XXII 



call the very dregs and lees of our political and social and religious 

 life. There is hardly an important period, at least in our later 

 history, which has not passed under his review. With the justly 

 honoured exception of Hallam's Constitutional History, Macaulay 

 usually dismisses his author with a few words of respect or con- 

 tempt, and draws almost altogether on his own resources. So Bur- 

 leigh gives us the reign of Elizabeth ; Bacon that of James I. ; 

 Milton, Hampden, of Charles I. and the Republic ; Temple (with 

 Mackintosh's History), Charles II. and the Revolution; Horace 

 Walpole, Chatham, Pitt, the Georges ; Clive and Hastings, the rise 

 of our Indian Empire,, The variety of topics is almost as nothing 

 to the variety of information on every topic ; he seemed to have 

 read everything, and to recollect all that he had read. 



As to the style of these essays, of Macaulay' s style in general, a few 

 observations. It was eminently his own, but his own not by strange 

 words, or strange collocation of words, by phrases of perpetual oc- 

 currence, or the straining after original and striking terms of ex- 

 pression. Its characteristics were vigour and animation, copiousness, 

 clearness, above all, sound English, now a rare excellence. The vigour 

 and life were unabating ; perhaps in that conscious strength which 

 cost no exertion he did not always gauge and measure the force of 

 his own words. Those who studied the progress of his writing 

 might perhaps see that the full stream, though it never stagnated, 

 might at first overflow its banks ; in later days it ran with a 

 more direct undivided torrent. His copiousness had nothing tumid, 

 diffuse, Asiatic; no ornament for the sake of ornament. As to its 

 clearness, one may read a sentence of Macaulay twice, to judge of 

 its full force, never to comprehend its meaning. His English was 

 pure, both in idiom and in words, pure to fastidiousness ; not that he 

 discarded, or did not make free use of the plainest and most homely 

 terms (he had a sovereign contempt for what is called the dignity of 

 history, which would keep itself above the vulgar tongue), but every 

 word must be genuine English, nothing that approached real vul- 

 garity ; nothing that had not the stamp of popular use, or the au- 

 thority of sound English writers, nothing unfamiliar to the common 

 ear. 



The Essays, however, were but preparatory, subsidiary to the great 

 history, which was the final aim, and the palmary ambition of Macau- 



