critical judgments are likely to be blunt, positive, and superficial. But they are never actually shallow and rarely without a modicum of truth. And they are never uninteresting. For, true to his narrative instinct, he always interweaves biography. And besides, the essays have the same rhetorical qualities that mark with distinction all the prose he has written, that is to say, the same masterly method and the same compelling style. It is to this method and style, that, after our rapid review of Macanlay's aims and accomplishments, we are now ready to turn.

There were two faculties of Macaulay's mind that set his work far apart from other work in 7. Organizing

the same field—the faculties of Faculty. organization and illustration. He saw things in their right relation and he knew how to make others see them thus.

If he was describing, he never thrust minor details into the foreground. If he was narrating, he never "got ahead of his story." The importance of this is not sufficiently recognized. Many writers do not know what organization means. They do not know that in all great and successful literary work it is ninetenths of the labor. Yet consider a moment. History is a very complex thing: divers events may be simultaneous in their occurrence; or one crisis may be slowly evolving from many causes in many places. It is no light task to tell these things one after another and yet leave a unified impression, to take up a dozen new threads in succession without tangling them and without losing the old ones, and to lay them all down at the right moment and without confusion. Such is the narrator's task, and it was at this task that Macaulay proved himself a past master. He could dispose of a number of trivial events in a single sentence. Thus, for example, runs his account of the dramatist Wycherley's naval career : “He embarked, was present at a battle, and celebrated it, on his return, in a copy of verses too bad for the bellman. On the other hand, when it is a question of a great crisis, like the impeachment of Warren Hastings, he knew how to prepare for it with elaborate ceremony and to portray it in a scene of the highest dramatic power.

. This faculty of organization shows itself in what we technically name structure; and logical and rhetorical structure may be studied at their very best in his work. His essays are perfect units, made up of many parts, systems within systems, that play together without clog or friction. You can take them apart like a watch and put them together again. But try to rearrange the parts and the mechanism is spoiled. Each essay has its subdivisions, which in turn are groups of paragraphs. And each paragraph is a unit. Take the first paragraph of the essay on Milton: the word manuscript appears in the first sentence, and it reappears in the last; clearly the paragraph deals

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with a single very definite topic. And so with all. Of course the unity manifests itself in a hundred ways, but it is rarely wanting. Most frequently it takes the form of an expansion of a topic given in the first sentence, or a preparation for a topic to be announced only in the last. These initial and final sentences—often in themselves both aphoristic and memorable—serve to mark with the utmost clearness the different stages in the progress of the essay.

Illustration is of more incidental service, but as used by Macaulay becomes highly organic. For 8. Illustrating his illustrations

not farFaculty.

fetched or laboriously worked out. They seem to be of one piece with his story or his argument. His mind was quick to detect resemblances and analogies. He was ready with a comparison for everything, sometimes with half a dozen. For example, Addison's essays, he has occasion to say, were different every day of the week, and yet, to his mind, each day like somethinglike Horace, like Lucian, like the “Tales of Scheherezade." He draws long comparisons between Walpole and Townshend, between Congreve and Wycherley, between Essex and Villiers, between the fall of the Carlovingians and the fall of the Moguls. He follows up a general statement with swarms of instances. Have historians been given to exaggerating the villainy of Machiavelli? Macaulay can name you half a dozen who did so.

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Did the writers of Charles's faction delight in making their opponents appear contemptible? “They have told us that Pym broke down in a speech, that Ireton had his nose pulled by Hollis, that the Earl of Northumberland cudgelled Henry Marten, that St. John's manners were sullen, that Vane had an ugly face, that Cromwell had a red nose." Do men fail when they quit their own province for another? Newton failed thus; Bentley failed; Inigo Jones failed; Wilkie failed.

In the same way

he was ready with quotations. He writes in one of his letters: “It is a dangerous thing for a man with a very strong memory to read very much. I conld give you three or four quotations this moment in support of that proposition; but I will bring the vicious propensity under subjection, if I can.” Thus we see his mind doing instantly and involuntarily what other minds do with infinite pains, bringing together all things that have a likeness or a common bearing.

Both of these faculties, for organization and for illustration, are to be partially explained by his marvelous memory.

As we have 9. Memory.

seen, he read everything, and he seems to have been incapable of forgetting anything. The immense advantage which this gave him over other men is obvious. He who carries his library in his mind wastes no time in turning up references. And surveying the whole field of his knowledge at once, with outlines and details all in immediate range, he should be able to see things in their natural perspective. Of course it does not follow that a great memory will always enable a man to systematize and synthesize, but it should make it easier for its possessor than for other men, while the power of ready illustration which it affords him is beyond question.

It is precisely these talents that set Macaulay among the simplest and clearest of writers, and 10. Clearness and that account for much of his Simplicity.

popularity. People found that in taking up one of his articles they simply read on and on, never puzzling over the meaning of a sentence, getting the exact force of every statement, and following the trend of thonght with scarcely a mental effort. And his natural gift of making things plain he took pains to support by various devices. He constructed his sentences after the simplest normal fashion, subject and verb and object, sometimes inverting for emphasis, but rarely complicating, and always reducing expression to the barest terms. He could write, for example, "One advantage the chaplain had, but it is impossible to conceive of his writing, “Now amid all the discomforts and disadvantages with which the unfortunate chaplain was rounded, there was one thing which served to offset them, and which, if he chose to take the oppor. tunity of enjoying it, might well be regarded as a positive advantage." One will search his pages in

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