in flowery meads. Macaulay, on the other hand, unshrinkingly went through an immense mass of inquiry, which even he sometimes felt 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. And in every way it was remarkable that he should maintain his lofty standard of conception and performance. Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet: but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rare exceptions. The tests of excellence in prose are as much less palpable, as the public appetite is less fastidious. Moreover, we are moving downwards in this respect. The proportion of middling to good writing constantly and rapidly increases. With the average of performance, the standard of judgment progressively declines. The inexorable conscientiousness of Macaulay, his determination to put out nothing from his hand which his hand was still capable of improving, was a perfect godsend to our slipshod generation. It was naturally consequent upon this habit of treating composition in the spirit of art, that he should extend to the body of his books much of the regard and care which he so profusely bestowed upon their soul. We have accordingly had in him, at the time when the need was greatest, a most vigilant guardian of the language. We seem to detect rare and slight evidences of carelessness in his Journal: of which we can only say that, in a production of the moment, written for himself alone, we are surprised that they are not more numerous and considerable. In general society, carelessness of usage is almost universal, and it is exceedingly difficult for an individual, however vigilant, to avoid catching some of the trashy or faulty usages which are continually in his ear. But in his published works his grammar,* his orthography, nay, his punctuation (too often surrendered In an unpublished paper on Appointment by Competition,' we find (at ii. 342) the following sentence: Instead of purity resulting from that arrangement to India, England itself would soon be tainted. Can the construction, of which the words we have italicised are an example, be found anywhere in the published works of Macaulay? Or in any writer of fair repute before the present century? Or even before the present day? Let any one, who desires to test its accuracy, try to translate it into a foreign language. Fonblanque, who was laudably jealous for our noble mother tongue, protested against this usage. His editor records the protest; and in the next page himself commits the crime. We find another example in Macaulay's letter to his father at p. 150 of vol. i. All minds seem to be perfectly made up as to the certainty of Catholic Emancipation having come at last.' This very slovenly form of speech is now coming in upon us like a flood, through rendered to the printer), are faultless. On these questions, and on the lawfulness or unlawfulness of a word, he may even be called an authority without appeal; and we cannot doubt that we owe it to his works, and to their boundless circulation, that we have not witnessed a more rapid corruption and degeneration of the language. To the literary success of Macaulay it would be difficult to find a parallel in the history of recent authorship. For this, and probably for all future, centuries, we are to regard the public as the patron of literary men; and as a patron abler than any that went before to heap both fame and fortune on its favourites. Setting aside works of which the primary purpose was entertainment, Tennyson alone among the writers of our age-in point of public favour, and of emolument following upon it— comes near to Macaulay. But Tennyson was laboriously cultivating his gifts for many years before he acquired a position in the eye of the nation. Macaulay fresh from college, in 1825, astonished the world by his brilliant and most imposing essay on Milton. Full-orbed he was seen above the horizon; and fullorbed, after thirty-five years of constantly-emitted splendour, he sank beneath it. His literary gains were extraordinary. The cheque for 20,000l. is known to all. But his accumulation was reduced by his bounty; and his profits would, it is evident, have been far larger still, had he dealt with the products of his mind on the principles of economic science (which, however, he heartily professed), and sold his wares in the dearest market, as he undoubtedly acquired them in the cheapest. No one can measure the elevation of Macaulay's character above the mercenary level, without bearing in mind, that for ten years after 1825 he was a poor and a contented man, though ministering to the wants of a father and a family reduced in circumstances; though in the blaze of literary and political success; and though he must have been conscious from the first of the possession of a gift which, by a less congenial and more compulsory use, would have rapidly led him to opulence. Yet of the comforts and through the influence of newspapers, official correspondence, and we know not what beside. As to errors of printing not obviously due to the operative department, during our searches in preparation for this article we have only chanced to stumble upon one; in the Essay on Bacon, the word aronponyμéva is twice printed with the accent on the antepenultima. Mr. Trevelyan records the rigour with which Macaulay proscribed Bosphorus' instead of Bosporus, and Syren instead of Siren. In the interests of extreme accuracy, we raise the question whether Macaulay himself is correct in writing macaroni (ii. 243) instead of maccaroni. Macaroni is according to the French usage, and is referred by Webster to μákap, a derivation which we utterly reject. But the original word is Italian, and is derived from macca, signifying abundance or heap (see the admirable Tramater' Dictionary, Naples, 1831). advantages, advantages, both social and physical, from which he thus forebore, it is so plain that he at all times formed no misanthropic or ascetic, but on the contrary a very liberal, estimate. It is truly touching to find that never, except as a Minister, until 1851 (ii. 291, 292), when he had already lived fifty of his sixty years, did this favourite of fortune, this idol of society, allow himself the luxury of a carriage. It has been observed, that neither in art nor letters did Macaulay display that faculty of the higher criticism, which depends upon certain refined perceptions and the power of subtle analysis. His analysis was always rough, hasty, and sweeping, and his perceptions robust. By these properties it was that he was so eminently poprikos, not in the vulgar sense of an appeal to spurious sentiment, but as one bearing his reader along by violence, as the River Scamander tried to bear Achilles. Yet he was never pretentious; and he said frankly of himself, that a criticism like that of Lessing in his Laocoon, or of Göthe on Hamlet, filled him with wonder and despair. His intense devotion to the great work of Dante (ii. 22) is not in keeping with his tastes and attachments generally, but is in itself a circumstance of much interest. We remember, however, at least one observation of Macaulay's, in regard to art, which is worth preserving. He observed that the mixture of gold with ivory in great works of ancient art— for example, in the Jupiter of Phidias-was probably a condescension to the tastes of the people who were to be the worshippers of the statue; and he noticed that in Christian times it has most rarely happened that productions great in art have also been the objects of warm popular veneration. Neither again had he patience for the accurate collection of minute particulars of evidence, to disentangle an intricate controversy, and by the recovery of the thread to bring out the truth. He neither could, nor would have done, for example, what Mr. Elwin has done in that masterly Preface to the Letters of Pope, which throws so much light upon the character.* All such questions he either passed by unnoticed, or else carried by storm. He left them to the Germans, of whose labours he possessed little knowledge, and formed a very insufficient estimate. His collection of particulars was indeed most minute, but he was the master, not the servant, of his subject-matter. When once his rapid eye was struck with some powerful effect, he could not wait to ascertain whether his idea, formed at a first view, really agreed with the ultimate presentation of the facts. If, * The Works of Alexander Pope. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Rev. Whitwell Elwin.' however, however, he wrote many a line that was untrue, never did he write one that he did not believe to be true. He very rarely submitted to correct or to retract; and yet not because he disliked it, but simply because, from the habits of his mind, he could not see the need of it. Nothing can be more ingenuous, for example, than the following passage, written when he was at the very zenith of his fame (ii. 442), in 1858: To-day I got a letter from pointing out what I must admit to be a gross impropriety of language in my book; an impropriety of a sort rare, I hope, with me. It shall be corrected, and I am obliged to the fellow, little as I like him.' If then Macaulay failed beyond many men inferior to himself in the faculty (as to his works) of self-correction, what was the cause of this defect? It certainly did not lie in any coarse, outward, vulgar view of his calling. It was not in such a spirit that Macaulay wooed the Muses. In whatever garb he wooed them, it was always in the noble worship of the Georgics, as the divinities 'Quarum sacra fero ingenti perculsus amore.' Though, relatively to the common standard of literary production, his very worst would have been good, his taste and his principle alike forbade him to be satisfied with less than his best. His conception of the vocation was lofty to the uttermost; his execution was in the like degree scrupulous and careful. Nowhere, perhaps, can we find a more true description of the motive which impels a great writer, than in the fine thought of Filicaja : 'Fama non cerco o mercenaria lode,' that poet was content to sing for love of singing— He could not, indeed, have accepted that portion of the Italian minstrel's 'self-denying ordinance' which dispensed with Fame. With the entire and peculiar force of his fancy, he projected in his mental vision the renown which the future was to bring him; and, having thus given body to his abstraction, allowed himself to dwell on it with rich enjoyment, as on some fair and boundless landscape. On the publication of his History, he felt as in all its fulness, so in all its forms, 'La procellosa e trepida * Manzoni's 'Cinque Maggio.' 'The The sale has surpassed expectation; but that proves only that people have formed a high idea of what they are to have. The disappointment, if there is disappointment, will be great. All that I hear is laudatory. But who can trust to praise that is poured into his own ear? At all events, I have aimed high. I have tried to do something that may be remembered. I have had the year 2000, and even the year 3000, often in my mind. I have sacrificed nothing to temporary fashions of thought and style; and, if I fail, my failure will be more honourable than nine-tenths of the successes that I have witnessed.' -(ii. 246). Yet we infer from the general strain of his Journals and Letters, that even had there been no such thing as fame in his view, he still would have written for the sake of writing; that for him reputation was to work, what pleasure properly is to virtuthe normal sequel, the grace and complement of the full-formed figure, but not its centre nor its heart. 6 We have spoken of some contrast between Macaulay himself and his works. It cannot be more fairly illustrated than in an instance which Mr. Trevelyan, true to his pledge, has not shrunk from exhibiting. Macaulay used the lash with merciless severity against the poems of Robert Montgomery; and it entered deeply into the flesh of the man. Like poor Yorick,' there are those who remember Montgomery, and who can say of him this, that if he was not, as he was not, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy,' he was a man of pure and high character, and of natural gifts much above the common. If his style was affected, his life was humble. He committed the fault of publishing, as hundreds do, indifferent verses; and the popular press of the day, with the public at its back, offered an absurd worship before the idol. But he was an idol♣ and Macaulay, as the minister of justice for the welfare of the republic of letters, hurled him from the pedestal into an abyss. It was, we have not a doubt, without a shadow of ill-feeling towards the culprit that the judge, in this instance, put on the black-cap of doom. We very much regret, that when Montgomery subsequently appealed for mercy, although it seems he had the folly to intermix some kind of menace with his prayer, Macaulay (ii. 276) refused to withdraw his article, which had more than served its purpose, from the published collection of his Essays; so that this bad poet, but respectable and respected man, is not allowed the sad privilege of oblivion, and the public are still invited to look on and see the immortal terrier worrying the mortal mouse. We have here an example of the inability of Macaulay to judge according to measure. But this is not the point we seek to illustrate. What was the fault of Robert Montgomery? |