all, is
not the original ballads of the Trojan War, but these ballads moulded
together, and wrought into the forms of a more civilised and cultivated
age. It is difficult to conjecture what the form of the old Roman ballad
may have been, and certain, that whatever they were, they could no more
satisfy the aesthetic requirements of modern culture, than an ear
accustomed to the great organs of Freyburg or Harlem could relish
Orpheus's hurdy-gurdy, although the airs which Orpheus played, if they
could be recovered, might perhaps be executed with great effect on the
more perfect instrument.

The former of Mr. Macaulay's ballad poetry are essentially modern: they
are those of the romantic and chivalrous, not the classical ages, and
even in those they are a reproduction, not of the originals, but of the
imitations of Scott. In this we think he has done well, for Scott's
style is as near to that of the ancient ballad as we conceive to be at
all compatible with real popular effect on the modern mind. The
difference between the two may be seen by the most cursory comparison of
any real old ballad, "Chevy Chase," for instance, with last canto of
Marmion, or with any of these "Lays." Conciseness is the characteristic
of the real ballad, diffuseness of the modern adaptation. The old bard
did everything by single touches; Scott and Mr. Macaulay by repetition
and accumulation of particulars. They produce all their effect by what
they _say_; he by what he _suggested_; by what he stimulated the
imagination to paint for itself. But then the old ballads were not
written for the light reading of tired readers. To do the work in
_their_ way, they required to be brooded over, or had at least the aid
of tune and of impassioned recitation. Stories which are to be told to
children in the age of eagerness and excitability, or sung in banquet
halls to assembled warriors, whose daily ideas and feelings supply a
flood of comment ready to gush forth on the slightest hint of the poet,
cannot fly too swift and straight to the mark. But Mr. Macaulay wrote to
be only read, and by readers for whom it was necessary to do all.

These poems, therefore, are not the worse for being un-Roman in their
form; and in their substance they are Roman to a degree which deserves
great admiration. Mr. Macaulay's prose writings had not prepared us for
the power which he has here manifested of identifying himself easily and
completely, with states of feeling and modes