out a better and stronger case for any side of a controversy which he was led to espouse. He was not good at drawing or explaining complex characters. He loved, indeed, to picture contradictory and paradoxical characters. Nothing delighted him more than to throw off an animated description of some great person, who having been shown in the first instance to possess one set of qualities in extreme prominence, was then shown to have a set of exactly antagonistic qualities in quite equal prominence. This was not describing a complex character. It was merely embodying a paradox. It was to "solder close," as Timon of Athens says, "impossibilities and make them kiss." There was something too much of trick about this, although it was often done with so much power as to bewilder the better judgment of the calmest reader. But where Macaulay happened to be right in his view of a man or an event, he made his convictions clear with an impressiveness and a brilliancy such as no modern writer has surpassed. The world owes him something for having protested by precept and example against the absurd notion that the "dignity of history" required of historians to be grave, pompous, and dull. He was not a Gibbon, but he wrote with all Gibbon's delight in the picturesqueness of a subject, and Gibbon's resolve to fascinate as well as to instruct his readers. Macaulay's history tries too much to be a historical portrait gallery. The dangers of such a style do not need to be pointed out. They are amply illustrated in Macaulay's sparkling pages. But it is something to know that their splendid qualities are far more conspicuous still than their defects. Perhaps very recent readers of history, too, may feel disposed to be grateful to Macaulay for having written without any profound philosophical theory to expound. He told history like a story. He warmed up as he went along, and grew enamored, as a romancist does, of this character

and angry with that other. No doubt he frequently thus did harm to the trustworthiness of his narrative where it had to deal with disputed questions, although he probably enhanced the charms of his animated style. But he did not set out with a mission to expound some theory as to a race or a tendency, and therefore pledged beforehand to bend all facts of the physical, the political, and the moral world to the duty of bearing witness for him, and proclaiming the truth of his message to mankind.

Macaulay was not exactly what the Germans would call a many-sided man. He never was anything but the one Macaulay in all he did or attempted. But he did a great many things well. Nothing that he ever attempted was done badly. He was as successful in the composition of a pretty valentine for a little girl as he was in his history, his essays, his "Lays of Ancient Rome," and his Parliamentary speeches. In everything he attempted he went very near to that success which true genius achieves. In everything he just fell short of that achievement. But he so nearly attained it that the reader who takes up one of Macaulay's books or speeches for the first time is almost sure to believe, under the influence of the instant impression, that the genuine inspiration is there. Macaulay is understood to have for a long time thought of writing a romance. If he had done so, we may feel sure that many intelligent readers would have believed, on the first perusal of it, that it was almost on a level with Scott, and only as the first impression gradually faded, and they came to read it over again, have found out that Macaulay was not a Scott in fiction any more than he was a Burke in eloquence or a Gibbon in history. He filled for a long time a larger space in the public mind than any other literary man in England, and his style greatly affected literary men. But his influence did not pierce deeply

down into public feeling and thought as that of one or two other men of the same period undoubtedly did, and does still. He did not impress the very soul of English feeling as Mr. Carlyle, for example, has done.

No influence suffused the age from first to last more strongly than that of Thomas Carlyle. England's very way of thinking was at one time profoundly affected by Carlyle. He introduced the English people to the great German authors, very much as Lessing had introduced the Germans to Shakespeare and the old English ballads. Carlyle wrote in a style which was so little like that ordinarily accepted as English, that the best thing to be said for it was that it was not exactly German. At one time it appeared to be so completely moulded on that of Jean Paul Richter, that not a few persons doubted whether the new-comer really had any ideas of his own. But Carlyle soon proved that he could think for himself; and he very often proved it by thinking wrong. There was in him a strong, deep vein of the poetic. Long after he had evidently settled down to be a writer of prose and nothing else, it still seemed to many that his true sphere was poetry. The grim seriousness which he had taken from his Scottish birth and belongings was made hardly less grim by the irony which continually gleamed or scowled through it. Truth and force were the deities of Carlyle's especial worship. "The eternal verities" sat on the top of his Olympus. To act out the truth in life, and make others act it out, would require some force more strong, ubiquitous, and penetrating than we can well obtain from the slow deliberations of an ordinary Parliament, with its debates and divisions and everlasting formulas. Therefore, to enforce his eternal verities Carlyle always preached up and yearned for the strong man, the poem in action, whom the world in our day had not found, and perhaps could not appreciate. If this man