research. Perhaps we fall into Macaulay's trick of exaggeration, but it is not easy to exaggerate the mental feats of a man who could carry in his memory works like Paradise Lost and Pilgrim's Progress and who was able to put it on record that in thirteen months he had read thirty classical authors, most of them entire and many of them twice, and among them such voluminous writers as Euripides, Herodotus, Plato, Plutarch, Livy, and Cicero. Nor was the classical literature a special field; Italian, Spanish, French, and the wildernesses of the English drama and the English novel (not excluding the "trashy") were all explored. We may well be astounded that the man who could do all these things in a lifetime of moderate compass, and who was besides such a tireless pedestrian that he was forever on his feet indoors as well as out,” could find time to produce so much literature of his own.

That literature-80 to style the body of work which has survived him-divides itself into at least

five divisions. There are, first,

the Essays, which he produced at intervals all through life. There are the Speeches which were delivered on the floor of Parliament between his first election in 1830 and his last in 1852, and which rank very high in that grade of oratory which is just below the highest. There is the Indian Penal Code, not altogether his own work and not literature of course, yet praised

4. His Work.

by Justice Stephen as one of the most remarkable and satisfactory instruments of its kind ever drafted. There are the Poems, published in 1842, adding little to his fame and not a great deal to English literature, yet very respectable achievements in the field of the modern romantic ballad. Finally, there is the unfinished History of England from the Accession of James the Second, his last, his most ambitious, and probably, all things considered, his most successful work.

The History and Essays comprise virtually all of this product that the present generation cares to 5. History of read. Upon the History, indeed, England.

Macaulay staked his claim to future remembrance, regarding it as the great work of his life. He was exceptionally well equipped for the undertaking. He had such a grasp of universal history as few men have been able to secure, and a detailed knowledge of the period of English history under contemplation equalled by none. But he delayed the undertaking too long, and he allowed his time and energy to be dissipated in obedience to party calls. Death overtook him in the midst of his labors. Even thus, it is clear that he underestimated the magnitude of the task he had set himself. For he proposed to cover a period of nearly a century and a half; the four volumes and a fraction which he completed actually cover about fifteen years. His plan involved too much detail. It has been called pictorial history writing, and such it was. History was to be as vital and as human as romance. It was to be in every sense a restoration of the life of the past. Macaulay surely succeeded in this aim, as his fascinating third chapter will always testify; whether the aim were a laudable one, we cannot stop here to discuss. Historians will continue to point out the defects of the work, its diffuseness, its unphilosophical character, perhaps its partisan spirit. But it remains a magnificent fragment, and it will be read by thousands who could never be persuaded to look into dryer though possibly sounder works. Indeed, there is no higher tribute to its greatness than the objection that has sometimes been brought against it, namely, that it treats a comparatively unimportant era of England's history with such fulness and brilliance, and has attracted to it so many readers, that the other eras are thrown sadly out of perspective.

But Macaulay's name is popularly associated with that body of Essays which in bulk alone

(always excepting Sainte

Beuve's) are scarcely exceeded by the product of any other essay-writer in an essay writing age. And the popular judgment which has insisted upon holding to this supposedly ephemeral work is not far wrong. With all their faults upon them, until we have something better in kind to replace them, we cannot consent to let them go. In one sense, their range is not

6. Essays.

wide, for they fall naturally into but two divisions, the historical and the critical. To these Mr. Morison would add a third, the controversial, comprising the four essays on Mill, Sadler, Southey, and Gladstone; but these are comparatively unimportant. In another sense, however, their range is very wide. For each one gathers about a central subject a mass of details that in the hands of any other writer would be bewildering, while the total knowledge that supports the bare arrays of fact and perpetual press of allusions betrays a scope that, to the ordinary mind, is quite beyond comprehension.

And the more remarkable must this work appear when we consider the manner of its production. Most of the essays were published anonymously in the Edinburgh Review, a few early ones in Knight's Quarterly Magazine, five (those on Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Pitt), written late in life, in the Encyclopædia Britannica. The writing of them was always an avocation with Macaulay, never a vocation. Those produced during his parliamentary life were usually written in the hours between early rising and breakfast. Some were composed at a distance from his books. He scarcely dreamed of their living beyond the quarter of their publication, certainly not beyond the generation for whose entertainment they were written with all the devices to catch applause and all the disregard of permanent merit which writing for such a purpose invites. He could scarcely be induced, even after they were pirated and republished in America, to reissue them in a collected edition, with his revision and under his name. These facts should be remembered in mitigation of the severe criticism to which they are sometimes subjected.

Between the historical and the critical essays we are not called upon to decide, though the decision is by no means difficult. Macaulay was essentially a historian, a story-teller, and the historical essay, or short monograph on the events of a single period that usually group themselves about some great statesman or soldier, he made peculiarly his own. He did not invent it, as Mr. Morison points out, but he expanded and improved it until he “left it complete and a thing of power.” Fully a score of his essays—more than half the total number—are of this description, the most and the best of them dealing with English history. Chief among them are the essays on Hallam, Temple, the Pitts, Clive, and Warren Hastings. The critical essays—upon Johnson, Addison, Bunyan, and other men of letters—are in every way as admirable reading as the historical. They must take a lower rank only because Macaulay lacked some of the prime requisites of a successful critic—broad and deep sympathies, refined tastes, and nice perception of the more delicate tints and shadings that count for almost everything in a work of high art. His

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