Roman Catholic Government. This is in every way an admirable specimen of his style. There is just one break in the sustained grandeur of the passage. He should not have introduced the numerical comparison between the different creeds—a tag of statistics is very chilling and repulsive amidst the glowing flow of admiration. Macaulay's abundance of hard information often betrays him into violations of Art.

Pathos.

In Macaulay's style, as in his nature, there was more vigour than tenderness or delicacy. The abruptness and rapidity of transition, and the unseasonable intrusion of hard matters of fact, which we have just referred to as being fatal to sustained sublimity, were no less fatal to sustained pathos. The following account of the death of Hampden illustrates the beauties and the faults of his pathetic narration :

"Hampden, with his head drooping, and his hands leaning on his horse's neck, moved feebly out of the battle. The mansion which had been inhabited by his father-in-law, and from which in his youth he had carried home his bride Elizabeth, was in sight. There still remains an affecting tradition that he looked for a inoment towards that beloved house, and made an effort to go thither to die. But the enemy lay in that direction. He turned his horse towards Thame, where he arrived almost fainting with agony. The surgeons dressed his wounds. But there was no hope. The pain which he suffered was most excruciating. But he endured it with admirable firinness and resignation. His first care was for his country. He wrote from his bed several letters to London concerning public affairs, and sent a last pressing message to the headquarters, recommending that the dispersed forces should be concentrated. When his public duties were performed, he calmly prepared himself to die. He was attended by a clergyman of the Church of England, with whom he had lived in habits of intimacy, and by the chaplain of the Buckinghamshire Green-coats, Dr Spurton, whom Baxter describes as a famous and excellent divine."

The galloping short sentences in the middle of the passage are sadly out of harmony with the occasion, and nothing could be more uncongenial than the ostentatious scrap of antiquarian know ledge foisted in at the end.

His reflections on St Peter's Ad Vincula, where Monmouth was buried, are solemn and touching. He warns us that—

"Death is there associated, not, as in Westminster Abbey and St Paul's, with genius and virtue, with public veneration, and with imperishable renown; not, as in our humblest churches and churchyards, with everything that is most endearing in social and domestic charities,-but with whatever is darkest in human nature and in human destiny, with the savage triumph of implacable enemies, with the inconstancy, the ingratitude, the cowardice of friends, with all the miseries of fallen greatness and of blighted fame, "and he then proceeds to record a long line of illustrious and unfortunate dead. The art of such a passage is of the simplest

H

order. To us it is affecting as a vivid representation of the lapse of time, and of the disasters that wait upon greatness: but to the narrator it is little more than an exercise of historical memory.

The Ludicrous.

Macaulay's wit and humour are the wit and humour usually ascribed to "The True-Born Englishman.' He has no command either of biting insinuation or of delicate raillery. His laugh is hearty and confident; unsparing contempt, open derision, broad and boisterous humour. Of each of the three qualities thus loosely expressed, we shall produce examples: his portrait of Archbishop Laud, for whom he "entertained a more unmitigated contempt than for any character in our history;" a short extract from his review of Mitford's History of Greece'; and the beginning of his review of Nares's 'Life of Lord Burleigh' :

"Bad as the Archbishop was, however, he was not a traitor within the statute. Nor was he by any means so formidable as to be a proper subject for a retrospective ordinance of the Legislature. His mind had not expansion enough to comprehend a great scheme, good or bad. His oppressive acts were not, like those of the Earl of Strafford, parts of an extensive system. They were the luxuries in which a mean and irritable disposition indulges itself from day to day, the excesses natural to a little mind in a great place. The severest punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at liberty, and send him to Oxford. There he might have stayed, tortured by his own diabolical temper- hungering for Puritans to pillory and mangle; plaguing the Cavaliers, for want of somebody else to plague, with his peevishness and absurdity; performing grimaces and antics in the Cathedral; continuing that incomparable Diary, which we never see without forgetting the vices of his heart in the imbecility of his intellect, minuting down his dreams, counting the drops of blood which fell from his nose, watching the direction of the salt, and listening for the note of the screech-owls. Contemptuous mercy was the only vengeance which it became the Parliament to take on such a ridiculous old bigot."

"The principal characteristic of this historian, the origin of his excellences and his defects, is a love of singularity. He has no notion of going with a multitude to do either good or evil. An exploded opinion, or an unpopular person, has an irresistible charm for him. The same perverseness may be traced in his diction. His style would never have been elegant, but it might at least have been manly and perspicuous; and nothing but the most elaborate care could possibly have made it so bad as it is."

"The work of Dr Nares has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it, is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordary preface; the prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We cannot sum up the merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely

MELODY, HARMONY, TASTE-DESCRIPTION.

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printed quarto pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic measure, and that it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the deluge, have been considered as light reading by Hilpa and Shalum. But, unhappily, the life of inan is now threescore years and ten; and we cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr Nares to demand from us so large a portion of so short an existence.

"Compared with the labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour, the labour of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in sugar-plantations, is an agreeable recreation," &c.

His masterpieces of broad ridicule are found in his literary reviews. He makes unmerciful game of Southey's Political Economy, Robert Montgomery's Poems, and Croker's edition of Boswell.

Melody, Harmony, Taste.

Macaulay's rhythm is fluent, rarely obstructed by harsh combinations, but it is not rich and musical like De Quincey's. Though often abrupt and always rapid, at times, as we have seen, it sweils into more flowing cadences; yet, at best, the melody of his sentences is the melody of a fluent and rapid speaker, not the musical roll of a writer whose ear takes engrossing delight in the luxuries of sound.

Beyond amplifying the roll of his sentences when he rose to more stately declamations, he does not appear to have studied much the adaptation of sound to sense. His rhythm is well suited to the general vigour of his purposes; it is not much in harmony with quiet and delicate touches.

Like De Quincey and Carlyle, he has certain salient mannerisms. The general voice of persons of cultivated taste is against his abruptness, his hyperbolical turn of expression, and his needless employment of antithesis. In these particulars he has transgressed the general rule of not carrying pungent and striking artifices to excess. Objection may also be taken to the unmiti gated force of his derision and his humour. "There is too much horse-play in his raillery."

In one of his earlier essays, Macaulay lays down the opinion that mere descriptions of scenery are tiresome, and that still life needs associations with human feeling to make it interesting. This explains why his writings contain so few descriptions of natural scenery.

When engaged on his History he made it a point of conscience to visit and describe from personal observation the scenes of the most memorable events. He visited the battle-field of Sedgmoor, and

describes the general appearance of the country at the present day as seen from the church-tower of Bridgewater. But the description is rather an analysis of the landscape into its general elements, mingled with various historical reminiscences, than a composition of those elements into a definite picture. In like manner he wrote on the spot a description of the Irish towns round which the Englishry rallied at the Revolution-Kenmare, Enniskillen, and Londonderry. In describing Kenmare, he simply notes the general features of the district" the mountains, the glens, the capes stretching far into the Atlantic, the crags on which the eagles build, the rivulets brawling down rocky passes, the lakes overhung by groves, in which the wild deer find covert;" elements, certainly, of gorgeous scenery, but left to the reader to form into a coherent landscape. His description of Londonderry is perhaps his most vivid effort. Yet even this is vague compared with the luminous word-painting of Carlyle.

In his Essays he neglects many opportunities that a master of descriptive art would have eagerly seized. Had Carlyle written an essay on Lord Clive, he would have luxuriated in realising to English readers the novel aspects of Indian scenery; he would have put forth all his powers of imagery to convey a distinct impression of the shape and dimensions of the table-lands and the great valleys, and would have placed vividly before us the exact "lie" of the hill-fortresses and the magnificent cities of the plains, the appearance of the surrounding country, and, as far as language can express such things, even the variations of sky and atmosphere.

But is not Macaulay always spoken of as a great pictorial artist? True, he is so; but in a very different sense from such artists as Carlyle. The dictum quoted above is the key to his choice of subjects. What he delights to group and to delineate is not inanimate things, but the condition, actions, and productions of man. When he describes a town he is concerned less with its shape and its position relatively to the surrounding landscape, than with its political or commercial importance, the number and character of its population, or the splendour of its buildings. The description of Benares is a fair specimen of his manner :—

"His first design was on Benares, a city which in wealth, population, dignity, and sanctity, was among the foremost of Asia. It was commonly believed that half a million of human beings was crowded into that labyrinth of lofty alleys, rich with shrines, and minarets, and balconies, and carved oriels to which the sacred apes clung by hundreds. The traveller could scarce make his way through the press of holy mendicants, and not less holy bulls. The broad and stately flights of steps which descended from these warming haunts to the bathing-places along the Ganges, were worn every day by the footsteps of an innumerable multitude of worshippers. The schools and temples drew crowds of pious Hindoos from every province where the Brahminical faith was known. Commerce had as many pilgrims

as religion. All along the shores of the venerable stream lay great fleets of vessels laden with rich merchandise. From the looms of Benares went forth the most delicate silks that adorned the balls of St James's and of the Petit Trianon; and in the bazaars the muslins of Bengal and the sabres of Oude were mingled with the jewels of Golconda and the shawls of Cashmere."

There is thus no lack of pictorial matter in Macaulay. The peculiarity is, that so much of it has a direct connection with human beings, and that though of a strongly objective turn of mind, he had no natural bent for the description of still life. It was vigorous, stirring movement "the rush and the roar of practical life"-that chiefly engaged his interest. He is nowhere more in his element than in describing a gorgeous pageant, or the demonstrations of an excited mob. He enters with great zest into the reception of Charles I. at Norwich, the "Progress" of James II., the procession of William and Mary along the Strand, the ceremony of the coronation, and suchlike. He describes the accompanying festivities with gusto; the illuminations, the bells ringing, the "conduits spouting wine," the "gutters running with ale." There is probably no prose passage that has been oftener committed to memory than his account of the trial of Hastings. One of his most vivid pictures is his detail of the prolonged excitement of London during the persecution and trial of the seven Bishops, and the burst of joy upon their acquittal:

"Sir Roger Langley answered 'Not guilty!' As the words passed his lips, Halifax sprang up and waved his hat. At that signal, benches and galleries raised a shout. In a moment ten thousand persons, who crowded the great hall, replied with a still louder shout, which made the old oaken roof crack; and in another moment the innumerable throng without set up a third huzza, which was heard at Temple Bar. The boats which covered the Thames gave an answering cheer. A peal of gunpowder was heard on the water, and another, and another; and so, in a few moments the glad tidings were flying past the Savoy and the Friars to London Bridge, and to the forest of masts below. As the news spread, streets and squares, marketplaces and coffee-houses, broke forth into acclamations. Yet were the acclamations less strange than the weeping. For the feelings of men had been wound up to such a point, that at length the stern English nature, so little used to outward signs of emotion, gave way, and thousands sobbed aloud for very joy. Meanwhile, from the outskirts of the multitude, horsemen were spurring off to bear along all the great roads intelligence of the victory of our Church and nation."

As regards the method of such descriptions. They follow very much the same rules as the description of scenery. The describer should begin with a comprehensive view of his subject. In this respect Macaulay is, as a rule, exemplary. In his description of Benares, for instance, the first sentence is a summary introduction to what follows. Further, the describer should observe a method in the details; he should place together all that are connected, and should give them either in the direct or in the inverse order of