The second two volumes were not published till 1855. Expec tation had been on tiptoe, and the rush was almost greater than for the first instalment.

While carrying on his History, he turned aside to write for the 'Encyclopedia Britannica' some biographies that he had more or less crudely sketched in his Essays'-the Lives of "Atterbury" (1853), "Bunyan" (1854), "Goldsmith" (1856), "Johnson" (1856), and "Pitt" (1859). These works are highly finished, and are considered by many to be the most favourable specimens of his style.

Meantime honours were coming in to crown his labours. In 1849 he was elected Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. The year 1857 was especially fruitful of such rewards to successful toil. In that year he was elected a Foreign Member of the French Academy, and of the Prussian Order of Merit, High Steward of Cambridge; and in the autumn he was raised to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley-the first literary man to receive such a distinction.

He did not long enjoy his honours. His multifarious labours began to tell upon him. He was threatened with one of the maladies that too surely follow upon a life of excitement and overstrained energy-derangement of the action of the heart. Latterly he was prohibited from public speaking: at his installation as High Steward of Cambridge he simply bowed his acknowledgments, and made no speech. He had drafted and partly written a fifth volume of his History, but did not live to publish it. The last composition published during his life was his biography of Pitt. He died at his residence, Holly Lodge, Kensington, on the 28th of December 1859.

We cannot say of Macaulay himself what he said of Johnson -that we are as familiar with his personal appearance as with the faces that have surrounded us from childhood. The explanation probably is, that there was nothing in his appearance to draw particular attention. He seems to have been a fair complexioned, good-looking man, about the middle height, full-bodied, and with a tolerably firm carriage. He is described as robustlooking." Crabb Robinson says that his features were regular, but that they had not the delicacy one expects to see in men of genius and fine sensibility. His voice was strong and commanding, but its effect was marred by a quick and excited articulation.

He had a vigorous constitution. He was one of the favoured few that draw, as De Quincey says, the double prize of a fine intellect and a healthy stomach. Had he been more economical

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of his strength, he might have lived much longer in full exercise of his faculties.

It is often said that a man's powers cannot be fairly valued till several generations after his death; that his contemporaries and their immediate posterity can seldom judge with impartiality. Many persons repeat this dictum in something like the above form without ever asking themselves, What kind of powers do we mean? If power is taken to mean intellectual power as dis played in books, the dictum is probably true. We can probably judge better of the amount of intellect in a book than could have been done by the writer's contemporaries. But while posterity may give a juster award as respects the intellectual power shown in a book, it is much more likely to be unfair in its judgment of a man's general energy of intellect. Intellect may be thrown into other things than books, and if a man dazzles the judgment of his contemporaries, and obtains unmerited praise of his literary productions, the reason in all likelihood is that literature is not his only field of intellectual display.

Macaulay's brilliant command of expression, and confident and plausible deliverances on every subject of human interest, furnish a sufficient explanation of the extraordinary popularity of his works. But undoubtedly the popular admiration of the man's abilities was heightened by the current traditions of his oratory, his powers of conversation, and his astonishing feats of memory. Everything combined to convey the impression of amazing versatility. Now, when his books are calmly judged, and his work estimated by special authorities in the various fields that he traversed with such confidence, there is a danger that we undervalue his powers, and estimate his whole intellectual force by the part of it that was spent upon his books. If he wished his fame to rest upon the quality, and not upon the quantity, of his literary productions, he should have chosen a more limited field, and not voraciously aspired to be pre-eminent in three such departments as poetry, history, and criticism. And if he wished his fame to rest upon his literary productions alone, whether in their quantity or in their quality, he should not have dissipated his energies so profusely in directions that are of little avail for permanent literary renown. He aspired to eminence not only as a man of letters, but as an orator and as a legislator. Besides all this, attested by substantial documents, he spent, if we may credit circulating traditions, an ordinary man's allowance of energy in the excitement of conversation, and in the indulgence of an incontinent appetite for reading. In conversation he did not give and take like De Quincey: once started on a theme, he ran on as in a set prelection, without break or pause. As regards his reading, the report is that besides what he read for his literary

works, he went through thousands of novels, kept abreast of the ballad literature of the streets, and attempted such freaks as reading the bulky volumes of Chrysostom. With all necessary allowance for exaggeration, it is evident that his literary performances are far from representing the whole of his dissipated intellectual force.

Numerous testimonies are on record concerning his extraordinary powers of memory. The hyperbolical expression that he forgot nothing, while it goes very far beyond the truth, indicates significantly what an impression he made on his contemporaries. It is the kind of exaggeration that makes heroes out of pre-eminent men. In his history he often quotes the substance of a document instead of giving the exact words; and the reason was, that he often quoted from memory. Several of his essays, involving extensive ranges of matter of fact, were written, by his own statement, at a distance from books. Concerning his conversation, we have several authentic anecdotes. We learn from the historian Prescott that he did not go prepared on a particular subject, and watch his opportunity to bring it forward, but fluently quoted a profusion of facts and dates on subjects introduced by others. Washington Irving relates that, in historical combats with Hallam, Macaulay quoted chapter and section as if he had had the books before him. Another acquaintance tells us that, being on one occasion convicted of a misquotation from 'Paradise Lost,' he soon after offered himself for examination, undertaking to quote any passage suggested to him in the whole poem. Moore's Diary contains several expressions of wonder at the power of his memory. At one time in particular, says the poet, "he astonished us by repeating old Irish slang ballads as glibly as I used to do when a boy."

With such a plenitude of sheer retentiveness, he combined a large share of the analogical faculty. He ranged freely through the immense store of particulars that he had accumulated, drawing parallels, analogies, and figurative comparisons with vivacious facility. Assert a proposition in art, politics, social science, indeed in any department of human knowledge, and without a moment's hesitation he would place before you similar propositions from various authors, and hosts of confirmatory or contradictory particulars. He would then, perhaps, state a view held by himself, and support his position by a fertile array of instances, analogies, and similitudes.

These brilliant powers were not without their natural weaknesses. He was so hurried a thinker, he was so enamoured of mere movement, that he could not rest to analyse minutely, or to make certain that his instances and comparisons were exactly to the point. True, he had strong sense, and with his wide

command of facts was not likely to go far astray on practical questions. But compare him with a calm, meditative, original writer like De Quincey, and you become vividly aware of his peculiar deficiency, as well as his peculiar strength; you find a more rapid succession of ideas and greater wealth of illustration, but you miss the subtle casuistry, the exact and finished similitudes, and the breaking up of routine views. No original opinion requiring patient consideration or delicate analysis is associated with the name of Macaulay. It better suited his stirring and excitable nature to apply his dazzling powers of expression and illustration to the opinions of others. He was quick to expose false generalisations by producing contradictory instances, and he often generalised for himself with the utmost boldness; but none of his original generalisations possess any importance. The life of a misunderstood man like Goldsmith is a good test of a writer's power of breaking through false traditions. Macaulay's Life of Goldsmith repeats many vulgar errors, and contains nothing new except the opinion that Goldsmith was not an ill-used man, but might have lived comfortably had he been provident an opinion resulting from strong unsentimental sense, coupled with a special eye for plain matters of fact. In his similitudes and otherwise, he often errs against exact congruity. Describing Dante's countenance, he places a "sullen and contemptuous curve" upon the lip, a "haggard and woful stare in the eye-sullenness and contempt upon one feature, and hopeless compassion upon another. Expounding the peculiarities of Milton's similes, and enlarging especially upon "the extreme remoteness of the associations by which he acts upon the reader -an expression, by the way, somewhat vague-he illustrates his meaning by saying that the poet "strikes the key-note, and expects his hearers to make out the melody "- -a feat that schoolboy" knows to be absurdly impossible, there being hundreds of different melodies starting from the same key-note.

every

In his writings he

As regards the emotional side of the man. appears buoyant and hopeful, an optimist, looking on the bright side of things, enthusiastic in his desire of progress, exultingly sure of its fulfilment in these latter days, confident in his opinions, warm and open in his expressions of like and dislike; a man "radiant," as Carlyle says, "with pepticity," without a trace of misgiving, despondency, or sourness. His sympathies go all with the vigorous and hopeful side of human nature; he ignores the miseries and difficulties of this life. He would have us believe that human comfort is rapidly on the increase; that we are rapidly nearing his millennium, where " employment is always plentiful, wages always high, food always cheap, and a large family is con

sidered not as an encumbrance but as a blessing." "From the oppressions of illiterate masters, and the sufferings of a degraded peasantry," his mind always turns with delight to such conceptions as "the vast magnificent cities, the ports, the arsenals, the villas, the museums, the libraries, the marts filled with every article of comfort or luxury, the factories swarming with artisans, the Apennines covered with rich cultivation up to their very summits, the Po wafting the harvests of Lombardy to the granaries of Venice, and carrying back the silks of Bengal and the furs of Siberia to the palaces of Milan."

We spoke of De Quincey as a man of ever-active imagination, often engaged in transmuting the scenes and characters of his daily life into food for his æsthetic sensibilities.

There does not seem to have been much of this day-dreaming turn in Macaulay. His energies were engrossed with actualities, and in his overpowering love of movement he hurried eagerly from one thing to another, without staying to overlay them with superstructures of the imagination. In his study he did not lie dreaming on a rug before the fire with a book in his hand, subjecting every new idea to a mental chemistry of analysis and synthesis, and using it as a starting-point for speculations of his own, but sat in his chair or walked through the room reading, writing, and revising with his whole strength. The chief work of his imagination-using the word in a loose popular sense-was to picture the scenes and personages of ancient times and distant countries as they really were- -the work of what may be called the historical imagination. Of æsthetic imagination-imagination properly so called, imagination as a creative or modifying faculty engaged in building up objects of Fine Art-he had little share. It was, one may say, pushed aside by other mental activities, and what work it did was done in a hurry. His warmest admirers cannot claim for him a high degree of aesthetic culture. He was too much occupied with facts to have time for it. His 'Lays of Ancient Rome' are interesting rather historically than aesthetically. They afford us vivid glimpses of Roman life and Italian scenery. The incidents, the sayings, and the doings are of the garish order that captivates the inexperienced taste.

Concerning his OPINIONS. In practical politics, as we have seen, Macaulay adhered to the Whigs; and generally, in questions not identified with party, showed himself a friend to religious liberty, and to measures calculated to improve the condition of the poorer classes. While he supported the Reform Bill, he was averse to sweeping constitutional changes. The Radical party was his especial aversion.

Theoretical politics he professed to regard with abhorrence. He