pointed and too personal, the repartee at times too brutal. There is an exhilaration in the air, an excitement in the situation that are characteristic of those places where the young are wont to congregate. Macaulay had another quality that is shown in all his writings, his sense of absolute certainty. Once he takes pen in hand he has no doubts or hesitations, all is clear and emphatic, and no writer is less subtle, less fond of divided or suspended judgments. Lord Melbourne, with the irony of the experienced and disillusioned man of the world, hit off this trait once for all, this overweening self-confidence, when he said that he wished he were as cocksure of anything as Macaulay was of everything. No twilight of dubiety ever hovers over a page of Macaulay. Everything is cleancut, trenchant, emphatic, downright. Now this, of course, is a defect in an author who has to deal with such miscellaneous and variegated material as does the historian. Not everything is clear and certain and after all one's investigations are over and all one's powers of reflection and analysis have been directed upon a given subject, much remains necessarily somewhat uncertain, more or less obscure, judgment must be more or less tentative, there is often insistent need of being on one's guard against the emphatic, there is always a need of nice reserve in the use of pronounced colors, always need of light and shade applied discriminatingly and with caution.

But for that we do not go to Macaulay. For him vehemence, passion, the sledge-hammer blow, the extravagant phrase of laudation and denunciation. Macaulay always gives you reasons for the faith that is in him but he never leaves you in any doubt as to what that faith is. You always know just where he stands and you are never for an instant left wondering as to why he came there. Unhappily he sometimes came there by mistake.

The Essays are of various kinds and value. Many of them concern the great figures in the history of England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These are, on the whole, the most important, for in this field Macaulay was most at home. They cover the period fairly well from the time of Elizabeth down nearly to the close of the reign of George III, the period of great

and momentous constitutional struggles, of the contest of the monarchy and the parliament for supremacy in the state; also the period which witnessed the marvelous establishment of the English control of India, of England's entrance into the fabled East. It was an heroic age which Macaulay illuminated by his genius.

Macaulay wrote always from the Whig point of view. His sympathies were pronounced and constant and they are not hidden for a moment from the reader. The Whigs and Tories were wrestling in fierce and bitter fashion for their respective principles and their warfare was over fundamentals. The existence and nature of English liberty, parliamentary, individual, representative, were at stake. Few moderns would deny that the triumph of the Whigs was the triumph of freedom. It is the vicissitudes of this long and wracking struggle, of this period of violent and profoundly significant contention, that Macaulay recounts with minute and extensive knowledge, and with unexampled vigor of language and pomp of style. He writes frankly from the Whig point of view and he pronounces judgment and delivers verdicts with truly magisterial assurance. But this does not at all mean that he is intentionally unfair, that he suppresses evidence if he dislikes it, that he garbles and twists in order to prove his point, that he wilfully misrepresents. Macaulay was an honest and an honorable advocate and there is distinct advantage in having a great struggle for liberty powerfully presented by one who profoundly believed in the importance of the issues at stake and who was greatly stirred by the recurrent and desperate crises, the tense dramatic situations, which developed as the long and arduous contest proceeded. Macaulay made errors, just as ermined judges sometimes do. But he was above board, his temper was generally fair. He lays the proofs before you and while he has his own views of the matter and expresses them with emphasis, the reader is given the evidence frankly and may dissent from the finding if he chooses. Macaulay's version of English history is the Whig version, a version, moreover, very widely and stoutly held to-day in the liberal circles of the world. The essays reproduced in this volume present some of the great, outstanding figures and the mighty ar

guments in this memorable civic and political controversy.

The two essays on Clive and Warren Hastings are of a different character. They portray a momentous chapter in British imperial history and abound in striking adventure and in the display of remarkable personal qualities operating upon a vast and mysterious stage. They are written with a pomp and pageantry worthy of the gorgeous East they celebrate. Immensely popular for three generations their fascination seems as powerful as ever, the magnificence of the scene, the play of personality, the sweep of the destinies involved, still arrest the attention and hold it captive. It will be long before these essays die.

Macaulay's knowledge of the history of Continental Europe was much less extensive and much less sure than that of his own country. Two of the more famous essays, those on Machiavelli and Frederick the Great, are included in this collection. The studies of English men of letters, Bunyan, Byron, Johnson, Bacon, Addison lie outside the scope of this volume which is devoted to the historical and not to the literary essays.

Macaulay's Essays are, of course, of unequal value, No one was more astonished than he at their popularity. Written for the most part for a quarterly review, he thought they would enjoy the usual fate of magazine literature. The natural life of such articles, he said, was only six weeks. When in 1842 his publisher urged him to have them reprinted in book form he was indisposed to do so and only yielded in the end because American publishers were bringing out defective editions without his preliminary knowledge or consent. "Now, I know," he wrote, "that these pieces are full of faults and that their popularity has been very far beyond their merit; but if they are to be republished, it would be better that they should be republished under the eye of the author, and with his corrections, than that they should retain all the blemishes inseparable from hasty writing and hasty printing." And when the first edition of the Essays in book form finally appeared in 1843 he wrote: "My collected reviews have succeeded well. Longmans tells me that he must set about a second edition. In spite, however, of the applause and of the profit, neither of

which I despise, I am sorry that it has become necessary to republish these papers. There are few of them which I read with satisfaction. Those few, however, are generally the latest, and this is a consolatory circumstance. The most hostile critic must admit, I think, that I have improved greatly as a writer. The third volume seems to me worth two of the second, and the second worth ten of the first." Macaulay would have been surprised, indeed, had he known of the steady demand for his Essays in the decades to come. Edition after edition has been brought out in England and America and on the Continent and in India. Trevelyan, writing seventeen years after Macaulay's death and thirty-three years after the appearance of the first edition in England, says this: "These productions, which their author classed as ephemeral, are so greedily read and so constantly reproduced, that, taking the world as a whole, there is probably never a moment when they are out of the hands of the compositor. The market for them in their native country is so steady, and apparently so inexhaustible, that it perceptibly falls and rises with the general prosperity of the nation; and it is hardly too much to assert that the demand for Macaulay varies with the demand for coal. The astonishing success of this celebrated book must be regarded as something of far higher consequence than a mere literary or commercial triumph. It is no insignificant feat to have awakened in hundreds of thousands of minds the taste for letters and the yearning for knowledge; and to have shown by example that, in the interests of its own fame, genius can never be so well employed as on the careful and earnest treatment of serious themes."

We may quote as a final comment the criticism of a fastidious and discriminating critic, Lord Morley: "His Essays are as good as a library; they make an incomparable manual and vade-mecum for a busy, uneducated man, who has curiosity and enlightenment enough to wish to know a little about the great lives and great thoughts, the shining words and many-colored complexities of action, that have marked the journey of man through the ages."

Columbia University

CHARLES DOWNER HAZEN.