the unfailing solace of his life, and on his performance as a historian and man of letters his lasting fame must be built. Everybody knows how immediate and how extraordinary was the success of Macaulay's writings. Macaulay attracted the general public by his combination of a somewhat common way of thinking with immense energy, untiring vivacity and marvellous power of exposition. The serious, respectable Englishman was delighted to find in Macaulay's pages his own meaning, although infinitely better expressed. A man so accomplished in all the lore of the past, yet so fervently in love with the present, a man of letters who could extract pleasure even from rows of suburban villas, who exulted in the growth of the Customs revenue and was moved almost to tears by the first great international exhibition, such a man of letters could not but charm so sanguine and self-confident an age. Some illustrious authors have made their name by reviling their contemporaries. Macaulay owed much of his rapid popularity to the contrary process. In this optimism there was nothing insincere, for Macaulay was far more genuine than most masters of rhetoric. He was the poet, not the parasite of his own generation. Along with Thackeray and Dickens he will always be read by those who wish to understand the English nation in the middle of the nineteenth century.

But an immediate, overwhelming success of this kind was sure to be followed by a violent reaction. Men acute and learned enough to discern the faults of a popular idol, and possibly whetted in their criticism by the thought that, with talents and attainments in some respects equal or superior, they had found no comparable recognition, have keenly scrutinised and austerely judged these famous writings which once seemed so perfect and still remain so popular. Macaulay's critical essays have been pronounced void of delicacy and of penetration; his Lays of Ancient Rome have been derided as pinchbeck poetry; his History of England has been slighted as the outcome of party spirit, an undiscerning hero-worship and a weak desire to be picturesque. Even his bold and stirring rhetoric has been censured as hard and monotonous. So vigorous and many-sided has been the attack, that his gigantic reputation has been considerably lowered.

A

majority, perhaps, of well-read persons would be half ashamed to own that they admire Macaulay. But now that most of the eminent men who led the attack upon his fame as critic, poet and historian have passed away, we can estimate his works with a calmness impossible to contemporaries, and we shall probably conclude that Macaulay is an English classic, although not a classic of the most exalted kind.

Perhaps the first and most vivid impression which most persons derive from Macaulay's writings is that of ample and varied knowledge. Extensive as his reading really was, it appears still greater because his powerful memory gave him full command over it and enabled him, like a skilful general with a well-disciplined army, to bring all his forces to bear upon the point which for the time being was vital. There is some interest in attempting to trace the bounds of his studies. Macaulay knew the Greek and Latin classics well, and appreciated them, not with the minute precision of a commentator, but with the keen relish of a man of the world and a man of letters. He was also deeply versed in the literatures of England, France and Italy as their limits were fixed in his youth, for his mind had been formed before mediæval authors became objects of curiosity, and with the works of his own age his sympathy was imperfect. He was familiar with almost everything that had been written in English during the three centuries that followed the revival of learning. What he knew best were the writings of the period from the Restoration to the French Revolution. He was steeped in the poetry, the memoirs, the histories, the divinity, the pamphlets and political orations of that time, although he seldom fell into the error of overrating their intrinsic value. But he seems not to have cared much for anything written before the age of Spenser and Shakespeare, and, though he lived at Cambridge when Wordsworth was in the ascendant there, he never quite yielded himself to the inspiration of the new school of poetry. In after years he might be said to turn away from contemporary authors. We should not have expected him to taste Browning, but he seems to have cared little for Tennyson, he did not read Carlyle or Ruskin, and Buckle's famous book only suggested to him a parallel between the author and Warburton. So likewise with

Macaulay's knowledge of French. Froissart and Comines seem to have been the only medieval writers who attracted his attention. He never quotes Rabelais or even Montaigne, and seldom if ever does he mention in his letters or journals a French author of the romantic school. For him French literature might almost be said to begin with Corneille and to end with Voltaire. The roll of Italian classics begins in a more distant age. Contrary to what we might have fancied from his temperament, Macaulay knew Dante well and loved him dearly. With Petrarch and Boccaccio he was intimate. His familiarity with the Italian authors of the sixteenth century and even of the age of decline which followed, his ready allusions to Machiavelli or Guicciardini, to Tasso or to Filicaja, excite more remark now than they would have done seventy years ago, when cultivated Englishmen still piqued themselves on an acquaintance with the graceful literature of Italy. Macaulay's knowledge of the great Spanish writers was a rarer accomplishment. German was scarcely known to his youth, nor was German thought ever really appropriated by him, although, as time went on, he read and admired the more famous poets and critics of Germany. Dutch he learnt for the purpose of writing his History. Thus it should seem that Macaulay's knowledge of literature, although very great, was neither encyclopædic nor unsurpassed. Even in England and in the nineteenth century several scholars might be named, his equals or possibly his superiors in this respect. But it would be hard to name any man of affairs who had read so much and at the same time so judiciously, for Macaulay seems to have profited by all his studies, and that which he ignored, however valuable in itself, would probably have been of little use to his somewhat rigid although capacious intellect.

To make Macaulay's fulness of reading popular there was needed Macaulay's style. His style has been by turns lauded and decried beyond reason, but none can doubt that it is genuine. As is the case with every born writer Macaulay's style reveals the man. Always vigorous, always clear, never careless, but often tending to become monotonous, it is the expression of a strong direct mind which glanced far over the fields of history and literature and saw vividly what

ever it saw at all. The sentences are always short, even when the space between two full stops is long. We may apply to Macaulay's most swelling periods what he himself observes about Temple's: "A critic who examines them carefully will find that they are not swollen by parenthetical matter, that their structure is scarcely ever intricate, that they are formed merely by accumulation, and that by the simple process of now and then leaving out a conjunction and now and then substituting a full stop for a semicolon, they might, without any alteration in the order of the words, be broken up into very short periods with no sacrifice except that of euphony. This simplicity of structure involves a simplicity of rhythm. Macaulay's rhythm is penetrating and serves to drive home his meaning, but it has little range or complexity of music. He has been well compared to a man playing everlastingly upon a silver trumpet. Macaulay was fastidious, but not finical in the choice of words, and his diction is pure and strong, but again, eloquent and fervid though he be, limited. His trick of repeating the same word over and over again the more forcibly to arrest the reader's attention is obvious and has always been remarked. However he may occasionally abuse it, it is an allowable artifice, consistent with the utmost command of language and with the utmost variety of phrase where variety is desired. Such exquisite gradation, however, Macaulay does not exhibit. Certain useful words such as "great or "eminent" occur repeatedly in close neighbourhood, where a mind more sensitive to shades of difference in thought would probably have used different adjectives. The monotony of words, like the monotony of rhythm and structure, had its origin in a certain monotony of thought.

Yet even Macaulay's bitterest enemies will allow that this monotony does not issue in dulness and that the total impression of any of his best essays is strikingly rich and diversified. The genuine excellence of Macaulay's style consists above all in its fresh and hearty vigour. Macaulay interests us because he is so much interested in his subject himself. He has neither doubts as to its importance nor difficulties as to its meaning. It may be true that usually he sees only one aspect of the matter in hand, but for that very reason he

sees so clearly. Next to this abounding energy Macaulay's most compelling attraction is his fulness of mind. Not that Macaulay had invariably made a deep study of his theme, for his knowledge of that was often incomplete, sometimes superficial, but he had been reading all his life, he had gone into the great world, he had borne his part in administration and debate, and all his literature and experience were garnered in a most capacious memory where everything could be found as it was wanted. The mere movement of the pen seems to have excited his brain to that point at which parallels, quotations, allusions, sonorous and historic names poured forth without effort and without limit. If Macaulay does not give you many ideas, he reminds you of many things, and if he does not probe the soul deeply, he introduces you to a multitude of persons. In nothing does he show himself more adroit than in his use of proper names. Over and over again he produces a rich effect by disposing them lavishly yet artfully. Where a plain man might say that the Spanish possessions in America extended right across the tropics, Macaulay fills the ear and the imagination by telling us that "the American dependencies of the Castilian crown still extended far to the north of Cancer and far to the south of Capricorn." Cromwell, when he chastised the Bey of Tunis and interposed between the Waldenses and their tyrants, becomes "the great man whose imperial voice had arrested the sails of the Libyan pirates and the persecuting fires of Rome." When Macaulay wishes to tell us that Addison in his Travels had nothing to say about Italian poetry he does it in this sumptuous manner :

"To the best of our remembrance Addison does not mention Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Boiardo, Berni, Lorenzo de Medici or Machiavelli. He coldly tells us that at Ferrara he saw the tomb of Ariosto, and that at Venice he heard the gondoliers sing verses of Tasso. But for Tasso and Ariosto he cared far less than for Valerius Flaccus and Sidonius Apollinaris. The gentle flow of the Ticin brings a line of Silius to his mind. The sulphurous stream of Albula suggests to him several passages of Martial. But he has not a word to say of the illustrious dead of Santa Croce; he crosses the wood of Ravenna without recollecting the Spectre