acute enjoyment of works of the imagination; but I have never habituated myself to dissect them. Perhaps I enjoy them the more keenly, for that very reason. Such books

as Lessing's Laocöon, such passages as the criticism on Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister, fill me with admiration and despair."

This frank and just acknowledgment proves that Macaulay could make a return upon himself, and renders further insistence needless, nay unmannerly.

Macaulay did not escape the prevalent disease of literary criticism in his generation, a political and party bias. The desire to maul a formidable Tory prompted him in the essay on the "War of the Succession" to describe Swift in terms equally violent and foolish, as "the apostate politician, the ribald priest, the perjured lover, a heart burning with hatred against the whole human race, a mind richly stored with images from the dunghill and the lazarhouse." The wish to glorify a consistent Whig led him to overcharge his praise of Addison, whose real merit might have dispensed with this exaggeration. Had Macaulay not taken the Puritan side in politics, he might have qualified his boundless admiration of Bunyan's allegory. Had Macaulay not hated the Stuarts, he might have toned down his philippic against the comedy of the Restoration. At times also Macaulay's criticism is coloured by the overbearing national self-esteem so common among Englishmen of the generation which followed the battle of Waterloo. And although he broke free at an early age from the narrow modes of thought prevalent in his father's circle, something of the Evangelical straitness may now and then be traced in his judgment both of men and of books. It appears in his remarks upon Horace Walpole, and it gives a faint but unmistakable flavour to his remarks about the natives of India during his residence in that country and in after years. So ardent a classical scholar might have been expected to take some interest in the last form of polytheism prevalent among civilised men, but to Macaulay the Hindu religion seemed a mere unaccountable absurdity which a little education on European principles would dispel. On the practical question as to the best way of spending public money to advance education in

India he was probably right; but no missionary could be more unsympathetic in regard to Oriental modes of thought.

For so sedulous a reader of poetry Macaulay had little sense of the beauty of nature, While yet a mere schoolboy, he unblushingly proclaimed his indifference to the country and his insatiable longing for London. In his essay on "Dante" he insisted that the life of a great city affords more matter even to the poetic imagination than hills and woods and streams. He laughed, not without provocation, at the solemn tone in which the Lake school descanted upon scenery and the mysterious operation of rural sights and sounds. Nor was Macaulay sensitive to the impressions derived from plastic art. When he travelled in Italy he felt the massive grandeur of Genoa and the ample magnificence of St. Peter's, but he rarely noted any save the broadest and most inevitable of artistic effects. In St. Mark's his eye was caught less by the unrivalled harmony of rich and solemn colour than by the badness of the mediaval hexameters inscribed on the walls. Even in his latest and most finished writings it will be found that, while the allusions to politics and literature are full of reality, the allusions to nature and to plastic art are conventional. Something of this deficiency was perhaps due to his Puritan ancestry and home. At all events Macaulay had it in common with his age. Like his contemporaries, he seems not to have been one moment depressed by the extreme ugliness of modern civilisation. The sort of discontent which pervades the writings of Ruskin or of Arnold was unknown to him. In his criticism of Southey's Colloquies he readily exposed Southey's ignorance and inability to argue, but he did not see or would not confess that there was an element of truth in Southey's denunciation of manufacturing towns and the manufacturing system. An independent perception of beauty and sincere enjoyment of beautiful things are perhaps as rare to-day as they were in Macaulay's time, but now that we have all learnt the language of sensibility we are the more surprised at the comparative obtuseness of such a cultivated mind.

Most of the Essays, and indeed the best, are historical. They deserve their fame, although their merit has sometimes

The first virtue of a

been overrated or misunderstood. historian is industry in collecting and weighing evidence. As Macaulay wrote a History which is a work of wide and deep research, the Essays have often been taken for works of the same type. This is a mistake. Apart from the singular power which they display, the Essays resemble other periodical writing. When composing the Essays Macaulay seldom went far to find his materials. With one or two exceptions he relied upon authorities already in print and easily accessible; he did not always make a severely critical study of these, and he wrote largely out of his stock of general information as a man of letters and public man. It is the fulness of this general information which gives the Essays a semblance of profound historical learning. In one or two of his later Essays he occasionally availed himself of knowledge which he had acquired with a view to using it in the History; but even the later Essays are not erudite or exhaustive. Macaulay's historical Essays, in short, are brilliant sketches, not critical monographs. This he was partly aware of, and this, no doubt, accounts for his long reluctance to have them reprinted. "The moment I come forward to claim a higher rank," he wrote, "I must expect to be judged by a higher standard." What he foresaw has happened. When the varied information and literary splendour of the Essays had gained them a lasting popularity, flaws in their substance were exposed to the keenest critical illumination, and mistakes or omissions of fact have been discovered in all; in some, very grave mistakes or omissions.

But historians do not differ merely as to the industry with which they amass facts or the skill with which they sift evidence; they differ also in their conception of history. History may be written upon different principles and with different objects, and all forms of history are legitimate so long as each is good in its own kind. When history was first written, it was with the mixed purpose of appeasing curiosity and gratifying our human interest in our fellowcreatures; history was above all things narrative, and the teaching of lessons or discovery of causes was secondary to the charm of a tale. In this kind there has been nothing so perfect as the entrancing work of Herodotus. At a later

and more reflective period history was valued, not only as an interesting narrative, but as a store of moral and political wisdom, the aim consciously avowed and in some measure achieved by Thucydides. Not that a history resembles a cookery-book, or that we can turn over the volumes of the past in the hope of finding a recipe for the present, but that, human nature being a dogged thing and circumstances very monotonous, we may, by reading history which has been intelligently written, augment our tact and improve our sympathetic perception as to what great bodies of men are likely to do and how they may best be guided or at least influenced. But whatever the attraction or the usefulness of history thus written by statesman for statesmen, there is yet another and perhaps a higher aim in writing history, an aim which, if present to the mind of any ancient writer, was present to Polybius alone. This is the purely scientific aim, the endeavour to know what has happened, but still more why it has happened; to understand, in the small degree to which that is possible, the political action of men in other ages or in distant lands. The ablest historians who wrote after the revival of classical studies followed almost timidly in the footsteps of their masters, often excelled in narrative, were sometimes acute in disquisition, but hardly ever attained the severity of a scientific record and explanation of past events. The progressive severance of the contemplative from the active life and of science from literature, characteristic of our own time, produced in the last century a school of historians who adopted this conception of their duty. If we ask how Macaulay conceived of history and how he wrote it, we find in his works traces of all three ideals, but the first and second usually prevail over the third.

Macaulay had a rare gift of narration, and all men love to use the powers in which they excel. Macaulay had steeped himself in antiquity and in the literature inspired by the rediscovery of antique masterpieces. For both reasons we should suspect, what a perusal of his writings confirms, that history is to him above all things narrative. Macaulay was himself, like so many of the Greek and Roman historians, a public man of large capacity and experience. Therefore we might conjecture, what proves to be the case, that he valued

history partly as a storehouse of practical wisdom. It is thus that he praised Mill's History of British India, for the pains therein taken to trace the progress of sound ideas of government. But we are not left to merely circumstantial evidence to show how Macaulay understood history, for he himself has told us whom he regarded as the masters of history.

"The truth is that I admire no historians much except Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus. Perhaps in his way, a very peculiar way, I might add Fra Paolo. The modern writers who have most of the great qualities of the ancient masters of history are some memoir writers; St. Simon for example. There is merit, no doubt, in Hume, Robertson, Voltaire and Gibbon. Yet it is not the thing. I have a conception of history more just, I am confident, than theirs. The execution is another matter. But I hope to improve."

Thus among his favourite historians three belong to antiquity and are men of astonishing literary power. The fourth belongs to the revival of letters, and was in a sense a public man, as were Thucydides and Tacitus. On the other hand Macaulay refers in this context to no modern historian later than the eighteenth century. Among those whom he names, Voltaire had acuteness, if not the painstaking scientific mind, and Gibbon had a great deal of both, was in fact a precursor of the age of science. But these qualities do not seem to have struck Macaulay, nor does he seem to have been aware of the revolution in the study of history which his German contemporaries were making, although he has spoken with all due honour of one of the most distinguished, Ranke. He does not even notice what had been done by the latest and most solid among French historians, such as Guizot. Here we note a deficiency in Macaulay's genius which has already been noticed in another connection. He was not a philosopher, his turn of mind was not analytical, nor did he value knowledge for its own sake as it is valued by the scientific student. He worked hard in amassing the materials for his History, but in writing it he was too often swayed, now by the love of literary display, now by the prejudices, the affections and the enmities natural to a public man intent on enforcing sound political doctrine. To say this is not to defame Macaulay,