you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half score of allusions to other historic facts, characters, literature, poetry, with which you are acquainted. Why is this epithet used? Whence is that simile drawn? How does he manage, in two or three words, to paint an individual, or to indicate a landscape? Your neighbor, who has his reading, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this great scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description.

Macaulay did not introduce a new kind of writing, but he greatly improved on his models. The essay-reviews of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly had been familiar to the English public for a quarter of a century. Jeffrey, Sidney Smith, Brougham, Sir Walter Scott, Lockhart, Hazlitt, Southey and Professor Wilson had already won great popular favor as critics and reviewers. But some of them had also earned a right to repose, or had gained other honors to which their writings had been stepping-stones. Jeffrey was longing to lay down the burden of the "Blue and Yellow," and was looking about him for young blood with which to rejuvenate the growing decrepitude of the once all powerful Review. "Can you not," he wrote to a friend in London, "find me some bright young men who will become

contributors to the Review?" One such young man was found, and in August, 1825, there appeared the famous essay on Milton. The author had not quite attained his twenty-fifth year. One cannot read that essay now without some wonder that it should bring its author such instantaneous and wide renown, for in literary history there is nothing like it, except the publication of "Childe Harold." But there were a number of conspiring causes-fortuitous almost-that helped Macaulay. His brilliant university career and his remarkable conversational powers contributed greatly to make him conspicuous in a society always hungering and thirsting for some sensation. And so he became a lion in London drawing-rooms and his breakfast table was covered every morning with more invitations than he could accept. Needless to say the fortunes of the Review were rehabilitated and for twenty years thereafter its quarterly circulation was large or small as it contained or did not contain an article by Macaulay.

new

His career is too familiar to be repeated here. The story of his success in parliament, of his brilliant oratory, of his work in India and of his history is more than a twice-told tale. Those who desire to know it fully and wish to read a

book as interesting as a novel should seek out Trevelyan's life of Macaulay. It is the third best biography in the language, being only surpassed by Boswell's Johnson and Lockhart's Scott. No one can read that life without feeling that, fortunate as it appeared to be, his success was won by high merit and by always being fully ready for every emergency, was no mere luck, no happening of blind chance that brought him fortune and honor and fame. It was his steadfast

It

ness, his love of justice and truth and his ardor for the right as he perceived it. Doubtless his horizon was not equally wide in all directions. His mind had many limitations, and he necessarily fell into error, but there are few works of a similar character, controversial and critical, that contain less error than his. He is often an advocate, but his argument has amazing solidity and the witnesses he produces can rarely be impeached. He possessed in a high degree that talent which is essential to successful oratory, the talent of demonstration. For this reason he is a model for all forensic orators.

He is an

But he is more than an advocate. able and powerful judge. His judgments upon the men who have come before him for review, of Johnson and Boswell, of Lord Clive and Warren

Hastings, of Sir William Temple and Joseph Addison, of Lord Chatham and John Hampden and an innumerable host of others, are all masterly. Even where they seem to be not entirely just or where they are opposed to the common tradition they are very nearly unanswerable. The two that have given rise to the strongest dissent and have occasioned the most controversy are those concerning Boswell and Johnson. And yet there is not a statement concerning Boswell that cannot be substantiated from his own book, nor a stricture on Johnson that cannot be abundantly proved. This is not saying that Macaulay's estimate of these men is final, but that whoever would overthrow it must come very thoroughly prepared for the encounter.

Macaulay has given to literature a gallery of portraits unequaled anywhere, and it is this that makes his essays so fascinating. He causes to pass before us the heroic men of the past; he portrays their virtues and their vices; he describes their actions, and stops to consider whether they are just or not, commenting upon them both as legist and moralist, and yet not forgetting the environment of the individual. He illustrates his arguments by figures and similes, by wise saws and satiric thrusts drawn from every source in his

tory, poetry and fiction. He pours over all a wealth of information drawn from all ages and countries. His knowledge seems to be at instantaneous command and illumines all that he says. His essays are a library in themselves.

Though he played no mean part as orator, politician and statesman, Macaulay was essentially a man of letters. The affection that most men lavish upon the mistress of their hearts he lavished on books, and as men in love idealize all women so he thought no book mean. It is astounding to

read of the immense amount of trash he had stored in his memory. He did not love mathematics or science, and he had no sympathy with the philosophic speculations of the German and French schools. He consequently was no admirer of Carlyle, nor of John Stuart Mill, nor of Lewis. But everything that was literature, ancient or modern, he enjoyed to the full. He could cry over Homer, and repeat passages without stop from every great book that was ever written. In his capacious brain was stored all manner of strange and curious lore, the spoil of all the ages, and this he would produce at call. He never went anywhere unaccompanied by a book. He lived for literature, and of all men that the world has yet made account of in that vocation, his life seems to have