Montgomery? It certainly did not lie in the adulation he received; that was the fault of those who paid it. It lay simply and wholly in the publication of bad poems. And chiefly of the first bad poem; for when public praise told him his lines were good, and enabled him to go to Oxford for education with the proceeds, it was surely a most venial act on his part to give way to the soft illusion, and again and again to repeat the operation. His sin, then, was in giving a bad poem to the world. For this sin he was, as Scott says, 'sair mashackered and misguggled' by the reviewer. But the very offence, so mercilessly punished by Macaulay the author, was habitually favoured and promoted by Macaulay the man. See his Journal (in or about 1856, ii. 413). "I sent some money to Miss, a middling writer, whom I relieved some time ago Mrs. again. I will send her five pounds more. This will make fifty pounds in a few months to a bad writer whom I never saw If the author of - is really in distress I would gladly assist him, though I am no admirer of his poetry.' There is no way of promoting the publication of bad books so effectual as that of giving subsidies to those who mistake their vocation in becoming and continuing bad authors. There is, indeed, one patent, and we might almost say lamentable void in the generally engaging picture which the 'Life of Macaulay' has presented to us. We see his many virtues, his deep affections, his sound principles of civil, social, and domestic action in full play; nor is there anywhere found, or even suggested, a negation of those great principles of belief, which establish a direct personal relation between the human soul and its Creator, and an harmonious continuity between our present stage of destiny and that which is to succeed it in the world to come. Mr. Trevelyan has noticed his habitual reserve on subjects of religion; a habit perhaps first contracted in selfdefence against the rather worrying methods of his excellent, but not sympathetic, nor always judicious father. He speaks of Bacon's belief of Revelation, in words which appear to imply that the want of it would have been a reproach or a calamity; and, when challenged as to his own convictions before the constituency of Leeds, he went as far, in simply declaring himself to be a Christian, as the self-respect and delicacy of an honourable and independent mind could on such an occasion permit. He nowhere retracts what is thus stated or suggested. Much may be set down to the reserve which he commonly maintained on this class of subjects; but there are passages which suggest a doubt whether he had completely wrought the Christian dogma, dogma, with all its consolations and its lessons, into the texture of his mind, and whether he had opened for himself the springs of improvement and of delight which so many have found, and will ever find, in it. At the same time, with a sigh for what we have not, we must be thankful for what we have, and leave to One, wiser than ourselves, the deeper problems of the human soul and of its discipline. any serious account We are free, however, to challenge outright the declaration of Mr. Trevelyan, that his uncle had a decided and strong taste for theology. He had a strong and enduring predilection for religious speculation and controversy, and was widely and profoundly read in ecclesiastical history' (ii. 462). For all controversy, and for all speculation which partook of controversy, he manifestly had not a sour or querulous, but a genial and hearty love. And again, as respects ecclesiastical history; in many of its phases it constitutes a part, and a leading part, of the history of the world. What records the origin of the wars of the Investitures, the League, and the Thirty Years, could not be foreign to the mind and eye of Macaulay. But very large tracts of Church History lie outside the currents of contemporary events, though they involve profoundly the thoughts and feelings, the training and the destiny of individual men. Of all these it would be hard to show that he had taken at all. It must be admitted, indeed, that no department of human records has on the whole profited so little as Church History by the charms, perhaps even by the methods, of literary art; but Macaulay, if he had desired to get at the kernel, was not the man to be repelled by the uncouth rudeness of the shell. As respects theology, the ten volumes of his published works do nothing to bear out the assertion of Mr. Trevelyan. We have ourselves heard him assert a paradox which common sense and established opinion alike reject, that the theology of the Seventeenth Article was the same as that of the portentous code framed at Lambeth about the close of the sixteenth century. A proof yet more conclusive of a mind, in which the theological sense had never been trained or developed, is supplied by his own contemptuous language respecting a treatise which has ever been regarded as among the gems of Christian literature. 'I have read Augustine's "Confessions." The book is not without interest. But he expresses himself in the style of a field preacher' (i. 465). And again, he rather contemptuously classes the great Father with the common herd of those who record their confessions, or, in the cant phrase, their experience. He had indeed no admiration, and but little indulgence, for any of these introspective productions. productions. They lay in a region which he did not frequent ; and yet they are among not only the realities, but the deepest and most determining realities, of our nature. We reckon his low estimate of this inward work as betokening the insufficient development of his own powerful mind in that direction. It has been felt and pointed out in many quarters that Macaulay, as a writer, was the child, and became the type, of his country and his age. As, fifty years ago, the inscription 'Bath' used to be carried on our letter-paper, so the word 'English' is as it were in the water-mark of every leaf of Macaulay's writing. His country was not the Empire, nor was it the United Kingdom. It was not even Great Britain, though he was descended in the higher, that is the paternal, half from Scottish ancestry, and was linked specially with that country through the signal virtues, the victorious labours, and the considerable reputation of his father Zachary. His country was England. On this little spot he concentrated a force of admiration and of worship, which might have covered all the world. But as in space, so in time, it was limited. It was the England of his own age. The higher energies of his life were as completely summed up in the present, as those of Walter Scott were projected upon the past. He would not have filled an Abbotsford with armour and relics of the middle ages. He judges the men and institutions and events of other times by the instruments and measures of the present. The characters whom he admires are those who would have conformed to the type that was before his eyes, who would have moved with effect in the court, the camp, the senate, the drawing-room of to-day. He contemplates the past with no desiderium, no regretful longing, no sense of things admirable, which are also lost and irrecoverable. Upon this limitation of his retrospects it follows in natural sequence that of the future he has no glowing anticipations, and even the present he is not apt to contemplate in its mysterious and ideal side. As in respect to his personal capacity of loving, so in regard to the corresponding literary power. The faculty was singularly intense, and yet it was spent within a narrow circle. There is a marked sign of this narrowness in his disinclination even to look at the works of contemporaries whose tone or manner he disliked. It appears that this dislike, and the ignorance consequent upon it, applied to the works of Carlyle. Now we may have little faith in Carlyle as a philosopher or as an historian. Half-lights and half-truths may be the utmost which in these departments his works will be found to yield. But the total want of sympathy is the more noteworthy, because the resemblances, though partial, are both numerous and substantial between between these two remarkable men and powerful writers, as well in their strength as in their weakness. Both are honest, and both, notwithstanding honesty, are partisans. Each is vastly, though diversely, powerful in expression; and each is more powerful in expression than in thought. Both are, though variously, poets in prose. Both have the power of portraitures, extraordinary for vividness and strength. For comprehensive disquisition, for balanced and impartial judgments, the world will probably resort to neither; and if Carlyle gains on the comparison in his strong sense of the inward and the ideal, he loses in the absolute and violent character of his onesidedness. Without doubt, Carlyle's licentious, though striking, peculiarities of style have been of a nature allowably to repel, so far as they go, one who was so rigid as Macaulay in his literary orthodoxy, and who so highly appreciated, and with such expenditure of labour, all that relates to the exterior or body of a book. Still if there be resemblances so strong, the want of appreciation, which has possibly been reciprocal, seems to be of that nature which Aristotle would have explained by his favourite proverb : κεραμεὺς κεραμεῖ. The discrepancy is like the discrepancy of colours that are too near. Carlyle is at least a great fact in the literature of his time, and has contributed largely, in some respects too largely, towards forming its characteristic habits of thought. But on these very grounds he should not have been excluded from the horizon of a mind like Macaulay's, with all its large, and varied, and most active interests. His early training, and consequently the cast of his early opinions, was Conservative. But these views did not survive his career at Cambridge as an undergraduate. No details are given, but we hear that, during that period, Mr. Charles Austin effected, it would seem with facility, the work of his conversion (i. 76). He supplied an example rather rare of one who, not having been a Whig by birth, became one, and thereafter constantly presented the aspect of that well-marked class of politicians. Poeta nascitur, orator fit; and so as a rule a man not born a Liberal, may become a Liberal; but to be a Whig, he must be a born Whig. At any rate Macaulay offers to our view one of the most enviable qualities characteristic of that variety' of the Liberal species'—a singularly large measure of consistency. In this he will bear comparison with Lord Lansdowne or Lord Grey; but in proportion as the pressure of events is sharper on a Commoner than on a Peer, so the phenomenon of consistency is more remarkable. And the feature belongs to his mental character at large. It would be difficult to point out any great and signal change of views on any important subject between between the beginning of his full manhood, and the close of his career. His life is like a great volume; the sheets are of one size, type, and paper. Here again Macaulay becomes for us a typical man, and suggests the question whether the conditions of our nature will permit so close and sustained an unity to be had without some sacrifice of expansion? The feature is rendered in his case more noteworthy by the fact that all his life long, with an insatiable avidity, he was taking in whole cargoes of knowledge, and that nothing which he imported into his mind remained there barren and inert. On the other hand, he was perhaps assisted, or, as a censor might call it, manacled, by the perpetual and always living presence in his consciousness, through the enormous tenacity of his memory, of whatever he had himself thought, said, or written, at an earlier time. It may even be, as he himself said, that of the whole of this huge mass he had forgotten nothing. It cannot be doubted that he remembered a far larger proportion, than did other men who had ten or twenty times less to remember. And there was this peculiarity in his recollections; they were not, like those of ordinary men, attended at times with difficulty, elicited from the recesses of the brain by effort. He was alike favoured in the quantity of what he possessed, and in the free and immediate command of his possessions. The effect was most singular. He was (as has been variously shown) often inaccurate: he was seldom, perhaps never, inconsistent. He remembered his own knowledge, in the modern phrase his own concepts, better than he retained, if indeed he ever had embraced, the true sense of the authorities on which these 'concepts' were originally framed. In the initial work of collection, he was often misled by fancy or by prejudice; but in the after work of recollection, he kept faithfully, and never failed to grasp at a moment's notice, the images which the tablets of his brain, so susceptible and so tenacious, had once received. Diù servavit odorem. Among Macaulay's mental gifts and habits, it was perhaps this vast memory by which he was most conspicuously known. There was here even a waste of power. His mind, like a dredging-net at the bottom of the sea, took up all that it encountered, both bad and good, nor even seemed to feel the burden. Peerless treasures lay there, mixed, yet never confounded, with worthless trash. This was not the only peculiarity of the wondrous organ. There have been other men of our own generation, though very few, who, without equalling, have approached Macaulay in power of memory, and who have certainly exceeded him in the unfailing accuracy of their recollections. And yet not in accuracy as to dates, or names, or quotations, or other matters of hard fact, Vol. 142.-No. 283. when C |