publishers could hardly keep pace with the demand. The third and fourth volumes were not ready until 1855.

In 1847 he was defeated for reëlection to Parliament, but in 1852 was returned by his Edinburgh constituency without any effort on his part; but he took little part in the struggles and deliberations of that body.

During the latter part of Macaulay's life many distinguished honors were conferred upon him. In 1849 he was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow and Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1857 he was made a peer of the realm, under the title of Baron Macaulay of Rothley. In this same year he was elected Foreign Member of the French Academy, was given the Prussian Order of Merit, and was made High Steward of Cambridge. But his hard and unremitting labor had undermined his naturally strong constitution, and he died, December 28, 1859, when hardly past the prime of life.

THE ESSAYS

As a form of literature the essay is a relatively short disquisition upon some particular point or topic. It is not as formal and methodical as the more digni

fied treatise, and instead of giving a thorough and complete treatment of its subject, is comparatively superficial, and is designed, as a rule, to appeal to the popular taste rather than to the more limited circle of scholarly and profound thinkers for whom the treatise is primarily designed.

The essay offers an opportunity for the bright and witty thinker to discourse confidentially upon subjects in which he is interested without being required to give to them an orderly and exhaustive treatment, or to make his work conform rigidly to all the canons of literary criticism.

In the essay, more than in any other impersonal form of literary effort, the author is able to impress his own personality upon his work, so that oftentimes it assumes the freedom and variety and is often characterized by the individuality of the conversational monologue. It needs no profound student of literature to recognize at once the author in such essays as those of Bacon, Addison, Macaulay, or Matthew Arnold.

This species of composition has been a favorite one from the time of Bacon, the great English philosopher, and Montaigne, the greatest French writer of the sixteenth century, who were the first of modern writers to use it distinctively. It is especially adapted to periodical literature, and if it has not risen to its

highest level, it has, at any rate, appeared in its most agreeable and attractive form in such publications as the Tatler, Spectator, and Edinburgh Review. It has been used as the vehicle for historical and biographical sketches, literary and critical discussions, political arguments, and ethical and religious expositions. It has generally been written in prose, although Pope, in his essays on "Man" and "Criticism," has shown that it may appear in poetic form, without loss of freshness or vigor.

Some authors, like Addison and Steele, have produced the most of their literary work in this form, while others, like Cowley, have used it as a diversion, and have gained their reputation in other fields of literature.

To the scholar essay-writing may seem to be a form of literary dissipation, which, persisted in, will make the writer incapable of close and sustained work along any single line. Whether this be true or not, it is certain that the essay has influenced beneficially a wider class of readers than any other form of composition outside of fiction, and even fiction has done much less to disseminate useful information and to inspire thoughtful consideration of great questions.

Unlike poetry and fiction, the modern essay has not undergone a process of evolution. In its essential characteristics it has not changed materially since its

first appearance in the sixteenth century. A comparison between the essays of Bacon and Montaigne and those of almost any modern writer will show differences in the personal standpoint and style of treatment, but the essential elements of composition remain the same. The essay, like Athena, sprang full-grown and fully armed into the world of literature, and took its place at once as a finished and perfected product.

The essays of Macaulay, which are probably the most brilliant in the whole range of literature, were contributed mainly to the Edinburgh Review, a journal which had risen to an unequalled height of political, social, and literary power. To have the entry of its columns was to command the most direct channel for the spread of opinions and the shortest road to influence and celebrity.

Many of these essays were nominally book reviews, and were generally suggested by some book, whose unfortunate author found himself completely overshadowed by his sometimes friendly, but frequently hostile, critic. In reality these productions are brilliant essays, biographical, historical, and literary, and sometimes, though not often, really critical. Macaulay's sympathy was too easily aroused, and his partisanship was too intense to permit him to employ either the cool temper of the critic or the calm impartiality of the historian.

In the course of his reading Macaulay had accumulated an immense quantity and variety of facts, which his great retentive powers placed at his service whenever he wanted to use them. Thus his essays became exhaustless storehouses of information gathered from all fields of human learning and compacted with great ingenuity and skill into literary masterpieces. Although he composed with great rapidity, he never wrote carelessly or hastily. He gives an insight into his literary methods in a letter written to the editor of the Edinburgh Review from Calcutta, November 26, 1836, from which the following passage is taken:1

"At last I send you an article of interminable length on Lord Bacon. I hardly know whether it is not too long for an article in the Review, but the subject is of such vast extent that I could easily have made the paper twice as long as it is. About the historical and political part there is no great probability that we shall differ in opinion; but what I have said about Bacon's philosophy is widely at variance with what Dugald Stewart and Mackintosh have said on the same subject. . . . My opinion is formed not at second hand, like those of nine-tenths of the people who talk about Bacon; but after several very attentive perusals of his greatest works and after a great deal of thought. . . . I never bestowed so much care on 1 See Trevelyan's Life and Letters of Macaulay, Vol. I., p. 47.