was the antiquarian dissertation. There was also the historical review, containing alternate pages of extract and comment—generally rather dull and gritty. But the historical essay as he conceived it, and with the prompt inspiration of a real discoverer immediately put into practical shape, was as good as unknown before him. To take a bright period or personage of history, to frame it in a firm outline, to conceive it at once in article-size, and then to fill in the limited canvas with sparking anecdote, telling bits of color, and facts all fused together by a real genius for narrative, was the sort of genrepainting which Macaulay applied to history. We have only to turn the back numbers of the Edinburgh Review to perceive how his articles gleam in those old pages of 'gray paper and blunt type.' And to this day his Essays remain the best of their class, not only in England but in Europe. . . . How many persons, outside the class of professed students, know much of Lord Chatham, Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, Walpole, Pulteney, Cartaret and many more, beyond what they learn from the pages of Macaulay?"

Most of the Essays were published in the Edinburgh Review, the resonant organ of the Whigs. The last of these appeared in 1844 by which time Macaulay's work on the History of England had become exclusive and all-absorbing. The Essays were generally composed with great rapidity for that was Macaulay's habit, having filled his mind with his subject, to the exclusion of everything else, to write, when the time came, with extraordinary concentration of mind. He said of himself that he knew no one who could and did labor with such speed as himself, and he was not given to boasting. But the rapidity of execution did not mean carelessness or slovenliness in workmanship. While sometimes Macaulay's research was none too extensive his attention to the structure and form of his composition was always close and most fastidious. He could not rest content with the feeling that this or that part of his study was poorly constructed, that the transitions from one stage in the development to others were clumsy or abrupt or ineffective, that the sentences might have been better phrased. He had the capacity for taking infinite pains. He paid the supreme

compliment to his reader of considering that the latter was entitled to the very best, and not to the second best. The purpose which he expressed when he undertook the writing of his History was practically the same that had governed him in the production of his Essays: "I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies." He well knew that so unique a triumph could be achieved only by one who brought not only talent and self-reliance to the task but endless devotion to detail, an extreme conscientiousness in matters of expression. Macaulay learned by experience that about two pages of print a day were as much as he could do at his best, and except when at his best he would not work at all. His successes were legitimate, if ever successes were, for they were based on prodigies of labor, and on the most studied craftsmanship. It was evidently his motto that what was worth doing at all was worth doing well. "Macaulay," says Trevelyan, "never allowed a sentence to pass muster until it was as good as he could make it. He thought little of recasting a chapter in order to obtain a more lucid arrangement, and nothing whatever of reconstructing a paragraph for the sake of one happy stroke or apt illustration. Whatever the worth of his labor, at any rate it was a labor of love. 'Antonio Stradivari has an eye

That winces at false work, and loves the true.' Leonardo da Vinci would walk the whole length of Milan that he might alter a single tint in his picture of the Last Supper. Napoleon kept the returns of his army under his pillow at night, to refer to in case he was sleepless; and would set himself problems at the Opera, while the overture was playing."

Such and such only is the royal road to fame, a very dusty and rocky road, hard for the pilgrim, but commanding at the other end a magnificent prospect. Macaulay could not rest content "until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like running water."

The man who would take such pains in the perfecting of his work was an artist, and an artist with a conscience. Macaulay has merited and has received the great

gratitude and regard of mankind. The clarity of his style is but the formal expression of the clarity of his thought and both rested upon intellectual integrity and upon a lively sense of the responsibility an author owes his public.

This man who could labor terribly and who never spared himself in his passion for finish of form was aided enormously all through life by a priceless possession, namely an extraordinary memory. It is somewhat common in these days to depreciate this precious faculty as if it were something inert, mechnical, low. It would be difficult, however, to name any mental quality which would be more variously useful to an historian, better calculated to enrich his work, to facilitate his productivity. This gift Macaulay possessed in altogether extraordinary measure. It is was as easy for him to remember as it is for most people to forget and it seems to have been nearly impossible for him to forget anything. Whatever he read he retained with unconscious ease and, as he read voraciously, the result was a remarkable accumulation of knowledge, always at hand to be drawn upon. The great richness of Macaulay's style in allusions, comparisons, illustrations owes much to this unrivalled and easy command of all his variegated resources. Whatever passed into his mind remained there. The tales that are told of this capacity of his have become classic and legendary. At the age of thirteen while waiting for a mail coach he picked up a country newspaper and ran across two utterly commonplace and insignificant poems contributed by local bards. He merely glanced them over once and never again thought of them for forty years, when he repeated them word for word. Challenged on one occasion to a feat of memory he wrote out a complete list of the senior wranglers at Cambridge, with their dates and colleges for a hundred years. On another occasion when asked: "Macaulay, do you know your Popes?" he replied "No, I always get wrong among the Innocents." "But can you say your Archbishops of Canterbury?" "Any fool," said Macaulay, "could say his Archbishops of Canterbury backwards," and off he went, drawing breath only once to remark on the oddity of there having been both an Archbishop Sancroft and an Arch

bishop Bancroft. He once remarked that if by some devastating wave of vandalism every copy in existence of "Paradise Lost," "The Pilgrim's Progress" and "Sir Charles Grandison" were destroyed he could reproduce them from recollection. He was naturally proud of his good memory and had no patience with people who seemed to pride themselves on having a bad one. "They appear to reason thus; the more memory, the less invention," was his observation.

Macaulay possessed another endowment not much inferior to this, in enabling him to go far in the world of letters, an extraordinary faculty of assimilating printed matter at first sight. "To the end," says Trevelyan, "he read books faster than other people skimmed them, and skimmed them as fast as any one else could turn the leaves. 'He seemed to read through the skin,' said one who had often watched the operation. And this speed was not in his case obtained at the expense of accuracy." With such endowments Macaulay could and did acquire an amazingly extensive knowledge, and this knowledge he gave forth to the world in his "Essays" and his "History." And the world heard him gladly reading what he wrote with an avidity and a persistence rare, indeed unmatched, in the history of historians.

He had several supreme merits as a writer of history. One was that he was a born story-teller. He places the reader, as, before writing, he has placed himself, in the very center of the scenes and amid the persons whom he is attempting to portray. No detail of local color, or of individual indiosyncrasy escapes his attention. The very spirit of the times, as well as its grosser manifestations, is evoked by an imagination which is strong and yet which is controlled by a firm judgment. Every page that Macaulay wrote, every sentence, is made to add something significant and special to the picture which we can watch grow under our very eyes, Macaulay's processes of literary construction being almost as transparent as are his sentences. The secret of his power lies in the fact that he imparts to others his own living visualization of the scenes and characters of the past. What he sees intensely, what he feels keenly, the reader sees and feels with similar vividness and force. History becomes

something quite palpable, almost tangible, palpitating, painful sometimes, magnificent often, throbbing and thrilling always. To make the dead and dry leaves of the year that is gone leap to their places on the tree again and tingle once more with life and beauty would be a thing no more miraculous than the thing Macaulay did. Some of the most sumptuous and gorgeous passages in English literature are his creations fashioned out of material that to the ordinary man would seem as dry as dust. Such thaumaturgy is so rare in the historical field as to be very noteworthy.

Not only did Macaulay have this sense of the lively, the vital, he had the dramatic sense in equal measure, the instinct for subordination and arrangement of details so that the central figure or scene should stand forth, not in lonely isolation and grandeur, but in proper setting, surrounded, but not obscured or confused, by the lesser figures or incidents; the colors heightened, the lights concentrated where they should be. Drawing on the inexhaustible resources of his prodigious memory, and on the instructive experiences of his own political career, he is able to enrich his narrative with a breadth of treatment, with a variety of comparisons, analogies and illustrations unmatched elsewhere. The result is that the scene is always changing or appearing under a new aspect or in a new light, and never becomes tedious. His series of historical paintings includes a multitude of figures, big and little, for where the sitter is not worthy of a full length presentment, he is given his due in some small study, a head, or a head and shoulders. Pictorial history here reaches its apogee-magnificent panoramas, a spacious gallery of portraits, and an endless collection of miniatures and vignettes filling in the spaces which would otherwise be vacant. No English historian except Carlyle has equalled Macaulay in this branch of his craft, as a painter of unforgettable pictures.

Most of Macaulay's Essays were written when he was quite young, in the thirties or early forties, and they have the qualities that we associate with youth, the high spirits, the movement, the dash, the brilliant animation, the vigor and the strength, the enjoyment of the concrete, the dislike of the abstruse, the humor at times too