first home to me at the thought of the “Red King” and his bold Epirotes.

  If the boys of England could be polled as to their favourite poet, Sir Walter Scott and Lord Macaulay would doubtless divide the honours, and if the favourite poem were in question, “Horatius” would probably be voted first…. Macaulay was a master of prosody and had a thorough command over the instrument of rhyme. His versification is without flaw, though it is said to lack the spontaneous variety which avoids monotony. It displays a vigour and vividness which command both eye and ear and which is maintained without any sacrifice of form.

  It is a gross and vulgar critical error to deem Macaulay’s poetical effects vulgar or gross. They are popular; they hit exactly that scheme of poetry which the general ear can appreciate and the general brain understand. They are coin for general circulation; but they are not base coin. Hundreds and thousands of immature and ’prentice tastes have been educated to the enjoyment of better things by them; thousands and tens of thousands of tastes, respectable at least, have found in them the kind of poetry which they can like, and beyond which they are not fitted to go. And it would be a very great pity if there were ever wanting critical appreciations, which, while relishing things more exquisite and understanding things more esoteric, can still taste and savour the simple genuine fare of poetry which Macaulay offers.

  The mention of Macaulay reminds me of the charm I found in his “Lays of Ancient Rome,” which came out when I was fitting for college. Certain critics, of whom the late Matthew Arnold is perhaps the most noteworthy, tell us that the “Lays” are not poetry; but on that question I am content to be wrong with John Stuart Mill and “Christopher North” and Henry Morley and Edmund Clarence Stedman, if they are wrong, rather than to be right with Matthew Arnold, if he is right.

The History of England, 1849–55

  The mother that bore you had she been yet alive, would scarcely have felt prouder or happier than I do at this outburst of your graver fame. I have long had a sort of parental interest in your glory, and it is now mingled with a feeling of deference to your intellectual superiority which can only consist, I take it, with the character of a female parent.

  Finished Macaulay’s two volumes. How admirable they are; full of generous impulse, judicial impartiality, wide research, deep thought, picturesque description, and sustained eloquence! Was history ever better written?

  The first two volumes of Macaulay’s “History” have had a most brilliant success, but I cannot help thinking that the work has meretricious attractions which may pall upon the public taste. There can be no doubt that, to produce a startling effect, the author does exaggerate very much, if he may be defended from positive misrepresenting. I rejoice that such good principles as those which he inculcates should be found in such a popular work.

  Macaulay’s success has been enormous; indeed, such as to convince one his book cannot be worth much—that is, in a high sense, for in a low one his two volumes have got him £10,000. A young officer said to me, “That is what I call history. We took five copies at our depot.”

  I have just finished Macaulay’s two volumes of the “History of England” with the same feeling that you expressed—regret at coming to the end, and longing for another volume—the most uncommon feeling, I suppose, that readers of two thick octavo volumes of the history of England and of times so well known, or whose story has been so often written, ever experienced. In truth, in the whole course of reading or hearing it read I was sorry to stop and glad to go on. It bears peculiarly well that severe test of being read aloud; it never wearies the ear by the long resounding line, but keeps the attention alive by the energy shown. It is the perfection of style so varied, and yet the same in fitness, in propriety, in perspicuity, in grace, in dignity and eloquence, and, whenever naturally called forth in that just indignation which makes the historian as well as the poet. If Voltaire says true that “the style is the man” what a man must Macaulay be! But the man is in fact as much more than the style, as the matter is more than the manner. It is astonishing with what ease Macaulay wields, manages, arranges his vast materials collected far and near, and knows their value and proportions so as to give the utmost strength and force and light and life to the whole, and sustains the whole. Such new lights are thrown upon historic facts and historic characters that the old appear new, and that which had been dull becomes bright and entertaining and interesting.

  He has written some very brilliant essays—very transparent in artifice, and I suspect not over honest in scope and management, but he has written no history; and he has, I believe, committed himself ingeniously in two or three points, which, fitly exposed, would confound him a good deal, and check his breeze from El Dorado. Chiefly, his bitter hatred of the Church of England all through is evident; it is, I think, the only very strong feeling in the book; and his depreciation of the station and character of the clergy of Charles II. and James II. to-day is but a symptom…. I doubt if Macaulay’s book will go down as a standard edition to our historical library, though it must always keep a high place among the specimens of English rhetoric.

  The sect of Quakers has been in high dudgeon with Macaulay, for what they consider an unjust attack upon Penn in his History. They demanded an interview, which he at once granted, and they remonstrated with him upon what they considered his aspersions on their fame, particularly as referring to the transaction of the money which was extorted from the girls who went out to meet Monmouth for the use of the maids of honour, and which was carried on by Penn. The Quakers denied the facts, but Macaulay produced all the official documents on which he had founded his statement, and they were entirely floored. Macaulay offered to print the documents from which he had gathered his facts, but they were in no hurry to accept this proposal, and said they would confer further before they gave their answer. Macaulay was much amused by this incident, and contrived to please the Quakers by his courtesy.

  Mr Macaulay’s historical narrative is poisoned with a rancour more violent than even the passions of the time; and the literary qualities of the work, though in some respects very remarkable, are far from redeeming its substantial defects. There is hardly a page—we speak literally, hardly a page—that does not contain something objectionable either in substance or in colour: and the whole of the brilliant and at first captivating narrative is perceived on examination to be impregnated to a really marvelous degree with bad taste, bad feeling, and, we are under the painful necessity of adding—bad faith. These are grave charges: but we make them in sincerity, and we think that we shall be able to prove them; and if, here or hereafter, we should seem to our readers to use harsher terms than good taste might approve, we beg in excuse to plead that it is impossible to fix one’s attention on, and to transcribe large portions of a work, without being in some degree infected with its spirit; and Mr. Macaulay’s pages, whatever may be their other characteristics, are as copious a repertorium of vituperative eloquence as, we believe, our language can produce, and especially against everything in which he chooses (whether right or wrong) to recognise the shiboleth of Toryism…. Mr. Macaulay’s Historical Novel…. We accuse him of a habitual and really injurious perversion of his authorities. This unfortunate indulgence, in whatever juvenile levity it may have originated, and through whatever steps it may have grown into an unconscious habit, seems to us to pervade the whole work—from Alpha to Omega—from Procopius to Mackintosh—and it is on that very account the more difficult to bring to the distinct conception of our readers. Individual instances can be, and shall be, produced; but how can we extract and exhibit the minute particles that colour every thread of the texture?—how extract the impalpable atoms that have fermented the whole brewing? We must do as Dr. Faraday does at the Institution when he exhibits in miniature the larger processes of Nature.

  But as he announced a History, the public received as a bona fide History the work on which he purposes to build his fame. If it had been announced as a historical romance, it might have been read with almost unmixed delight, though exception might have been taken to his presentment of several characters and facts. He has been abundantly punished, for instance, for his slanderous exhibition of William Penn. But he has fatally manifested his loose and unscrupulous method of narrating, and, in his first edition, gave no clue whatever to his authorities, and no information in regard to dates which he could possibly suppress. Public opinion compelled, in future editions, some appearance of furnishing references to authorities, such as every conscientious historian finds it indispensable to his peace of mind to afford, but it is done by Macaulay in the most ineffectual and baffling way possible,—by clubbing together the mere names of his authorities at the bottom of the page, so that reference is all but impracticable. Where it is made, by painstaking readers, the inaccuracies and misrepresentations of the historian are found to multiply as the work of verification proceeds. In fact, the only way to accept his History is to take it as a brilliant fancypiece,—wanting not only the truth but the repose of history,—but stimulating, and even, to a degree, suggestive.

  The one thing which detracts from the pleasure of reading these volumes is the doubt whether they should have been written. Should not these great powers be reserved for great periods? Is this abounding, picturesque style suited for continuous history? Are small men to be so largely described? Should not admirable delineation be kept for admirable people? We think so,—you do not want Raphael to paint sign-posts, or Palladio to build dirt pies…. The life of a great painter is short; even the industry of Macaulay will not complete this history. It is a pity to spend such powers on such events; it would have been better to have some new volumes of essays solely on great men and great things. The diffuseness of the style would have been then in place; we could have borne to hear the smallest minutiæ of magnificent epochs. If an inferior hand had executed the connecting links, our notions would have acquired an insensible perspective: the works of the great artist, the best themes would have stood out from the canvas; they are now confused by the equal brilliancy of the adjacent inferiorities.

  On several subjects I should venture to differ from Mr. Macaulay; but I cannot refrain from expressing my admiration of his unwearied diligence, of the consummate skill with which he has arranged his materials, and of the noble love of liberty which animates his entire work. These are qualities which will long survive the aspersions of his puny detractors,—men who, in point of knowledge and ability, are unworthy to loosen the shoe-latchet of him they foolishly attack.

  My attention was first directed to the subject of the following pages by finding in Lord Macaulay’s picture of William Penn a character, so inconsistent with itself, that one would not expect to meet with it until we discover a country inhabited by centaurs, or succeed in catching a living mermaid. I was thus led to examine the authorities on which he relies. A short time served to convince me that the dark stains with which he has disfigured the portrait of Penn were not to be found in the original, but owed their existence solely to the jaundiced eye of the artist.

  I have only recently read over again the whole of his “History of England” with undiminished pleasure and admiration, though with a confirmed opinion that his style is not the very best, and that he is not the writer whom I should be most desirous to imitate; but what appears to me most admirable and most worthy of imitation in Macaulay is the sound moral constitution of his mind, and his fearless independence of thought, never sacrificing truth to any prejudice, interest, or preconceived opinion whatever. Above all he was no hero worshipper, who felt it incumbent on him to minister to vulgar prejudices or predilections, to exalt the merits and palliate the defects of great reputations, and to consider the commission of great crimes, or the detection of mean and base motives, as atoned for and neutralized by the possession of shining abilities and the performance of great actions. Macaulay excited much indignation in some quarters by the severity with which he criticised the conduct and character of the Duke of Marlborough, and the Quakers bitterly resented his attacks upon Penn. He was seldom disposed to admit that he had been mistaken or misinformed, and I thought he was to blame in clinging so tenaciously to his severe estimation of Penn’s conduct after the vindication of it which was brought forward, and the production of evidence in Penn’s favor, which might have satisfied him that he had been in error, and which probably would have done so in any case in which his judgment had been really unbiased. I always regretted, not for the sake of Penn’s memory, but for the honour of Macaulay himself, that he would not admit the value and force of the exculpatory evidence, and acknowledge, as he very gracefully might, the probability at least of his having been in error. But the case of the Duke of Marlborough is very different, and reflects the highest honour on his literary integrity and independence.

  He does not wear Hallam’s spotless ermine, and in reading his pages, we fail to feel that a new Chief Justice has taken his place on the great bench of historians. On matters of detail issue has been joined with him by different critics more or less competent. Lord Macaulay’s knowledge of facts was so extraordinary, and so minute, that in any controversy the chances decidedly are that he is correct, and his opponents in the wrong. At the same time a body of adverse criticism exists in reference to the “History,” which is entitled to serious consideration. Such writers as the Bishop of Exeter, Mr. Lothbury, Mr. Paget, Mr. Dixon, Mr. Babington, have brought a series of objections against different portions of the “History” in which it is difficult to believe that there is no substratum of reality.

  His history is like a cavalry charge. Down go horse and man before his rapid and reckless onset. His “rush” is irresistible save by the coolest judgment and the most cultivated intellects. Ranks are broken, guns are spiked, and away sweeps the bold dragoon to arrive at a fresh square.

  He never seems to doubt what he narrates, nor to doubt that what he says is the absolute truth. His style, hence, becomes cumbrous and heavy-glittering, it may be, but glittering like cut steel or polished lead; and, if looked at in the writings of some of his imitators, in whose hands the historian’s mannerisms and peculiarities are not relieved by sterling qualities, appears both ridiculous and offensive.

  He has brought to this work a new method of great beauty, extreme power…. When he is relating the actions of a man or a party, he sees in an instant all the events of his history, and all the maxims of his conduct; he has all the details present; he remembers them every moment, in great numbers. He has forgotten nothing; he runs through them as easily, as completely, as surely, as on the day when he enumerated or wrote them. No one has so well taught or known history…. He is not a poet like Michelet; he is not a philosopher like Guizot; but he possesses so well all the oratorical powers, he accumulates and arranges so many facts, he holds them so closely in his hand, he manages them with so much ease and vigour, that he succeeds in recomposing the whole and harmonious woof of history, not losing or separating one thread. The poet reanimates the dead; the philosopher formulates creative laws; the orator knows, expounds, and pleads causes. The poet resuscitates souls, the philosopher composes a system, the orator redisposes chains of arguments; but all three march towards the same end by different routes, and the orator, like his rivals, and by other means than his rivals, reproduces in his work the unity and complexity of life.

  The day of their publication, 17th Dec., 1855, will be long remembered in the annals of Paternoster Row. It was presumed that 25,000 copies would be quite sufficient to meet the first public demand; but this enormous pile of books, weighing fifty-six tons, was exhausted the first day, and eleven thousand applicants were still unsatisfied. In New York one house sold 73,000 volumes (three different styles and prices) in ten days, and 25,000 more were immediately issued in Philadelphia—10,000 were stereotyped, printed, and in the hands of publishers within fifty working hours. The aggregate sale in England and America, within four weeks of publication, is said to have exceeded 150,000 copies. Macaulay is also stated to have received £16,000 from Mr. Longman for the copyright of the third and fourth volumes.

  It may be thought that the successful work of that great master in the art of descriptive history would have deterred me from my attempt; but, on the contrary, it acted as an incentive, since it breaks off just at the point where the great difficulties of the new government began, and the new system finally consolidated itself. I should not have been contented with my work had I not (to keep up the simile) attempted the ascent of this last height, from which I might hope to survey the past and the future, the whence and the whither of the history.

  What his violins were to Stradivarius, and his fresco to Leonardo, and his campaigns to Napoleon, that was his “History” to Macaulay. How fully it occupied his thoughts did not appear in his conversation; for he steadily and successfully resisted any inclinations to that most subtle form of selfishness, which often renders the period of literary creation one long penance to all the members of an author’s family. But none the less his book was always in his mind; and seldom indeed did he pass a day or turn over a volume without lighting upon a suggestion which could be turned to useful purposes.

  Its vivid word-painting of characters and great events, and the splendid use in such descriptions of his vast knowledge of details, gave as great an impulse to the literature of history as Gibbon had done in his day, and his “Historical Essays” on the times and statesmen between the Restoration and Pitt are masterpieces of their kind.

  Certainly history had never before in our country been treated in a style so well calculated to render it at once popular, fascinating, and fashionable. Every chapter glittered with vivid and highly coloured description. On almost every page was found some sentence of glowing eloquence or gleaming antithesis, which at once lent itself to citation and repetition. Not one word of it could have failed to convey its meaning. The whole stood out in an atmosphere clear, bright, and incapable of misty illusion as that of a Swiss lake in summer. He was not a Gibbon, but he wrote with all Gibbon’s delight in the picturesqueness of a subject, and Gibbon’s resolve to fascinate as well as to instruct his readers. Macaulay’s history tries too much to be an historical portrait gallery. The dangers of such a style do not need to be pointed out. They are amply illustrated in Macaulay’s sparkling pages. But it is something to know that their splendid qualities are far more conspicuous still than their defects.

  This is undoubtedly the most brilliant and the most popular history ever written in the English language. Though the work covers a period of only seventeen years, and those not among the most eventful ones in English annals, yet the splendor of the author’s style has caused it to be more universally read than any other history in English literature. It shows vast research, extraordinary power in the portraiture of individual character, and a literary skill that is unrivalled.

  There is here a wide field of choice. Shall we go back to the art of which Macaulay was so great a master? We could do worse. It must be a great art that can make men lay aside the novel and take up the history, to find there, in very fact, the movement and drama of life. What Macaulay does well he does incomparably. Who else can mass the details as he does, and yet not mar or obscure, but only heighten, the effect of the picture as a whole? Who else can bring so amazing a profusion of knowledge within the strait limits of a simple plan, nowhere encumbered, everywhere free and obvious in its movement? How sure the strokes, and how bold and vivid the result! Yet when we have laid the book aside, when the charm and the excitement of the telling narrative have worn off, when we have lost step with the swinging gait at which the style goes, when the details have faded from our recollection, and we sit removed and thoughtful, with only the greater outlines of the story sharp upon our minds, a deep misgiving and dissatisfaction take possession of us. We are no longer young, and we are chagrined that we should have been so pleased and taken with the glitter and color and mere life of the picture…. Macaulay the artist, with an exquisite gift for telling a story, filling his pages with little vignettes it is impossible to forget, fixing these with an inimitable art upon the surface of a narrative that did not need the ornament they gave it, so strong and large and adequate was it; and Macaulay, the Whig, subtly turning narrative into argument, and making history the vindication of a party. The mighty narrative is a great engine of proof. It is not told for its own sake. It is evidence summed up in order to justify a judgment. We detect the tone of the advocate, and though if we are just we must deem him honest, we cannot deem him safe. The great story-teller is discredited; and, willingly or unwillingly, we reject the guide who takes it upon himself to determine for us what we shall see.

  No historian who has yet written has shown such familiarity with the facts of English history, no matter what the subject in hand may be: the extinction of villenage, the Bloody Assizes, the appearance of the newspaper, the origin of the national debt, or the state of England in 1685. Macaulay is absolutely unrivalled in the art of arranging and combining his facts, and of presenting in a clear and vigorous narrative the spirit of the epoch he treats. Nor should we fail to mention that both Essays and History abound in remarks, general observations, and comment always clear, vigorous, and shrewd, and in the main very just.

  His chief monument is the “History of England.” It is only a fragment, though it is a colossal fragment…. It was his aim to make the past a living reality to his readers, and to invest historical facts with all, or more than all, the interest of fiction. His brilliant success was largely due to the artistic use of infinite detail in narrative and in the portrayal of character. But, as he soon found when he began to write, this method required vast space. He cannot fairly be charged with diffuseness in the “History,” except, perhaps, in some cases where he develops a general statement with redundant illustration. On the other hand, he often condenses into a few words or sentences the results of wide reading and laborious research. A careful study of almost any chapter will show that, relatively to the mass of particulars which he communicates, his style is, on the whole, compact. But even a greater conciseness of language could not have materially reduced the amount of room which his plan, by its very nature, demanded.

  The enemies of Macaulay at the present time assail rather his methods than his opinions, and so far they are clearly right for a historian has as much right to his opinions as “a Christian or an ordinary man.” They allege in substance that his “History” is a misplaced eulogy of a second-rate Dutchman, that he wrote a style in which the truth could not be told, that he was as much the mouthpiece of a party as counsel in court are the mouthpieces of their clients, that he confounded William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, with another person of the same name, and that he said the oaks of Magdalen when he should have said the elms. The last charge is true…. The general accusation against Macaulay really resolves itself into this, that he overstated his case and was too much of his own opinion. I do not think it is altogether wise to deny that there is some truth in this charge. The proper answer is that the vehemence of Macaulay’s Whiggery and the unqualified manner in which he condemns Marlborough and Penn are incidental defects of a very noble quality, the quality of moral indignation. Macaulay was no arm-chair politician judging of temptations which he had never felt, and of circumstances in which he had never been placed. He sat in the House of Commons, in the Cabinet, in the Council of the Governor-General of India. He knew public life as well as any man of letters ever knew it. But the knowledge did not make him a cynic or a pessimist. He had an almost passionate belief in the progress of society and in the greatness of England.

General

  North.—“The son of the Saint, who seems himself to be something of a reviewer, is insidious as the serpent, but fangless as the slow-worm.”

  I hear that Mr. Macaulay is to be returned. If he speaks half as well as he writes, the House will be in fashion again.

  Macaulay has obtained the reputation which, although deservedly great, is yet in a remarkable measure undeserved.

  He delights everyone—high or low, intelligent or ignorant. His spice is of so keen a flavor, that it tickles the coarsest palate. He has the hesitating suffrages of men of taste, and the plaudits of the million. The man who has a common knowledge of the English language, and the scholar who has mastered its refinements, seem equally sensible to the charm of his diction. No matter how unpromising the subject on which he writes may appear to the common eye, in his hands it is made pleasing. Statistics, history, biography, political economy, all suffer a transformation into “something rich and strange.” Prosaists are made to love poetry, Tory politicians to sympathize with Hampden and Milton, and novel readers to obtain some idea of Bacon and his philosophy. The wonderful clearness, point and vigor of his style, send his thoughts right into every brain. Indeed, a person who is utterly insensible to the witchery of Macaulay’s diction must be either a Yahoo or a beatified intelligence.

  Writes like a man; that is the reason why men of sense and women of spirit are attracted by his style. There is nothing effeminate, cockneyish, dainty, or far-fetched in it; but an essential and pervading manliness.

  The brilliant Macaulay, who expresses the tone of the English governing classes of the day, explicitly teaches that good means good to eat, good to wear, material commodity; that the glory of modern philosophy is its direction on “fruit;” to yield economical inventions; and that its merit is to avoid ideas and avoid morals. He thinks it the distinctive merit of the Baconian philosophy in its triumph over the old Platonic, its disentangling the intellect from theories of the all-Fair and all-Good, and pinning it down to the making a better sick chair and a better wine-whey for an invalid;—this not ironically, but in good faith—that “solid advantage,” as he calls it, meaning always sensual benefit, is the only good.

  Macaulay seems to me the historian of sophistication, a man who writes only and always for “society,” and knows as little of any primitive existence as a New Zealander could know of Mayfair. Everybody admires him, of course, but nobody believes in him—at least, so far as my experience goes.

  Take at hazard any three pages of the “Essays” or “History,” and, glimmering below the stream of the narrative you, as it were, you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half-score of allusions to other historic facts, characters, literature, poetry, with which you are acquainted…. Your neighbor, who has his reading, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this great scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description.

  His copiousness had nothing tumid, diffuse, Asiatic; no ornament for the sake of ornament. As to its clearness, one may read a sentence of Macaulay twice, to judge of its full force, never to comprehend its meaning. His English was pure, both in idiom and in words, pure to fastidiousness…. Every word must be genuine English, nothing that approached real vulgarity, nothing that had not the stamp of popular use, or the authority of sound English writers, nothing unfamiliar to the common ear.

  Above all, we thank Macaulay for the English-heartedness which throbs transparently through his writings, and which was so marked a characteristic of his life…. With Macaulay the love of country was a passion. How he kindles at each stirring or plaintive memory in the annals he was so glad to record.

  He abounds in the stock metaphor, the stock transition, the stock equipoise, the stock rhetoric, the stock expedients generally of Addison, Robertson, Goldsmith, etc.

  What first strikes us in him is the extreme solidity of his mind. He proves all that he says, with astonishing vigour and authority. We are almost certain never to go astray in following him. If he cites a witness, he begins by measuring the veracity and intelligence of the authors quoted, and by correcting the errors they may have committed, through negligence or partiality. If he pronounces a judgment, he relies on the most certain facts, the clearest principles, the simplest and most logical deductions. If he develops an argument, he never loses himself in a digression; he always has his goal before his eyes; he advances toward it by the surest and straightest road. If he rises to general consideration, he mounts step by step through all the grades of generalization, without omitting one; he feels the ground every instant, he neither adds to nor subtracts from facts; he desires at the cost of every precaution and research, to arrive at the precise truth…. Rarely was eloquence more sweeping than Macaulay’s. He has an oratorical impetus; all his phrases have a tone, we feel that he would govern minds, that he is irritated by resistance, that he fights as he discusses. In his books the discussion always seizes and carries away the reader; it advances evenly, with accumulating force, straightforward, like those great American rivers, impetuous as a torrent and wide as a sea. This abundance of thought and style, this multitude of explanations, ideas, and facts, this fast aggregate of historical knowledge goes rolling on, urged forward by internal passion, sweeping away objections in its course, and adding to the dash of eloquence the irresistible force of its mass and weight.

  Macaulay’s composition is as far from being abstruse as printed matter can well be. One can trace in his writing a constant effort to make himself intelligible to the meanest capacity. He loves to dazzle and to argue, but above everything he is anxious to be understood. His ideal evidently is to turn a subject over on every side, to place it in all lights, and to address himself to every variety of prejudice and preoccupation in his audience. Yet his simplicity is very different from the simplicity of such writers as Goldsmith and Paley. His is far from being a homely style. He does not studiously affect Saxon terms. Without being so scholastic and technical as De Quincey, he is not scrupulous about using words of Latin origin, and admits many terms that Dean Alford would have excluded from “the Queen’s English.” Besides, although he were an Anglo-Saxon Pharisee in his choice of words, his turns of expression are not simple in the sense of being familiar and easy. His balanced sentences, abrupt transitions, pointed antithesis, and climatic arrangement, elevate him out of the ranks of homely authors, and constitute him, as we have said, pre-eminently artificial.

  Macaulay, historiographer in chief to the Whigs, and the great prophet of Whiggery which never had or will have a prophet, vehemently judged that a man who could pass over from the celestial Whigs to the infernal Tories must be a traitor false as Judas, an apostate black as the Devil.

  Macaulay, divested of all the exorbitances of his spirit and his style, would have been a Samson shorn of the locks of his strength…. He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life, and this may seem a small merit, until we remember of how few writers we could say the same…. Macaulay is like the military king who never suffered himself to be seen, even by the attendants in his bedchamber, until he had had time to put on his uniform and jack-boots. His severity of eye is very wholesome; it makes his writing firm, and firmness is certainly one of the first qualities that good writing must have. But there is such a thing as soft and considerate precision, as well as hard and scolding precision. Those most interesting English critics of the generation slightly anterior to Macaulay,—Hazlett, Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt,—were fully his equals in precision, and yet they knew how to be clear, acute, and definite without that edginess and inelasticity which is so conspicuous in Macaulay’s criticisms, alike in their matter and their form.

  First of all, Macaulay is a model of style—of style not merely as a kind of literary luxury, but of style in its practical aspect. When I say that he is a model of style, I do not mean that it is wise in any writer to copy Macaulay’s style, to try to write something that might be mistaken for Macaulay’s writing. So to do is not to follow in the steps of a great writer, but merely to imitate his outward manner. So to do is not the part of a disciple, but the part of an ape. But every one who wishes to write clear and pure English will do well to become, not Macaulay’s ape, but Macaulay’s disciple. Every writer of English will do well, not only to study Macaulay’s writings, but to bear them in his mind, and very often to ask himself, not whether his writing is like Macaulay’s writing, but whether his writing is such as Macaulay would have approved…. He was a great scholar, a great writer, a great historian, a great man. Those who can most clearly see his real faults are those who know his writings best, and who therefore admire them most. And those who know them best and admire them most will also be the first to mark what can not fairly be called faults, those gaps in the way of looking at things which belong to the man and his time, as other gaps of the same kind doubtless belong to other men and other times. Macaulay is a man who already belongs to a past age; but without such men in past ages, the present age could not have been what they have helped to make it.

  Macaulay never seems to have known either pain or mortification. He succeeded in everything which he undertook; and if there be any lesson which is taught only in the school of severity, that lesson he never learnt. A defect of some kind there undoubtedly was in him. We admire, but he fails deeply to interest. He rarely stirs our enthusiasm; he never touches our deepest emotions. In the midst of his brilliancy his writing is commonplace, though it is commonplace of the very highest kind.

  The laboriousness of Macaulay as an author demands our gratitude; all the more because his natural speech was in sentences of set and ordered structure, well-nigh ready for the press. It is delightful to find, that the most successful prose-writer of the day was also the most painstaking. Here is indeed a literary conscience…. For the style of Macaulay, though a fine and a great, is without doubt a pampering style, and it leaves upon the palate a disrelish for the homely diet of mere truth and sense.

  The truth which explains if it does not harmonize the conflicting opinions about Macaulay is that his distinctive merits and defects are merely the obverse and reverse aspects of one and the same quality. The association between seeing clearly and seeing narrowly is a well-nigh universal law of the human mind; and the undeniable narrowness of Macaulay’s view was due neither to willful blindness nor yet to defect of vision, but to the preterhuman vividness with which he saw whatever he happened at the moment to be looking at. Any object, or event, or quality which he sets himself to contemplate is illuminated as with an electric light, and, amid the dazzling brilliance which it rays around, all sense of shade and gradation is lost. This is the explanation of that luminous clearness of his color which has been so much and so justly admired: it is also the explanation of that lack of proportion and relation and that total absence of perspective which have been equally complained of in his compositions.

  The writer who has done most, without I suppose intending it, to promote hypocrisy in literature is Macaulay. His “every schoolboy knows” has frightened thousands into pretending to know authors with whom they have not even a bowing acquaintance. It is amazing that a man who had read so much should have written so contemptuously of those who have read but little; one would have thought that the consciousness of superiority would have forbidden such insolence, or that his reading would have been extensive enough to teach him at least how little he had read of what there was to read; since he read some things—works of imagination and humour, for example—to such very little purpose, he might really have bragged a little less.

  I recall no writer who is Macaulay’s equal in this art of covering his larger surfaces with minute work which is never out of place. Like the delicate sculpture on the sandals of Athene in the Parthenon, it detracts nothing from the grandeur of the statue. Or, to take a more appropriate figure, it resembles a richly decorated Gothic porch, in which every stone is curiously carved, and yet does its duty in bearing the weight of the mighty arch as well as if it were perfectly plain.

  It can hardly be said that Macaulay belonged to the very highest order of minds. I do not think that he did. In no department except the historical did he show pre-eminent capacity, and even his “History” is open to the charge of being only a splendid and ornate panorama…. Macaulay unquestionably had genius of a kind: the genius which moulds the results of immense industry into a coherent and consistent whole. This is a fine and a most rare gift; and we are not wrong when we assert that its owner must always be, even when not of the highest order, a man of genius…. He is one of the greatest masters of the English tongue. The march of his ordered prose is measured and stately. Still it is ponderous, compared at least with the unaffected freedom and flexible life of Shakespeare’s, or Fielding’s, or Charles Lamb’s. But the art with which this defect is concealed is, like every other detail of Lord Macaulay’s art, perfect in its way. The style is ponderous, but there is no monotony. Short sentences, which, like the fire of sharpshooters through cannon, break the volume of sound, are introduced at stated intervals into each paragraph. A Junius-like epigram follows the imposing burst of eloquence with which Burke or Brougham might have clenched a great harangue. There is no slovenliness in these finished pages.

  Macaulay’s style—his much-praised style—is ineffectual for the purpose of telling the truth about anything. It is splendid, but splendide mendax, and in Macaulay’s case the style was the man. He had enormous knowledge, and a noble spirit; his knowledge enriched his style and his spirit consecrated it to the service of Liberty. We do well to be proud of Macaulay; but we must add that, great as was his knowledge, great also was his ignorance, which was none the less ignorance because it was wilful; noble as was his spirit, the range of subject over which it energized was painfully restricted.

  I fancy Macaulay will descend the stream of time more by virtue of the brilliant point lace of his narrative, than by inherent truth or reliability of sentiment or statement.

  His “Essays” and his “History” exhibit the most popular style which any English author has ever possessed. Competent critics object to its glaring defects, but have never denied its power.

  One of the most remarkable qualities in his style is the copiousness of expression, and the remarkable power of putting the same statement in a large number of different ways. This enormous command of expression corresponded with the extraordinary power of his memory. At the age of eight he could repeat the whole of Scott’s poem of “Marmion.” He was fond, at this early age, of big words and learned English; and once, when he was asked by a lady if his toothache was better, he replied, “Madam, the agony is abated!” He knew the whole of Homer and of Milton by heart; and it was said with perfect truth that, if Milton’s poetical works could have been lost, Macaulay would have restored every line with complete exactness. Sydney Smith said of him: “There are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as on great; he is like a book in breeches.” His style has been called “abrupt, pointed, and oratorical.” He is fond of the arts of surprise—of antithesis—and of epigram.

  Since his death and the commitment of his writings to posterity and to criticism, his prose still has a substantial place in English Letters. The one who denies his claim to be ranked among the first examples of English style, must see to it that he be prepared to maintain his difficult position…. The prose of Macaulay in respect to its clearness was in every sense true to the claims of the home language. There are but few representative writers of English whose style so happily avoids the extreme of pedantry on the one hand, and that of purism, on the other…. Macaulay was the Lombard of his age—a master of sentences. What his biographer, Mr. Trevelyan, states, would seem to be confirmed, “that he never allowed a sentence to pass muster until it was as good as he could make it,” until every sentence ran as smoothly as running water and every paragraph closed with a telling clause.

  Macaulay is a master of all the Figures that lend themselves to effective denunciation—Irony, Innuendo, Epigram, as well as damaging Similitudes…. The richness of vituperative phraseology, the profusion of the illustrative comparisons, the invention of turns of thought to heighten the effect, are Macaulay’s own, and cannot be imitated, although they may be appropriated and reproduced.

  He had no time to let his own mind work, and took all his opinions as he found them ready made for him in books, and determined by his temperament. It is curious to compare his letters with those of a man like Carlyle and to see how exclusively Macaulay confines himself to giving the news. He never discusses a subject, though he occasionally announces a view. Neither the profoundly imaginative nor the profoundly speculative nature could bear such a life as his. But his lack of originality made it all the easier for him to produce a great quantity of excellent and valuable work. He had a wonderful memory, unfailing industry, a vivid conception of the past and a unique style; and he was thoroughly interested in his subject. He said the things that the most intelligent people thought, so eloquently and incisively that they began at once to pride themselves on their own cleverness.

  The vice of Macaulay’s style is its unrelieved facility, its uniform velocity.

  His rhetorical power is manifest in the “Lays of Ancient Rome” as in his speeches, and if they are hardly poetry they are most effective declamation. His essays are equally unapproached in their kind. He ascribes the invention of the genus to Southey, but claims, rightly, to have improved the design. In striking contrast to most periodical literature, they represent the greatest condensation instead of the greatest expansion of knowledge, and the sense of proportion, and consequent power of effective narrative, are as remarkable in his best essays—especially the essays on Clive and Warren Hastings—as the clearness of style and range of knowledge. The first part of the “History” shows the same qualities, though the latter volumes begin to suffer from the impracticable scale.

  Macaulay is brilliant and emphatic, but we weary at last of his everlasting staccato on the trumpet.

  The popular impression that Macaulay is the best of paragraphers is probably not far from the truth. The great rhetorician bestowed unlimited pains upon his paragraphs, and no preceding writer began to equal him in conscious appreciation of the importance of that structure. His unity is rhetorical, rather than logical; but as such it is nearly always unimpeachable. The sections that contain real digressions are few indeed. In the matter of proportion by bulk he is nearly always admirable. He knows his principal point, and it is on this that he enlarges. His emphasis-proportion is consciously paragraphic. He reveals very great variability in sentence-length, and drives home his main topic and his main conclusion in simple sentences. When he masses clauses it is to relieve each of emphasis and show the unity of the group as amplifying some previous terse generalization. He shows such deliberate observance of this principle that he forms the first basis for the generalization made in a former chapter: in the best modern paragraphs the distance between periods is inversely as the emphasis of each included proposition. Nevertheless, in this matter of distribution of emphasis, Macaulay is not faultless. It has been the general verdict of critics that he not infrequently over-emphasizes; that he magnifies clauses into sentences.

  His popularity was honestly won by the energy and capacity of his mind, and by an eloquence which, whatever its faults may be, at any rate was able to enliven the weight of his learning. By the resources and the quickness of his memory, by his erudition, and his command of his erudition, by his fluency and studied clearness, he has gained no more than the rank he deserves as an exponent of the matter of history, and as a critic of opinions. No amount of distaste for Whiggery or for common sense can with justice be allowed to detract from Macaulay’s fame…. The weaknesses of his style were known to himself, but among them he had no cause to reckon the vices of pretence or vanity. He knew the things that he appeared to know, and much more; and his reputation is only a fair tribute paid to him by those who have learned from him…. No writer is placed at such a disadvantage as Macaulay, when his worst passages are taken up and criticised minutely. With no writer is criticism so apt to be unjust, simply because it is impossible to represent in detail a genius which was great by the extent of its empire, rather than by any mystery of its inner shrines. To remember particular bits of Macaulay’s prose is not always as satisfactory as to remember his heroic ballads. But in the variegated mass of his writings, and in the impression of life and zest in all that he wrote, the particular faults and fallacies may easily and rightly pass out of notice.

  Clearness is one of Macaulay’s most obvious merits; he never leaves you in doubt as to his meaning. But this clearness is partly due to the fact that he never grapples with difficult problems or deep thoughts for which language offers inadequate expression. He never goes out of his own depth; but neither does he ever take you out of yours; and this, though it has won him many readers, is a doubtful virtue. Sometimes the clearness is gained at the expense of exactness; statements are made too absolutely. His complete mastery over his material is often astonishing, when the amount of that material, the wealth of detail, is considered. In the art of constructing a complex narrative he has few equals. Animation, a quality which depends on a good many others; in Macaulay’s case on his own interest in his story, on the swing of his sentences, on his pictorial phrases, his contrasts and comparisons, his energy in bestowing praise and blame, above all, on his love of the concrete. His diffuseness is a very serious fault, but as it is not combined with dullness, it attracts many readers who would be bewildered by a quick succession of thoughts. Of the qualities of strength, pathos, and humour, and again of the rhythm, it may be said briefly that Macaulay has them all in the degree in which a good, but not the very greatest, orator has them. Those finer and subtler effects which, though they would be lost in speech, are in place on the printed page, are not to be found in him.

  Hallam and Wordsworth, Dickens and Thackeray and Carlyle are names not hard to place. Each of these has his evident and peculiar stamp. The same cannot be said of Macaulay. The clue to his genius is not easy to follow. To read his works is to delight the attention and inspire the feelings. But when we are asked to estimate him, we hesitate. In the cause of this hesitation, real difficulty must be added to something of reluctance…. His was a mind whose strength was closely allied to its weakness; which was too brilliant to be cautious, and too quick to be profound. His faults therefore lie side by side with his merits. Yet from every repeated appeal to his work, from weighing what is best in it against its acknowledged blots, we return with a conscious right to the assertion that, despite many failings, time will vindicate a great and an immortal name.

  Macaulay’s style is clear, highly-coloured, lively, almost passionate; and above all, it is filled with a strong personality. In every line we seem to hear these words:—“I, Thomas Macaulay, a conscientious man of learning, and a friend of liberty, have by my studies arrived at this result; whether the matter, from the point of view of an inhabitant of another world, happened exactly as I related it or not, I do not know; but that is how I saw it.” The secret of Macaulay’s style is antithesis. It occurs so often that one would think his use of it was intentional, but for the frequency which he had recourse to it in his parliamentary speeches which proves that this peculiar style was natural to him. Antithesis is quite suitable to Macaulay’s conception of history; absolute historical truth too, is beyond the reach of the greatest human genius; it is only by presenting both sides of the question that a fair average amount of truth can be arrived at.