ecration. His talent for this work, and his enjoyment of it, were so great, that he was tempted at times to hunt after criminality for the pleasure of punishing it. He acquired a diseased taste for character that was morally tainted, in order that he might exercise on its condemnation the rich resources of his scorn and invective. His progress through a tract of history was marked by the erection of the gallows, the gibbet, and the stake, and he was almost as insensible to mitigating circumstances as Judge Jeffreys himself. He seemed to consider that the glory of the judge rested on the number of the executions; and he has hanged, drawn, and quartered many individuals, whose cases are now at the bar of public opinion, in the course of being reheard.

The last and finest result of personal integrity is intellectual conscientiousness, and this Macaulay cannot be said to have attained. His intellect, bright and broad as it was, was the instrument of his individuality. His sympathies and antipathies colored his statements, and he rarely exhibited anything in "dry light." In this respect, he is inferior to Hallam and Mackintosh, who are inferior to him in extent of information, and genius for narrative. The vividness of his perceptions confirmed the autocracy of his disposition, and his convictions had to him the certainty of facts. It must be admitted that he had some reason for his dogmatism. He excelled all Englishmen of his time in his knowledge of English nistory. There was no drudgery he would not endure in order to obtain the most trivial fact which illustrated the opinions or the manners of any particular age. Indeed, the minuteness of his information astonished even antiquaries, and in society was sometimes thought "to be erected

into a colossal engine of colloquial oppression." And this information was not a mere assemblage of dead facts. It was vitalized by his passions and imagination; it was all alive in the many-peopled domain of his "vast and joyous memory;" and it was so completely possessed as to be always in readiness to sustain an argument or illustrate a principle. The songs, ballads, satires, lampoons, plays, private correspondence of a period, were as familiar to him as the graver records of its annalists. But in disposing his immense materials he followed the law of his own mind rather than the law inherent in the facts. Instead of viewing things in their relations to each other, he viewed things in their relation to himself. His representation of them, therefore, partook of the limitations of his character. That character was broad, but it would be absurd to say that it was as broad as the English race. Macaulayized English history as a distinguished poet of the century was said to have Byronized human life. Even in some of his most seemingly triumphant statements it will be found that a different disposition of the facts will result in establishing an opposite opinion. Take the article on Bacon, the most glaring of all the instances in which he has refused to assume the point. of view of the person he has resolved to condemn ; and any intellect, resolute enough to resist the marvellous fascination of the narrative, can easily redispose the facts so as to arrive at an opposite conclusion.

He

A prominent cause of Macaulay's popularity is to be found in the definiteness of his mind. He always aspired to present his matter in such a form as to exclude the possibility of doubt, either in his statement or argument. Of all great English writers he is therefore the least suggestive. All that he demands of a

reader is simple receptiveness. Selection, arrangement, reasoning, pictorial representation, are all done by himself. This explicitness, too, is purchased at some sacrifice of truth. His comprehensiveness is apt to be of that kind which arrives at broad generalizations by excluding a number of the facts and principles it ought to include. Real comprehensiveness of mind is impossible unless the interior life of the separate facts included in the sweeping generalization is adequately comprehended. Shakspeare, of all English minds, is the most comprehensive; and Shakspeare, in virtue of his comprehensiveness, would doubt in many instances where Macaulay is most certain. The most perfect exhibition of Macaulay's talent is his analysis and representation of the character of James II., from a hostile point of view. He catches his victim in a series of cunningly contrived traps, and the poor creature, in Macaulay's narrative, cannot move a step without falling into the trap marked folly or the trap marked wickedness. Shakspeare's method of dealing with character was entirely different.

As an artist Macaulay is greater in his Essays than in his History of England. Each of his essays is a unit. The results of analysis are diffused through the veins of narration, and details are strictly subordinated to leading conceptions. In his History details are so numerous as to confuse the mind. Events succeed each other in their chronological rather than their intellectual order; and his readers gain an intense perception of particular facts without any general view of the whole field. The power of the author to interest us is as evident in his account of the Bank of England as in his account of the Massacre of Glencoe. We pass from one topic to another without any sense of the connection of

topics. Picture succeeds picture as in the anarchy of a panorama. It seems as if we were reading the work of a poet who had turned annalist. By emphasizing everything, interest in particulars is obtained at the expense of general effect. It is only by turning to the table of contents that we are able to generalize the events of a reign. There are scores of pages in the third and fourth volumes which we read as we read a newspaper, where an account of a murder may be succeeded immediately by an account of a masquerade. Prescott, who cannot be named with Macaulay in respect to fulness of matter, fertility of thought, originality of style, and unwearied energy of mind, is still superior to him in the artistic disposition of his materials. In reading Prescott, we have but a faint impression of the author and no feeling at all of the felicity of the style, but the real business of the historian is none the less performed, for we get a large view of facts in their true relations, and are enabled to take in the subject he treats of as a whole. In Macaulay the narrative of particular facts and incidents is incomparably bright and stimulating, but the facts and incidents are not seen from a commanding point.

In his essays, especially his biographical and historical essays, this defect is not observable. They rank among the finest artistic products of the century. They partake of the imperfections of his thinking and the limitations of his character, but they are still perfect of their kind. The articles on Machiavelli, Bunyan, Clive, Hastings, Frederic the Great, Barère, Chatham, not to mention others, are eminent specimens of that critical and interpretative biography, in which the character of the biographer appears chiefly to givs inity to the representation of facts and the application

of principles. The amount of knowledge each of them includes can only be estimated by those who have patiently read the many volumes they so brilliantly condense. In style they show a mastery of English which has been attained by no other English author who did not possess a creative imagination. The ari of the writer is shown as much in his deliberate choice of common and colloquial phrases as in those splendid passages in which he almost seems to exhaust the resources of the English tongue. As a narrator, in his own province, it would be difficult to name his equal among English writers; to his narrative, all his talents and accomplishments combined to lend fascination; and in it he exhibited the understanding of Hallam, and the knowledge of Mackintosh, joined to the picturesqueness of Southey, and the wit of Pope.

E. P. W.