manly figure, marvellously upright, with a bad neckcloth, and one hand in his waistcoat pocket. Of regular beauty he had little to boast, but in faces where there is an expression of great power, or of great good-humour, or both, you do not regret its absence." In everything that requires manual dexterity he was singularly awkward, and he was utterly destitute of all bodily accomplishments. When, during his attendance at Windsor as a Cabinet Minister, he was informed that there was a horse at his disposal, he replied, “If Her Majesty wishes to see me ride, she must order out an elephant." Much might be said in praise of the dignity, honesty, and manliness of his private character. No language could be too strong to describe the deep affection which he felt for some of his relatives, especially his sisters and a few cherished friends. For them he considered no sacrifice too great. Yet he was not exactly what is known as a good-hearted man. He was, it is true, generous in supplying the pecuniary wants of the many applicants for his bounty; but the money so bestowed was often given with a grudge and a sneer.

As an author, Macaulay's conscientious industry and neverceasing carefulness deserve the highest commendation. It is, indeed, as Mr. Gladstone, in his most candid and judicious essay on Macaulay, has observed, delightful to find that the most successful prose-writer of the day was also the most painstaking. Though, after the establishment of his fame, he could have commanded whatever price he chose for any thing that came from his pen, his vigilance never for a moment relaxed. He "unshrinkingly went through an immense mass of inquiry, which even he felt sometimes to be irksome, and which to most men would have been intolerable. He was perpetually picking the grain of corn out of the bushel of chaff. He freely chose to undergo the dust, and heat, and strain of battle before he would challenge from the public the crown of victory." His method in composing his History was first to write rapidly out a rough draft, and then begin to fill it in at the rate of six pages of foolscap every morning, written in so large a hand and containing so many

Macaulay's Writings.

419

erasures as to make on an average not more than two pages of print.

Now that the heat of contemporary feeling has subsided, Macaulay's merits can be appraised with some degree of accuracy. Narrative was his peculiar forte. As a critic his work is not of great value. He could point out the inaccuracies of a Croker or the absurdities of a Robert Montgomery with inimitable vigour and power of rough raillery, but that "slashing" kind of criticism has had its day, and no writer of equal eminence would now think of engaging in such work. The higher kind of criticism, which consists in trying to get at the inner meaning and substance of great literary works, he had, as he himself was aware, little talent for and rarely attempted. His poetry, with the exception of a few lines, may be described as brilliant rhymed rhetoric. But his biographical papers, in which in terse and striking fashion are set forth the main features of the lives of such men as the Earl of Chatham, Warren Hastings, Addison, are matchless in their own department. They are not, like the similar essays of Carlyle, a series of original reflections suggested by the subjects under discussion, with the leading details about whom the reader is supposed to be familiar, but vigorous résumés in which are comprised all the leading features in the life and character of the men who are handled. His "History of England from the Accession of James II.," to give the full title, is but a fragment of a much larger design which death prevented him from accomplishing. He prepared, as he tells us in the first words of the opening chapter, "to write the history of England from the accession of King James II. down to a time which is within the memory of men still living;" but he lived to bring it down only to the death of William. His reading in all sorts of the contemporary literature, pamphlets, squibs, songs, &c., joined to his extraordinary strength of memory, enabled him to give his History a picturesqueness and freshness of colour after which every historian ought to aspire, but to which very few have attained in anything like the same degree. No writer ever possessed

in a higher measure the art of rendering whatever he dealt with interesting and attractive. To say that he is not an impartial historian is only to say what must to some extent be said of every writer who treats of subjects regarding which party prejudice has not altogether subsided. His History has been described as "an epic poem, of which King William is the hero," and certainly he sometimes allows his Whig propensities to get the better of strict justice. Many assaults have been made upon his accuracy, but they have had little effect upon his fame. It would be strange indeed if in so large a work as the History, containing innumerable petty facts, no errors could be pointed out; but of direct errors there are not many. The real and weighty objection to Macaulay's accuracy is his habit of making broad, sweeping statements, which have indeed some foundation, but not enough to support the assertion based on them. The same fault occurs in all his writings. For example, in his "Encyclopædia Britannica" sketch of Johnson, he says that Johnson was "repeatedly provoked into striking those who had taken liberties with him." The "repeatedly" is a gross exaggera tion. The opinion of some of the best recent critics has been strongly adverse to Macaulay's style. It is said to be rhetorical, to want repose, to have about it a hard metallic ring, and to be disfigured by too frequently employed and obvious artifices. In these censures there is a good deal of truth; nevertheless, there was never a better style for purposes of popular effect. It is always lucid and vigorous and telling. Its influence upon the style of contemporary writers has been. very wide, and upon the whole beneficial. Force and clearness are qualities to which many other less important qualities of writing may well be sacrificed.

There are almost no points of comparison between Macaulay and Thomas Carlyle. In their ways of life, their characters, their mental habits, their way of writing, they were well-nigh totally dissimilar. Macaulay found Carlyle's literary heterodoxy so obnoxious to him that he would not read his works; and it is easy to imagine that Carlyle found certain

features in Macaulay's writings which rendered them almost equally repugnant to him. Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, Dumfriesshire, on December 4, 1795. His father, originally a stonemason, afterwards a small farmer, was an excellent specimen of the best type of Scottish peasant, a man of great force of character, rigid morals, deep religious feelings of the Calvinistic kind, and of abilities which, if cultivated, would have made their mark in any sphere. His mother, whom throughout life he loved as he never loved any one else, was a woman of gentle nature and much practical good sense. After acquiring the elements of knowledge at the parish school of Ecclefechan, Carlyle was sent to the academy at Annan, where he remained till, in 1809, he entered the University of Edinburgh. There he went through the ordinary course, distinguishing himself in mathematics, but quitting it in 1804 without taking a degree. His parents had indulged the hope, common to Scottish people of their class, that they might yet see their son " wag his head in a pulpit." But it was not destined so to be. After leaving the University, Carlyle, to use his own words, "got (by competition at Dumfries, summer 1814) to be mathematical master' in Annan Academy, with some potential outlook on divinity as ultimatum (a rural divinity student visiting Edinburgh for a few days each year, and delivering' certain 'discourses'). Six years of that would bring you to the church gate, as four years of continuous 'divinity hall' would; unluckily only that in my case I never had the least enthusiasm for the business, and there were even grave prohibitive doubts more and more rising ahead." His theological studies were pretty much confined to the writing and delivering in the Divinity Hall of two discourses-one in English, the other in Latin. In 1816 he was appointed "classical and mathematical" master at Kirkcaldy, in room of the old parish schoolmaster, who had been bought off as incapable. Edward Irving, whose death he 'commemorated in words of burning eloquence, was then master of an "academy" there, and Carlyle and he, who were previously acquainted with each other, spent much time to

gether. From the books in Irving's library Carlyle derived great benefit. The destinies of the two friends were very different. Irving, after a career of blazing popularity as a London preacher, is now a name and nothing besides; Carlyle, long unnoticed and unknown, has left an abiding impress on the literature of the nineteenth century.

Carlyle was ill fitted to be a teacher, and his impatience of folly and stupidity made him a harsh and stern preceptor. "In 1818," he writes, "I had come to the grim conclusion that schoolmastering must end, whatever pleased to follow; that it were better to perish,' as I exaggeratively said to myself, than continue schoolmastering." He accordingly went to Edinburgh, "intending, darkly, towards potential literature.'" His first publications were sixteen articles, mostly biographical, contributed to Brewster's "Edinburgh Encyclo. pædia" in 1820-23. These articles, which have never been reprinted, cannot be said to show any extraordinary promise. To the New Edinburgh Review, a short-lived periodical, he contributed in 1821 a paper on Joanna Baillie's "Metrical Legends," and in 1822 another on Goethe's "Faust," interesting as being his earliest reference to the great German whom he did so much to make known in this country. In 1822 he became tutor to Charles Buller, whose premature death in 1848 cut short the course of a politician of whom great things were expected. This connection was profitable to Carlyle in many ways. He received £200 a year as salary; and the Bullers, who recognised the great genius that lay beneath his rough and occasionally harsh exterior, were instrumental in introducing him to a better order of society than he had previously been accustomed to. Meanwhile his pen was not idle. In 1823-24 his "Life of Schiller" appeared by instalments in the London Magazine. In 1824 were published his translation of "Legendre's Geometry," with an able essay on Proportion by Carlyle himself; and his first important work, the admirable translation of Goethe's "Wilheim Meister." In the same year he paid his first visit to London, and in 1824. also, his engagement with the Bullers