His History of England.

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We fear that such men as Clive and Hastings have been too often taken as exemplars by our countrymen in the East; that hatred to our name, the deeper for suppression, results; and that for all this the essayist, who preferred an audience of the imagination to one of reason, is very seriously to blame.

But the book of Macaulay is undoubtedly his history. Its foundations had been laid as far back as the very first stirrings of literary ambition-a lifetime of study, a lifetime of experience had collected the materials, and a lifetime of labour had been employed on the work. It is a national loss that it remains unfinished, for never perhaps were theme and historian so welladapted to each other; and never perhaps had historian manifested a similar amount, as well of concentration of design as of continuousness of preparation. The theme was the constitutional history of England; and Hallam himself had no superiority over Macaulay in clear recognition of the true constitutional principles. There was here a certain groundwork of reason and philosophy, then, to impart unity and coherency to the whole; and to this groundwork of philosophy the workman was thoroughly equal. But, in addition, there were a hundred elements, for the elaboration of which it was precisely this workman that possessed the necessary skill. There were marches, and progresses, and processions, and the fierce tides of battle. There were parliaments and the fights of parties, the reasons pro and the reasons con, and the triumphant tellings of the ayes and noes. Manners there were to paint and characters to draw, containing both of them an inexhaustible store of those salient peculiarities that constitute the quaint, the odd, the curious, the original. In short, here was a theme that required precisely such an historian; and here was an historian that required precisely such a theme. We really believe that there does not exist in any language reading more captivating than this history. The interest of Carlyle's 'French Revolution is certainly at times infinitely more intense, but one cannot get rid of a feeling of a certain interruptedness, a certain inequality in that work, while the march of Macaulay is never either accelerated or retarded.

We should name the style in Macaulay's earlier writings, a transparent but flushed rapidity. But as regards the style of the history, while the transparency has been allowed to remain, and in greater perfection than before, the rapidity has been mitigated and the flush removed. What was transparent but flushed rapidity is now transparent complacent fluency. The river has reached the plain, and gently subsides into a wide smilingness of flow, as if grateful for the broad ease it feels.

If such was the style, the mental attributes of Macaulay, now mellow in maturity, were equally well adapted to the task. There was a judgment tamed into the measure of success by its very circumscription

D 2

circumscription, its very ascription to the general philosophy of the eighteenth century-a judgment which, within this range, was luminously clear and sharply precise. There was a memory eminently retentive, ready, and suggestive, stored, too, with material, teeming with illustration, prompt with allusion. There was a fancy exceedingly vivid, quick, and fertile. It was a source of facility and success, too, that so much had been already done, that it was a more than thrice-told tale that was in question, that nothing goaded to overspeed, that all conduced to the adoption of the calm, the leisurely, the placid. Accordingly a result so splendid has been produced that its incompletion will remain the lament of our latest literature. In lenocinio commendationis dolor est manûs, cùm id ageret, extinctæ.'

It is not to be supposed, however, that Macaulay has no faults; such a consummation is not for humanity. Faults he has, and great ones, up from mere qualities of style to attributes of intellect. In style, for example, despite his many true merits, Macaulay cannot be regarded as the very highest master. A nature so remarkably facile, adroit, and quick as his found no difficulty in appropriating the lesson, taught by so many contemporaries, of a more living picturesqueness and of a more natural reality in writing. That this is an age of photography holds as true of the domain of the pen as of that of the pencil; and Macaulay yielded, like others, to the fascination of the new trick. His deepest sympathies, nevertheless, are with the writers of the eighteenth century, and theirs was the style which his judgment, at bottom, really approved. That style he might quicken with measures, or freshen with colours, borrowed from the new; but it was that style that, in the main, should still be his. Accordingly he abounds in the stock metaphor, the stock transition, the stock equipoise, the stock rhetoric, the stock expedients generally of Addison, Robertson, Goldsmith, Smollett, but especially David Hume. Phrases analogous to sinks into insignificance' are common with him; he constantly tells us, of men of 'parts,' that so and so had 'parts;' and he speaks of the nerves of the mind.' We can have, by oversight, even such a sentence as this from him: Though his wasted and suffering body could hardly move without support-he flew to London.' On the whole, the style of Macaulay is one rather of culture than creation. Rarely do we find in it any of those peculiarly delicate, almost evanescent turns by which the new thought of an original writer announces itself.

Another fault of Macaulay, begun probably under the influence of Hume, and increased by parliamentary experience, is the tediousness with which he expatiates on the pros and cons of party. He is never better pleased than when he gets the two parties on 'the floor of the House,' and has an opportunity of conjecturally cataloguing all the motives and opinions, probable or possible, on

the

His power of portrait painting.

37

the one side and the other. This is a trick of Hume's, too, but Macaulay feels absolutely in his element here, and cannot persuade himself to quit but with the flush of triumph over the majority of the ayes and the minority of the noes.

Macaulay seems, and is generally reckoned, a great master of portrait-painting. So far as striking epithets and sharp, welldefined predication are concerned, Macaulay certainly deserves the praise. The words applied do indeed seem so trenchant, that the man, we are tempted to believe, must be cut out by them; and very often the person, at all events, is cut out by them. Johnson, Horace Walpole, James I., James II., William III., and some others, are certainly actually seen by the reader. William III., indeed, is not only seen, but even, perhaps, understood. But this is not the case with the characters generally. Those Sunderlands, Arlingtons, Cliffords, Ashleys, Montagues, Russells, Hamiltons, &c., &c., have all of them been successively and individually introduced to us, and with the most brilliantly specific language; still we find that they all retreat, as we leave them, into a vague distance, where they become more and more shadowy, and finally disappear. We have not, after all, seen what manner of men they were; these sharp and telling predicates gave us them in pieces only, and it is in vain we seek to find them coherent in a whole. How different Carlyle! One word, and we have Robespierre, or Mirabeau, or Danton, or Calonne, or Vergniaud, and we never lose them. They are men and realities to us for ever, and not mere bundles of qualities artfully stuffed out by brilliant predication. This is the difference of art. Carlyle seeks to seize his man in the very centre of his nature, in that one quality that harmonizes all the varieties and diversities of his actions. Macaulay, by collecting all these varieties and diversities ab extra seeks to put together a figure which, unprovided with this central and uniting knot, falls all abroad in pieces again. The stupid phrase, such is the inconsistency of human nature,' which occurs so frequently in Macaulay, is, in reality, only a consolation addressed to himself on a dimly-felt failure in construing of the kind alluded to. 'The character of Harley,' says Macaulay, 'is to be collected from innumerable panegyrics and lampoons; from the works and the private correspondence of Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot, Prior, and Bolingbroke, and from multitudes of such works as "Ox and Bull," "The High German Doctor," and the "History of Robert Powell, the Puppet Showman." This we believe to be evidence crucially decisive of the truth of our judgment here. It is perfectly plain from these words, that Macaulay sought to construct Harley out of a thousand piecemeal materials gathered from without. In this way, indeed, a figure (but in perpetual danger of instant dissolution) may be pieced together, but never an actual human

character

character realized to thought. Such human character, instantly found in what it says itself, is seldom or never found in what is said of it. And this is the secret of Carlyle's art: he searches for the one look, the one gesture, the one act, the one word that gives ingress to the inner whole, and never troubles himself to gather from without the scattered beams of manifestation, knowing well that no sheaf, however large, collected in that way, will ever enable him to restore the original luminary.

But if it be thus with the characters of Macaulay, an analogous inexactitude frequently accompanies his statements of fact. And here it is the celebrated descriptive chapter which will best illustrate our views. The subject of that chapter is eminently suited to Macaulay, both as regards his outward execution and his inward habit of thought. As regards the former, he had to describe contrasts (in reference to our own times) adapted to interest and pleasingly surprise the very shallowest faculties, while, as regards the latter, the burthen of the story was progress, moral and intellectual progress. But what a remarkable easiness and indifference of temper he manifests in the collecting and selecting of his materials! The most of them are collected from writers fifty or sixty years later than the period described; and the most of these writers are novelists. His one great authority for a very large portion of the contents of that chapter is unquestionably Roderick Random.' The incidents of travelling, the state of the roads, the highwaymen, the tricks of London, the squire, the curate, are all to be found there. And certainly it is quite true that in the novels of Smollett and Fielding there is, as Thackeray observes, a very great amount of historical truth in solution.' Still, Macaulay has taken this observation a great deal too much au pied de la lettre, and it is simply ridiculous to put up Orson Topehall, a prey to all the rascality of London, as the normal English squire of the day. Still more ridiculous is it to represent the curate Shuffle, whom Roderick Random finds drinking, smoking, and fiddling in the alehouse, as the true type of the priest of that time. Would we be historically accurate, should we assume Sir Pitt Crawley to represent the baronetage, and Lord Verisopht the peerage of our own days? Out of the smells of the Thames and the Serpentine, out of the painted harlots who, morning and evening, infest Regent Street, and out of the skittle-sharpers, and hundreds the like, of whom we hear daily in the newspapers, would it not be easy to furbish up a picture of these days as piquant and racy, but at the same time quite as fallacious as Macaulay's representation of the times of our ancestors?

The reader, we dare say, recollects the description of the English traveller in the Highlands rising in the morning from the

bare

Causes and Cure of Drunkenness.

39

bare earth, blind with smoke, mad with itch, &c. Macaulay tells us himself the source from which he derives all these and other extraordinary particulars. In a note he says: Almost all these circumstances are taken from Burt's letters; for the tar I am indebted to Cleland's poetry.' His manner of working is here evident, then the statements of a single writer are conclusive to him.

In conclusion, we may say of Macaulay that be his shortcomings what they may, he has completely realized his own ideal. He says himself: The diligence, the accuracy, and the judgment of Hallam, united to the vivacity and the colouring of Southeya history of England written throughout in this manner would be the most fascinating book in the language: it would be more in request at the circulating libraries than the last novel.' This was written in 1835, and accurately foretold the fortune of his own history twenty years later. Yes; Macaulay eminently possessedand again we use his own words-the art of writing what people will like to read:' he rejects all but the attractive parts of his subject; he keeps only what is in itself amusing, or what can be made so by the artifice of his diction.' He cannot originate, he cannot create, but he disposes admirably, and has a marvellous power of what the French call the mise en scène. In subtlety, depth, fertility, in spontaneity of thought, he is infinitely behind his own great prototype Hume. To the solidity, the comprehensiveness, the completeness, the immensity of range of Gibbon, he can have no pretension. To the earnestness, the intensity, the vision of Carlyle, he is equally a stranger. With men like these he is simply incommensurable. His place is not among the kings; he holds no throne; he sits not by the sides of Thucydides and Tacitus. In the annals of the world we know but one mate for him-a mate that he would disdain, perhaps, but a mate that if here inferior is there superior-this mate is Sallust.

ART. III.-1. Works of Dr. F. R. Lees. 4 Volumes. London: Horsell and Co. 1853-1857.

2. The Politics of Temperance. Alliance Depôt, 335 Strand. 1860. (YSTEMATIC inquiries into the extent, causes, and results of intemperance, prosecuted during a period of half a century, and certain tentative experiments for the repression of this serious evil, have apparently brought the bulk of temperance reformers to a number of definite conclusions. It is these, with some of the facts and reasons from whence they are deduced, which we desire to lay very briefly before our readers for their consideration, not merely to excite to thought and elicit opinion, but, so far as is pos