pid in its movement, and brilliant; and yet, with all its
splendor, has a crystalline clearness. Indeed, the fault generally found
with his style is, that it is so constantly brilliant that the vision is
dazzled and wearied with its excessive brightness." He has sometimes been
charged with sacrificing facts to fine sentences.

In his statesmanship, Macaulay was always an earnest defender of liberty.
His first speech in Parliament was in support of a bill to remove the
civil disabilities of the Jews, and his whole parliamentary career was
consistent with this wise and liberal beginning.
###

The place in which the impeachment of Warren Hastings was conducted, was
worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of William Rufus; the hall
which had resounded with acclamations at the inauguration of thirty kings;
the hall which had witnessed the just sentence of Bacon, and the just
absolution of Somers; the hall where the eloquence of Strafford had for a
moment awed and melted a victorious party inflamed with just resentment;
the hall where Charles had confronted the High Court of Justice with the
placid courage which half redeemed his fame.

Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting. The avenues were lined with
grenadiers. The streets were kept clear by cavalry. The peers, robed in
gold and ermine, were marshaled by heralds. The judges, in their vestments
of state, attended to give advice on points of law. The long galleries
were crowded by such an audience as has rarely excited the fears or the
emulation of an orator. There were gathered together, from all parts of a
great, free, enlightened, and prosperous realm, grace and female
loveliness, wit and learning, the representatives of every science and of
every art.

There were seated around the queen, the fair-haired, young daughters of
the house of Brunswick. There the embassadors of great kings and
commonwealths gazed with admiration on a spectacle which no other country
in the world could present. There Siddons, in the prime of her majestic
beauty, looked with emotion on a scene surpassing all the imitations of
the stage. There Gibbon, the historian of the Roman Empire, thought of the
days when Cicero pleaded the cause of Sicily against Verres; and when,
before a senate which had still some show of freedom, Tacitus thundered
against the oppressor of Africa. There, too, were seen, side by side, the
greatest painter and the greatest scholar of the age; for the specta