Huntsman, and wanders up and down Rimini without a thought of Francesca."

What a melodious list of beautiful names! what a delightful train of poetic and historic association! what a sense of meeting a throng of great and famous or lovely and unhappy people! It should be noted, too, that Macaulay dispensed his enormous wealth of allusion with judgment. His references are to persons, places and things which a cultivated public might be supposed to know or at least to have heard of. He did not, like some learned authors, illustrate the familiar by the obscure, or the great by the little. To his mastery over the art of allusion it is chiefly due that the Essays, although they deal with subjects drawn for the most part from a narrow field, form a sort of introduction to history and to literature generally, and that they have such a virtue to excite curiosity, the wish to know more.

His

Charm of a more subtle and delicate kind is wanting, it is true, in Macaulay's works. A certain commonness already noted in his thought could not but manifest itself in his style. Macaulay is always the rhetorician, that is, he is always addressing a crowd, and he therefore instinctively omits what the average man will not instinctively appreciate. logical power is very considerable so long as he keeps within the circle of ordinary interests, but he has neither the good nor the evil of subtlety. His heart is sound and he is loyal to the right, but he does not penetrate far into human nature. He has a healthy sense of the ridiculous, but no very exquisite gift of humour, a kindly affectionate nature, but no command of the highest pathos. Too often he overloads praise or blame, and enforces very simple psychological discoveries with superfluous energy. He very seldom strikes out a choice inimitable phrase. He never presents us with a lovely image. The disproportionate interest taken in the famous sentence about the New Zealander sufficiently shows that he was not rich in the imaginative vein. For these reasons Macaulay is, of all illustrious writers, the one least apt to be made an intimate, a lifelong companion by those who love literature. Providence designed him to be the admiration of many, not the delight of a few.

It is above all as a narrator that Macaulay has gained a

high place in English literature. Nothing seems easier than to tell a plain story well, and few things are more difficult, as all who have made the attempt know. Macaulay's narrative is clear and full as a brimming river. With the glance of genius he seizes all the particulars which can contribute to the general effect. He sets these in the most natural order and in the strongest light. He never hurries or becomes obscure in the endeavour to be brief, but moves onward swiftly and gracefully, always satisfying and always renewing the reader's curiosity. Many admirable specimens of his skill in narrative are scattered through the Essays, but for the full display of his power a larger scope was required and was afforded by the History. Were the History worthless as a source of information, it would still be highly valuable as a model of the way in which information should be given. Every reader feels the animation and the movement of each individual passage. The skill with which every little part is combined in the whole, the mastery with which the different threads of the story are interwoven, is less obvious, but is, as Mr. Cotter Morrison has observed, even more admirable. Faults, indeed, may be detected, as in every great fabric of art. The emphasis is too uniform; there is too little interchange of quiet with rhetorical passages; at one time trifles hardly worth noting are dwelt upon; at another, things of consequence are stated in terms too general; the writer too often deviates into the picturesque, or pauses in digressions which, though short, are scarcely connected with his tale. But when every blemish has been acknowledged, this grand fragment of historical narrative compels our admiration. Since Gibbon's Decline and Fall nothing comparable has appeared in English, and seldom has it been surpassed in any foreign language.

Macaulay's verse was only the amusement of idle hours. Had it never been written, his fame would stand pretty much where it does now. Nevertheless it deserves notice in any endeavour to estimate Macaulay as an author. Like his prose, it has been very severely judged by critics who carry weight, and like his prose it has enjoyed a long popularity. Most of his pieces profess to be ballads, literary imitations of narrative poems composed in a rude age by and for unlettered men. They were in some degree inspired by Scott

and are numbered with the works of the Romantic period. In reality they are rhetorical displays with qualities of diction, structure and rhythm very like the diction, structure and rhythm of Macaulay's prose. In both we trace the same clearness, energy and speed, the same metallic brilliance and clangour. The enumeration of the forces of the League on the morning of Ivry, or of the beacons that arose upon the night after the Armada came in view, is in principle and even in execution very like the recital of the illustrious personages present at the trial of Warren Hastings, or of the warlike nations that descended to the sack of the Mogul Empire. The verses which conclude the "Prophecy of Capys" have little in common with "Marmion" and far less in common with "Chevy Chase," but they might easily be moulded into a stirring peroration :

:

"Then where o'er two bright havens
The towers of Corinth frown;
Where the gigantic King of Day
On his own Rhodes looks down;

Where soft Orontes murmurs

Beneath the laurel shades;

Where Nile reflects the endless length
Of dark-red colonnades ;

Where in the still deep water,

Sheltered from waves and blasts,

Bristles the dusky forest

Of Byrsa's thousand masts;

Where fur-clad hunters wander

Amid the northern ice;

Where o'er the sand of morning land
The camel bears the spice;

Where Atlas flings his shadow

Far o'er the western foam,

Shall be great fear on all who hear
The mighty name of Rome."

Even the simplest, most serious and most touching of Macaulay's poetical efforts, the Epitaph on a Jacobite, bears this rhetorical impress to a degree which detracts from its pathos. To say that Macaulay, even when composing in verse, was always a rhetorician rather than a poet, is not to deny his poems a real excellence; it only amounts to saying that their excellence is not of the highest kind. They are original and they are vivid, and, though a time comes when we cease to take them very seriously, we have all owed to them some hours of real enjoyment.

When we have refined all we can, genius escapes us still, and nothing can better serve to show that some portion of that divine essence was vouchsafed to Macaulay than the obstinate life of his Essays. In a letter stamped with his peculiar blunt honesty he has himself told us how contributions to periodicals must be written and what faults they are almost certain to display.

"They are not expected to be highly finished. Their natural life is only six weeks. Sometimes their writer is at a distance from the works to which he wants to refer. Sometimes he is forced to hurry through his task in order to catch the post. He may blunder; he may contradict himself; he may break off in the middle of a story; he may give an immoderate extension to one part of his subject and dismiss an equally important part in a few words. All this is readily forgiven if there be a certain spirit and vivacity in his style."

It would not be difficult to trace in some of Macaulay's Essays some of these defects, and Macaulay hesitated long before he would consent to reprint them. Yet they have now been before the world for two generations; they have been read by millions; they have been criticised by the ablest and the severest pens; and they are still alive. They are alive with all their faults and in virtue of their vigorous originality. For, as Mr. Cotter Morrison, no flattering biographer, has said, Macaulay made of the review article a new thing; he invented a new type of essay almost as much as Addison did in his Spectators, and, although Macaulay's style invites parody-and many clever writers have responded to the invitation-the Essays remain alone, and nobody has succeeded in producing anything so good of that kind. This, after all, is the touchstone of literature. Very few of the books written in any age can stand its application, and those that do may be certified as classics, whatever the precise rank to which they should be assigned.

The essential qualities of mind are the same in all the Essays. In some respects no great writer was ever more uniformly equal to himself or more immediately recognisable in all his works. Yet the differences between the Essays in point of merit are very considerable. Of the two classes into

which they fall, the historical and the critical, the first are by far superior. Although Macaulay had some of the most essential qualifications for criticism, sound common sense, unfeigned love of letters and vast knowledge, it cannot be said that Macaulay was a great critic. He was free from those antiquarian or sentimental foibles which so often mislead lesser men. He was too honest and manly not to have a keen eye and a hearty repulsion for everything that was morbid or affected, or exaggerated or silly. He lived in habitual converse with the best minds of all nations. He felt the truest reverence for those select masterpieces which have come down to us undimmed by the flight of ages and uninjured by the revolutions that destroy States and creeds, but have no power over consummate beauty. He had the liveliest relish for fine rhetoric, the most acute sensibility to fine poetry. He possessed in his marvellous memory an unfailing store of literary parallels and illustrations. A critic thus endowed by nature and enriched by study could not but be often right in his judgments, and Macaulay's admiration was often as discriminating as enthusiastic. We should not have expected him to care much for Goethe, yet the words of Mignon

"Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an:
Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?" –

drew from him the remark that he knew no two lines in the world he would sooner have written than those. What he lacked as a critic was not knowledge or feeling, but the philosophic mind. He was not subtle nor analytical. With his usual good sense he felt, and with his usual honesty he avowed, this defect:

"You will believe me," he wrote to Macvey Napier, "that I tell you what I sincerely think when I say that I am not successful in analysing the effect of works of genius. I have written several things on historical, political and moral questions of which, on the fullest reconsideration, I am not ashamed, and by which I should be willing to be estimated; but I have never written a page of criticism on poetry or the fine arts which I would not burn if I had the power. Hazlitt used to say of himself, 'I am nothing if not critical.' The case with me is directly the reverse. I have a strong and