"They valued a prayer or a ceremony, not on account of the comfort which it conveyed to themselves, but on account of the vexation which it gave to the Roundheads; and were so far from being disposed to purchase union by concession, that they objected to concession, chiefly because it tended to produce union." "One thing, and one thing only, could make Charles dangerous-a violent death, His subjects began to love his memory as heartily as they had hated his person; and posterity has estimated his character from his death rather than from his life." "The great ruling principle of his [Robert Walpole's] public conduct was indeed a love of peace, but not in the sense in which Archdeacon Coxe uses the phrase. The peace which Walpole sought was not the peace of the country, but the peace of his own administration." "There can be no greater error than to imagine that the device of meeting the exigencies of the State by loans was imported into our Island by William the Third. From a period of immemorial antiquity it had been the practice of every English Government to contract debts. What the Revolution introduced was the practice of honestly paying them." "The town of Bedford probably contained more than one politician who, after contriving to raise an estate by seeking the Lord during the reign of the saints, contrived to keep what he had got by persecuting the saints during the reign of the strumpets; and more than one priest who, during repeated changes in the discipline and doctrines of the Church, had remained constant to nothing but the benefice." "The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. Indeed he generally contrived to enjoy the double pleasure of tormenting both spectators and bear." The art of the following is essentially epigrammatic. The piquancy arises from the unexpected deliverance of such incongruities in the same sentence :— "They therefore gave the command to Lord Galway, an experienced veteran, a man who was in war what Molière's doctors were in medicine, who thought it much more honourable to fail according to rule, than to succeed by innovation, and who would have been very much ashamed of himself if he had taken Monjuich by means so strange as those which Peterborough employed. This great commander conducted the campaign of 1707 in the most scientific manner. On the plain of Almanza he encountered the army of the Bourbons. He drew up his troops according to the methods prescribed by the best writers, and in a few hours lost eighteen thousand men, a hundred and twenty standards, all his baggage, and all his artillery.' Climax.-A rhetorician of so decided a turn as Macaulay could not fail to use the rhetorician's greatest art. In every paragraph that rises above the ordinary level of feeling, we are conscious of being led on to a crowning demonstration. His arts of contrast already exemplified have the effect of making a climax. See particularly the quotations at pp. 93, ΙΟΙ. He seems to pause in the course of his narrative or his 104 argument, and go back for a race that will carry him sweepingly : "In his youth he wrote on the emotions produced by mountains and cascades, by the masterpieces of painting and sculpture, by the faces and necks of beautiful women, in the style of a parliamentary report. 6 In his old age he discussed treaties and tariffs in the most fervid and brilliant one man. In stating, as his manner is, the various motives that impel different parties at particular conjunctures, he is careful to reserve the most telling for the end, and artfully prepares the way for the final resolution. One of his most studied attempts at climax is the famous passage about Charles in the Essay on Milton. The only other Figure of Speech that is a marked ingredient in Macaulay's style is Hyperbole. An exaggerated turn of expression is one of the main elements of his animated manner: it will be fully discussed under the quality of Strength. QUALITIES OF STYLE. Simplicity. Macaulay's composition is as far from being abstruse as printed One can trace in his writing a constant effort matter can well be. to make himself intelligible to the meanest capacity. He loves to dazzle and to argue, but above everything he is anxious to be understood. His ideal evidently is to turn a subject over on every side, to place it in all lights, and to address himself to every variety of prejudice and preoccupation in his audience. Without Yet his simplicity is very different from the simplicity of such writers as Goldsmith and Paley. His is far from being a homely style. He does not studiously affect Saxon terms. being so scholastic and technical as De Quincey, he is not scrupulous about using words of Latin origin, and admits many terms that Dean Alford would have excluded from "the Queen's English." Besides, although he were an Anglo-Saxon Pharisee in his choice of words, his turns of expression are not simple in the sense His balanced sentences, abrupt tranof being familiar and easy. sitions, pointed antitheses, and climactic arrangement, elevate him out of the ranks of homely authors, and constitute him, as we have said, pre-eminently artificial. What is it, then, that makes him so easily understood? For one thing, he seldom meddles with abstruse problems. He does not, like De Quincey, delight to match his ingenuity against difficulties; he does not choose a subject because it has baffled everybody else: his pleasure is to do brilliantly what everybody can do in a manner. De Quincey wrote upon Pope and Shakspeare because perplexities had settled upon their lives. Macaulay takes up only biographies whose principal incidents are known and read by all men - the lives of Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, Pitt. He does not covet openings for nice speculation. When a recondite question crosses his path, he provides an answer so simple and easy that the cautious reader doubts whether it is complete. He makes Shakspeare the result of the Reformation; Wordsworth the result of the French Revolution; Byron "the interpreter between Wordsworth and the multitude." In discussing the life of Bacon, he finds it necessary to give his opinion of the inductive method. The opinion is very plausible; but scientific authorities pronounce it "ignorant and shallow in the extreme." In his life of Machiavelli, he undertakes to account for the peculiar state of Italian society in the fourteenth century. The explanation is most simple: the Italians were given to commerce and literature; they employed mercenaries to fight their battles; the mercenaries were treacherous, hence they ceased to depend upon war for effecting their desires: they came to despise courage and honour intrigue; to think it contemptible to do by force what could be done by fraud. With all its simplicity, the explanation is far from satisfactory; it begins at too late a point. It does not explain why the Italians turned to commerce and literature, and paid the natives of ruder countries to do their fighting. If we knew that, we should probably find that the treachery of the mercenaries encourage, and did not originate, cowardice and intrigue: a people originally indisposed to fight their own battles were not likely at any time to excel in the active virtues. Further, the employment of mercenaries was only one of many causes tending to encourage the practice and admiration of dishonest dexterity. In like manner in his History, with all his unexampled knowledge of facts, and of every variety of opinion avowed by opposite parties, he still shows a disposition to put up with pat and easy explanations of events. For example, he explains the hostility of the clergy to the Revolution by the fact that it controverted flatly all their favourite doctrines about non-resistance and passive obedience. This is a most acceptable theory; it refers us to a well-known weakness of human nature: yet who that has read Macaulay's own picture of the multitude of conflicting interests then prevalent will believe that this was the sole cause of the clerical disaffection? Another example of his love of simple explanations is seen in the prominence he everywhere gives to the doctrine of reaction. The discontent under Cromwell and under William is compared to the discontent under Moses; and all such cases are spoken of as reactions of feeling. So the "appalling outbreak of licentiousness "after the Restoration is explained as the natural result of the Puritan austerity. In all these instances the alleged law is a familiar fact of our nature; and we are willing to accept it as a full explanation, though it is far from being so. He is, then, readily understood, because he deals with familiar subjects, and explains difficulties by a reference to familiar things. But this is only a small element of his intelligibility. The main element is his close and constant adherence to the concrete. The terse abstract statement so familiar to the reader of Johnson, occurs but rarely in Macaulay, and only as a variety of expression. He discusses everything in the concrete. When he states an abstract proposition, unless it is all the more familiar, he follows it up with a plethora of particular cases. We have seen (p. 97) that his prodigious knowledge of particulars betrays him into a superfluity of illustration. In describing the conduct of individuals, he is not content with general terms: he does not simply style them brave, or just, or sagacious; he compares them with some well-known embodiment of these qualities, or relates significant circumstances. Thus, in a passage already referred to, he says that “had the administration of James been able and splendid, it would probably have been fatal to our country." Many writers would have been content with this plain statement, but Macaulay goes on to say :— "Had he been, like Henry the Fourth, like Maurice of Nassau, or like Gustavus Adolphus, a valiant, active, and politic ruler, had he put himself at the head of the Protestants of Europe, had he gained great victories over Tilly and Spinola, had he adorned Westminster with the spoils of Bavarian monasteries and Flemish cathedrals, had he hung Austrian and Castilian banners in Saint Paul's, and had he found himself, af er great achievements, at the head of fifty thousand troops, brave, well disciplined, and devotedly attached to his person, the English Parliament would soon have been nothing more than a name. In conveying an idea of the doctrines of the Church of England, instead of plunging into details and bald generalities, he hits them off boldly by stating the position of the Church of England relatively to other Churches, and enlivens the comparison with the names of representative men: "To this day the constitution, the doctrines, and the services of the Church, retain the visible marks of the compromise from which she sprang. She occupies a middle position between the Churches of Rome and Geneva. Her doctrinal confessions and discourses, composed by Protestants, set forth principles of theology in which Calvin or Knox would have found scarcely a word to disapprove. Her prayers and thanksgivings, derived from the ancient liturgies, are very generally such that Bishop Fisher or Cardinal Pole might have heartily joined in them. A controversialist who puts an Arminian sense on her articles and homilies, will be pronounced by candid men to be as unreasonable as a controversialist who denies that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration can be discovered in her liturgy." In stating quantity or dimension, he adds to the dry unrememberable ciphers a comparison with some similar case in the lump. His "third chapter" is much indebted to this art of relieving the tedious quotation of figures. Thus― "Cornwall and Wales at present yield annually near fifteen thousand tons of copper, worth near a million and a half sterling-that is to say, worth about twice as much as the annual produce of all English mines of all descriptions in the seventeenth century." In like manner he substitutes familiar ways of reckoning time in place of the precise notation by dates. Thus, in describing the amalgamation of races after the Conquest, he says: "The great-grandsons of those who had fought under William, and the great-grandsons of those who had fought under Harold, began to draw near to each other in friendship; and the first plecge of their reconciliation was the Great Charter, won by their united exertions and framed for their common benefit." : His way of dealing with cumbrous qualifications, explanations, and examples, is not an unmixed gain in the direction of simplicity. His method is, as we have seen, to make all such statements in separate sentences, instead of joining them to the main statement in the same sentence. So far this is a gain the mind is engaged with one thing at a time; it is asked to take in the several statements one by one, instead of getting them all at once along with an indication of their relationships. But this very severality of statement leads to confusion: the mind having grasped the separate facts, receives no clue to their mutual bearings, and is placed in danger of bewilderment. There is a way out of the difficulty-namely, to make the qualifications and explanations as few as possible. This is hardly legitimate; yet we have seen that Macaulay is suspected of adopting it. Clearness. In the Introduction (p. 17) we mentioned Macaulay as one of the writers whose style justifies a subdivision of Clearness into Perspicuity and Precision. He is perspicuous, but not precise. To say that "not an ambiguous sentence is to be found through |