and carried the question (a very rare event) in his own way, the debate on the Copyright Act, and the question of Judges holding seats in the House of Commons. Though he took his seat, Lord Macaulay never spoke in the House of Peers; he went down, we believe, more than once, with the intention of speaking, but some unexpected turn in the debate deprived him of his opportunity; his friends, who knew the feeble state of his health at that time, were almost rejoiced at their disappointment in not hearing him in that which would have been so congenial a field for his studied and matured eloquence. As a poet the fame of Macaulay rests, with the exception of the stanzas above alluded to, and one or two small pieces, on his Ballads, his "Lays of Rome," his "Armada," his "Cavalier," and "Cromwellian," and his "Ivry," and "Moncontour." In other departments of poetry he might have been endangered by his affluence and prodigality; his prize poems, and some of his early writings betray the danger. But the essence of the ballad, of popular poetry (for which in all its forms, from the Prince of ballad-writers, Homer, to the common street ballad, which he caught up instantaneously, and could repeat by the score, he had an absolute passion), is simplicity — simplicity not inconsistent with the utmost picturesqueness, with the richest word-painting. Its whole excellence is in rapidity of movement, short, sudden transition, sharp, emphatic touches of tenderness, or of the pathetic, in, above all, life, unreposing, unflagging, vigorous, stirring life; with words enough but not an idle word, words which strike home to the heart, and rivet themselves on the memory; a cadence which enthralls and will not die away from the ear. The popularity of Macaulay's ballads is the best proof of their excellence; they have become the burden of a host of imitators. Popularity may be a bad test of some of the higher kinds of poetry. Dante, Milton, Shakspeare, to be fully appreciated, may require a thoughtful, refined, enlightened constituency; ballad poetry may be safely left to universal suffrage. Even in his famous Essays Macaulay had not satisfied his own ambition, nor reached that place after which he aspired in English letters. He seemed disposed to leave them buried in the voluminous journal in which they had appeared. Here, however, it was the honest admiration of the public, not the base desire of a bookseller for gain, which suggested and indeed compelled their separate publication. America set the example: the first collection was made to gratify the laudable curiosity of those who are spreading our language and our literature over a continent to which our island is but a speck in the ocean. However flattering this homage, American editions are not to be implicitly depended upon, and are confined to their own use. It became necessary to answer the demand in England, and edition after edition has followed in rapid unexhausted succession. On these essays (not perhaps fitly so called, at least very unlike the short essays on religious, moral, social subjects, such as Bacon's, Cowley's, Addison's, Johnson's, Goldsmith's,) we cannot of course speak at length. They are rather philosophical, or historical disquisitions, and are remarkable in the first place for their vast range and variety. Some grapple with the most profound questions, — the Baconian philosophy, the law of population against Mr. Sadler, and what is called the Utilitarian philosophy. This essay Macaulay himself, with noble moderation and selfrespect, refused to include in his own selection, not because he was disposed to retract one argument, or to recede from the severity of his judgment on the opinions which he undertook to refute, but because he had not done justice to the high character of his adversary, the late Mr. Mill. belong to literary criticism, in which he delighted to mingle singularly acute and original observations on the biographies of distinguished authors, their place in society; and the articles on Dryden, the Comic Dramatists of Charles II., Temple, Addison, Johnson, Byron, are the most full, instructive, and amusing views of the literary life of their respective ages, as well as of their specific works. The greater num Some ber, however, and doubtless the most valuable of the essays, are those which belong to history; a few to the history of Europe, - Machiavelli, Ranke's Lives of the Popes, Frederick the Great, Mirabeau, Barère. In these two last, his judgments on the acts and on the men of the French Revolution are very striking. But the chief and the most important are those on English History. This was manifestly the subject which he had thought on most profoundly, investigated with the greatest industry, and studied down to what we may call the very dregs and lees of our political and social and religious life. There is hardly an important period, at least in our later history, which has not passed under his review. With the justly honored exception of Hallam's "Constitutional History," Macaulay usually dismisses his author with a few words of respect or contempt, and draws almost altogether on his own resources. So Burleigh gives us the reign of Elizabeth; Bacon that of James I.; Milton and Hampden, of Charles I. and the Republic; Temple (with Mackintosh's History), Charles II. and the Revolution; Horace Walpole, Chatham, Pitt, the Georges; Clive and Hastings, the rise of our Indian Empire. The variety of topics is almost as nothing to the variety of information on every topic; he seemed to have read everything, and to recollect all that he had read. As to the style of these essays, of Macaulay's style in general, a few observations. It was eminently his own, but his own not by strange words, or strange collocation of words, by phrases of perpetual occurrence, or the straining after original and striking terms of expression. Its characteristics were vigor and animation, copiousness, clearness, above all, sound English, now a rare excellence. The vigor and life were unabating; perhaps in that conscious strength which cost no exertion he did not always gauge and measure the force of his own words. Those who studied the progress of his writing might perhaps see that the full stream, though it never stagnated, might at first overflow its banks; in later days it ran with a more direct undivided torrent. His copi ousness had nothing tumid, diffuse, Asiatic; no ornament for the sake of ornament. As to its clearness, one may read a sentence of Macaulay twice, to judge of its full force, never to comprehend its meaning. His English was pure, both in idiom and in words, pure to fastidiousness; not that he discarded, or did not make free use of the plainest and most homely terms (he had a sovereign contempt for what is called the dignity of history, which would keep itself above the vulgar tongue), but every word must be genuine English, nothing that approached real vulgarity; nothing that had not the stamp of popular use, or the authority of sound English writers, nothing unfamiliar to the common ear. The Essays, however, were but preparatory, subsidiary to the great history, which was the final aim, and the palmary ambition of Macaulay. On the function, on the proper rank, on the real province and use of history, he had meditated long and profoundly. His ideal of the perfect historian, such as he aspired to be, may be found in an Essay, somewhat too excursive, in the "Edinburgh Review," republished in the recent volumes. A perfect history, according to Macaulay, would combine the unity and order of the great classical historians, with the diversity and immense range of modern affairs. This was but one condition; the history would not be content with recording the wars and treaties, the revolutions and great constitutional changes, the lives of kings, statesmen, generals; it would embrace the manners, usages, social habits, letters, arts, the whole life of the nation. It would cease to be haughtily aristocratic; it would show the progress of the people in all its ranks and orders. There can be no doubt that, as to the actual life of certain periods, Shakspeare and Scott are more true and trustworthy historians than Hume or even Clarendon. Why should not romance surrender up the province which it had usurped? Why should not all this, which is after all the instructive, not to say amusing part of the annals of mankind, be set in a framework of historic truth, instead of a framework of fiction? If we would really know our ancestors, if we would really know mankind, and - look to history for this knowledge, how can history, secluding itself in a kind of stately majesty, affect to disdain this most important part of her office? Nothing can be more clumsy than the devices to which the historian sometimes has recourse. It may be excusable in historic dissertations (the form which Hallam's works assumed), to have the book half text, half notes, broken, fragmentary, without continuity. Hume and Robertson took refuge in appendices, in which they sum up, with unsatisfactory brevity, what they wanted skill to inweave into their narrative. Henry's history may be read as containing what Hume left out. If there is in notes much beyond citation of authorities, perhaps comparison of authorities (we may pardon in Gibbon something more), this can only show that the historian has an unworthy conception of his high art, or that he wants the real power and skill of an historian. But to this lofty view of the historian's functions who is equal? It required all Macaulay's indefatigable research. For the historian, the true historian, must not confine himself to the chronicles and annals, the public records, the state papers, the political correspondence of statesmen and ambassadors; he must search into, he must make himself familiar with the lowest, the most ephemeral, the most contemptible of the writings of the day. There is no trash which he must not digest; nothing so dull and wearisome that he must not wade through. Nor are books all; much is to be learned from observation; and Macaulay delighted in rambling over England, to visit the scenes of historic events, the residences of remarkable men: the siege of Derry was described from Derry and its neighborhood; the exquisitely true and vivid epithets with which he paints the old Italian towns in his Roman ballads owe their life and reality to his travels in Italy. Finally, to order, dispose, work into a flowing and uninterrupted narrative, the whole of this matter demanded nothing less than his prodigious memory, ever at the command of his imagination; to ar range it without confusion, to distribute it according to the laws of historic perspective, to make it, in short, a history |