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studied meanness of expression that reminds us of the coarse familiarity of Swift. Thus, speaking of Boswell, he says "If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer." So of Chatham, he says-"He was not invited to become a placeman, and he therefore stuck firmly to his old trade of patriot." This homely order of expression he often employs with great effect in the way of derisive refutation. Thus in ridiculing Southey's sentimental views on questions of polit ca' economy, he says "We might ask how it can be said that there is no limit to the production of paper money, when a man is hanged if he issues any in the name of another, and is forced to cash what he issues in his own ?"

It is difficult to draw the line between such strength of language and the figure of speech known as hyperbole. The italicised expressions in the following passages are unmistakably hyperbolical. Such expressions are very common in Macaulay, and, read along with the context, do not strike us as rising far above the general level of his language:

"The house of Bourbon was at the summit of human greatness. England had been outwitted, and found herself in a situation at once degrading and perilous. The people of France, not presaging the calamities by which they were destined to expiate the perfidy of their sovereign, went mad with pride and delight. Every man looked as if a great estate had just been left him." "His own reflections, his own energy, were to supply the place of all Downing Street and Somerset House. The preservation of an empire from a formidable combination of foreign enemies, the construction of a government in all its parts, were accomplished by him, while every ship brought out bales of censure from his employers, and while the records of every consultation were filled with acrimonious minutes by colleagues."

One of his modes of exaggeration is almost a mannerism. Whatever he happens to be engaged with is in some respect or other the most wonderful thing that ever. existed. The following are his two most common forms for expressing such a conviction: -(1.) "No election ever took place under circumstances so favourable to the Court.' (2.) "Of all the many unpopular steps taken by the Government, the most unpopular was the publishing of this declaration."

He is sometimes betrayed into making the same extreme statement about two different persons. Thus he says of Clarendon-"No man ever laboured so hard to make himself despicable and ludicrous ;" and it is notorious that he makes a like remark about Boswell.

So much for the animation of Macaulay's manner. As regards his choice of subjects, it may be said in general that he is careful to take up only such as have an independent interest to the mass of English readers. Consequently his charms of style operate at

every advantage; they have no dead weight to overcome; they are required only to support the natural interest of the matter. A History of England, if written with moderate spirit, would always have an attraction for every Englishman; written with Macaulay's glowing patriotism and brilliant style, it proved more attractive than the most captivating novel. Similarly with his Essays. His article on Milton placed him at once in the first rank of popular favourites; an extraordinary success resulting, not so much from the display of his literary knowledge, as from the happy application of his glittering rhetoric to a theme much can vassed at the time. All his essays are upon men of first-rate interest any particulars about Machiavelli, Byron, Johnson, Bacon, Pitt, or Frederick the Great, are eagerly read, if there is any appearance of novelty in the manner of relating them.

Great men and great events-these are the favourite themes of Macaulay. When such matter is handled in such a manner, no wonder that the writer is the most popular author of his day.

Animation is our author's distinguishing quality; but often from the grandeur of his subject, and of the objects that he brings into comparison with it from all countries and from all times, his style takes a loftier tone.

There is something more than animating in his easy manner of ranging through space and time. To be transported with such freedom from continent to continent, from dynasty to dynasty, and from age to age; to pass judgment on the rival pretensions of the foremost men and the most august empires that have appeared in the world,—this, unless we have a very frivolous conception of what we are doing, should elevate us to the highest heights of sublimity. Macaulay's abrupt manner is sometimes antagonistic to the finest effects that might be accomplished by these ambitious surveys. But very often his eloquence is lofty and imposing.

Thus, in advocating with wonted enthusiasm the apotheosis of Lord Clive :—

"From Clive's second visit to India dates the political ascendancy of the English in that country. His dexterity and resolution realised, in the course of a few months, more than all the gorgeous visions which had floated before the imagination of Dupleix. Such an extent of cultivated territory, such an amount of revenue, such a multitude of subjects, was never added to the dominion of Rome by the most successful proconsul. Nor were such wealthy spoils ever borne under arches of triumph, down the Sacred Way, and through the crowded Forum, to the threshold of Tarpeian Jove. The fame of those who subdued Antiochus and Tigranes grows dim when compared with the splendour of the exploits which the young English adven turer achieved at the head of an army not equal in numbers to one hal. of a Roman legion."

Perhaps his noblest flight of sublimity is his eulogy of the

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Roman Catholic Government. This is in every way an admirable specimen of his style. There is just one break in the sustained grandeur of the passage. He should not have introduced the numerical comparison between the different creeds-a tag of statistics is very chilling and repulsive amidst the glowing flow of admiration. Macaulay's abundance of hard information often betrays him into violations of Art.

Pathos.

In Macaulay's style, as in his nature, there was more vigour than tenderness or delicacy. The abruptness and rapidity of transition, and the unseasonable intrusion of hard matters of fact, which we have just referred to as being fatal to sustained sublimity, were no less fatal to sustained pathos. The following account of the death of Hampden illustrates the beauties and the faults of his pathetic narration :—

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Hampden, with his head drooping, and his hands leaning on his horse's neck, moved feebly out of the battle. The mansion which had been inhabited by his father-in-law, and from which in his youth he had carried home his bride Elizabeth, was in sight. There still remains an affecting tradition that he looked for a moment towards that beloved house, and made an effort to go thither to die. But the enemy lay in that direction. He turned his horse towards Thame, where he arrived almost fainting with agony. The surgeons dressed his wounds. But there was no hope. The pain which he suffered was most excruciating. But he endured it with admirable firinness and resignation. His first care was for his country. He wrote from his bed several letters to London concerning public affairs, and sent a last pressing message to the headquarters, recommending that the dispersed forces should be concentrated. When his public duties were performed, he calmly prepared himself to die. He was attended by a clergyman of the Church of England, with whom he had lived in habits of intimacy, and by the chaplain of the Buckinghamshire Green-coats, Dr Spurton, whom Baxter describes as a famous and excellent divine."

The galloping short sentences in the middle of the passage are sadly out of harmony with the occasion, and nothing could be more uncongenial than the ostentatious scrap of antiquarian know ledge foisted in at the end.

His reflections on St Peter's Ad Vincula, where Monmouth was buried, are solemn and touching. He warns us that

"Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and St Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration, and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities, but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame,"and he then proceeds to record a long line of illustrious and unfortunate dead. The art of such a passage is of the simplest

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order. To us it is affecting as a vivid representation of the lapse of time, and of the disasters that wait upon greatness: but to the narrator it is little more than an exercise of historical memory.

The Ludicrous.

Macaulay's wit and humour are the wit and humour usually ascribed to "The True-Born Englishman." He has no command either of biting insinuation or of delicate raillery. His laugh is hearty and confident; unsparing contempt, open derision, broad and boisterous humour. Of each of the three qualities thus loosely expressed, we shall produce examples: his portrait of Archbishop Land, for whom he "entertained a more unmitigated contempt than for any character in our history;" a short extract from his review of Mitford's History of Greece'; and the beginning of his review of Nares's 'Life of Lord Burleigh':

"Bad as the Archbishop was, however, he was not a traitor within the statute. Nor was he by any means so formidable as to be a proper subject for a retrospective ordinance of the Legislature. His mind had not expansion enough to comprehend a great scheme, good or bad. His oppressive acts were not, like those of the Earl of Strafford, parts of an extensive system. They were the luxuries in which a mean and irritable disposition indulges itself from day to day, the excesses natural to a little mind in a great place. The severest punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at liberty, and send him to Oxford. There he might have stayed, tortured by his own diabolical temper hungering for Puritans to pillory and mangle; plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of somebody else to plague, with his peevishness and absurdity; performing grimaces and antics in the Cathedral; continuing that incomparable Diary, which we never see without forgetting the vices of his heart in the imbecility of his intellect, minuting down his dreams, counting the drops of blood which fell from his nose, watching the direction of the salt, and listening for the note of the screech-owls. Contemptuous mercy was the only vengeance which it became the Parliament to take on such a ridiculous old bigot."

"The principal characteristic of this historian, the origin of his excellences and his defects, is a love of singularity. He has no notion of going with a multitude to do either good or evil. An exploded opinion, or an unpopular person, has an irresistible charm for him. The same perverseness may be traced in his diction. His style would never have been elegant, but it might at least have been manly and perspicuous; and nothing but the most elaborate care could possibly have made it so bad as it is."

"The work of Dr Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordry preface; the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely

MELODY, HARMONY, TASTE-DESCRIPTION.

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printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light reading by Hilpa and Shalum. But, unhappily, the life of man is now threescore years and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr Nares to demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence.

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Compared with the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar-plantations, is an agreeable recreation," &c.

His masterpieces of broad ridicule are found in his literary reviews. He makes unmerciful game of, Southey's Political Economy, Robert Montgomery's Poems, and Croker's edition of Boswell.

Melody, Harmony, Taste.

Macaulay's rhythm is fluent, rarely obstructed by harsh combinations, but it is not rich and musical like De Quincey's. Though often abrupt and always rapid, at times, as we have seen, it swells into more flowing cadences; yet, at best, the melody of his sentences is the melody of a fluent and rapid speaker, not the musical roll of a writer ́ whose ear takes engrossing delight in the luxuries of sound.

Beyond amplifying the roll of his sentences when he rose to more stately declamations, he does not appear to have studied much the adaptation of sound to sense. His rhythm is well suited to the general vigour of his purposes; it is not much in harmony with quiet and delicate touches.

Like De Quincey and Carlyle, he has certain salient mannerisms. The general voice of persons of cultivated taste is against his abruptness, his hyperbolical turn of expression, and his needless employment of antithesis. In these particulars he has transgressed the general rule of not carrying pungent and striking artifices to excess. Objection may also be taken to the unmitigated force of his derision and his humour. "There is too much horse-play in his raillery."

KINDS OF COMPOSITION.

Description.

In one of his earlier essays, Macaulay lays down the opinion that mere descriptions of scenery are tiresome, and that still life needs associations with human feeling to make it interesting This explains why his writings contain so few descriptions of natural scenery.

When engaged on his History he made it a point of conscience to visit and describe from personal observation the scenes of the most memorable events. He visited the battle-field of Sedgmoor, and

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