MACAULAY'S ENGLAND.

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then uncommon; and—without straining a point I think I may say they are now. With its Macaulay endorsement, it makes a unique autograph, now in the possession of the Messrs. Longmansbut destined to find place eventually among the manuscript treasures of the British Museum.

The great history is a partisan history, but it is the work of a bold and outspoken and manly partisan. The colors that he uses are intense and glaring; but they are blended in the making of his great panorama of King William's times, with a marvellous art. We are told that he was an advocate and not a philosopher; that he was a rhetorician and not a poet. We may grant all this,

and we may grant more and yet I think we shall continue to cherish his work. Men of greater critical acumen and nicer exploration may sap the grounds of some of his judgments; cooler writers, and those of more self-restraint, may draw the fires by which his indignations are kindled ; but it will be very long before the world will cease to find high intellectual refreshment in the crackle of his epigrams, in his artful deployment of testimony, in his picturesque array of great

historic characters and in the roll of his sonorous

periods.

Yet he is the wrong man to copy; his exaltations make an unsafe model. He exaggeratesbut he knows how to exaggerate. He paints a truth in colors that flow all round the truth, and enlarge it. Such outreach of rhetoric wants corresponding capacity of brain, and pen-strokes that never swerve or tremble. Smallish men should beware how they copy methods which want fulness of power and the besom of enthusiasm to fill out their compass. Homer can make all his seawaves iridescent and multitudinous-all his women high-bosomed or blue-eyed — and all his mountains sweep the skies: but we should be modest and simple.

It was not until Macaulay had done his last work upon the book (still incomplete) which he counted his monument, that he moved away from his bachelor quarters in the Albany (Piccadilly) and established himself at Holly Lodge, which, under the new name (he gave it) of Oirlie Lodge, may be found upon a winding lane in that labyrinth of city roads that lies between

HIS HOME life.

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Kensington Gardens and Holland House. There was a bit of green lawn attached, which he came to love in those last days of his; though he had been without strong rural proclivities. Like Gibbon, he never hunted, never fished, rarely rode. But now and then-among the thorntrees reddening into bloom and the rhododendrons bursting their buds, the May mornings were "delicious" to him. He enjoyed, too, overmuch, the modest hospitalities he could show in a home of his own. There are joyfully turned notes-in his journal or in his familiar letters of "a goose for Michaelmas," and of "a chine and oysters for Christmas eve," and "excellent audit ale" on Lord Mayor's day. There, too, at Holly Lodge, comes to him in August, 1857, when he was very sad about India (as all the world were), an offer of a peerage. He accepts it, as he had accepted all the good things of life-cheerily and squarely, and was thenceforward Baron Macaulay of Rothley. He appears from time to time on the benches of the Upper House, but never spoke there. His speaking days were over. A little unwonted fluttering of the heart warned him that the end was not far off.

A visit to the English lakes and to Scotland in 1859 did not-as was hoped-give him access of strength. He was much disturbed, too (at this crisis), by the prospect of a long separation from his sister, Lady Trevelyan - whose husband had just now been appointed Governor of Madras. "This prolonged parting," he says, "this slow sipping of the vinegar and the gall is terrible!" And the parting came earlier than he thought, and easier; for on a day of December in the same year he died in his library chair. His nephew and biographer had left him in the morning - sitting with his head bent forward on his chest- an atti

tude not unusual for him-in a languid and drowsy reverie. In the evening, a little before seven, Lady Trevelyan was summoned, and the biographer says:-" As we drove up to the porch of my uncle's house, the maids ran crying into the darkness to meet us; and we knew that all was over."

He was not an old man - only fifty-nine. The stone which marks his grave in Westminster Abbey is very near to the statue of Addison.

In estimating our indebtedness to Macaulay as

a historian

JOHN WILSON Croker.

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where his fame and execution were largest we must remember that his method of

close detail forbade wide outlook or grasp of long periods of time. If he had extended the same microscopic examination and dramatic exhibit of important personages to those succeeding reigns, which he originally intended to cover-coming down to the days of William IV.-he would have required fifty volumes; and if he had attempted, in the same spirit, a reach like that of Green or Hume, his rhetorical periods must have overflowed more than two hundred bulky quartos! No ordinary man could read such; and thank Heaven! no extraordinary man could write so many.

Some Tory Critics.

Among those who sought with a delightsome pertinacity for flaws in the historic work of Macaulay, in his own time, was John Wilson Croker, to whom I have already alluded.* He was an older man than the historian; Irish by birth, handsome, well-allied by marriage, plausible, fawning on the great (who were of his party) wear

*See p. 116, Ante.