lve hours before. These are considerations which ought not to
have escaped a philosophical historian who had the advantage, which
Kennett had not, of knowing the exact time when these details
occurred....

We must here conclude. We have exhausted our time and our space, but not
our topics. We have selected such of the more prominent defects and
errors of Mr. Macaulay as were manageable within our limits; but
numerous as they are, we beg that they may be considered as specimens
only of the infinitely larger assortment that the volumes would afford,
and be read not merely as individual instances, but as indications of
the general style of the work, and the prevailing _animus_ of the
writer. We have chiefly directed our attention to points of mere
historical inaccuracy and infidelity; but they are combined with a
greater admixture of other--we know not whether to call them literary or
moral--defects, than the insulated passages sufficiently exhibit. These
faults, as we think them, but which may to some readers be the prime
fascinations of the work, abound on its surface. And their very number
and their superficial prominence constitute a main charge against the
author, and prove, we think, his mind to be unfitted for the severity of
historical inquiry. He takes much pains to parade--perhaps he really
believes in--his impartiality, with what justice we appeal to the
foregoing pages; but he is guilty of a prejudice as injurious in its
consequences to truth as any political bias. He abhors whatever is not
in itself picturesque, while he clings with the tenacity of a Novelist
to the _piquant_ and the startling. Whether it be the boudoir of a
strumpet or the death-bed of a monarch--the strong character of a
statesman-warrior abounding in contrasts and rich in mystery, or the
personal history of a judge trained in the Old Bailey to vulgarize and
ensanguine the King's Bench--he luxuriates with a vigour and variety of
language and illustration which renders his "History" an attractive and
absorbing story-book. And so spontaneously redundant are these errors--
so inwoven in the very texture of Mr. Macaulay's mind--that he seems
never able to escape from them. Even after the reader is led to believe
that all that can be said either of praise or vituperation as to
character, of voluptuous description and minute delineation as to fact
and circumstance, has been passed in review before him--when a new
subject, indeed, seems to have bee