EUROPEAN HISTORY

THE FOREMOST ESSAYIST IN ENGLISH LITERATURE--HIS STYLE AND
LEARNING HAVE MADE MACAULAY A FAVORITE FOR OVER A HALF
CENTURY.

Macaulay belonged to the nineteenth century, as he was born in 1800,
but in his cast of mind, in his literary tastes and in his intense
partisanship he belonged to the century that includes Swift, Johnson
and Goldsmith. He stands alone among famous English authors by reason
of his prodigious memory, his wide reading, his oratorical style and
his singular ascendancy over the minds of young students. The only
writers of modern times who can be classed with him as great personal
forces in the development of young minds are Carlyle and Emerson, and
of the three Macaulay must be given first place because of a certain
dynamic quality in the man and his style which forces conviction on
the mind of the immature reader. The same thing to a less extent is
true of Carlyle, who suffers in his influence as one grows older.
Emerson is in a class by himself. His appeal is that of pure reason
and of high enthusiasm--an appeal that never loses its force with
those who love the intellectual life.

Many famous men have testified to the mental stimulus which they
received from Macaulay's essays. Upon these essays, contributed to the
EDINBURGH REVIEW in its prime, Macaulay lavished all the resources of
his vast scholarship, his discursive reading in the ancient and modern
classics, his immense enthusiasm and his strong desire to prove his
case. He was a great advocate before he was a great writer, and he
never loses sight of the jury of his readers. He blackens the shadows
and heightens the lights in order to make heroes out of Clive and
Warren Hastings; he hammers Boswell and Boswell's editor, Croker, over
the sacred head of old Dr. Johnson; he lampoons every eminent Tory, as
he idealizes every prominent Whig in English political history.
Macaulay's style is declamatory; he wrote as though he were to
deliver his essays from the rostrum; he abounds in antithesis; he
works up your interest in the course of a long paragraph until he
reaches his smashing climax, in which he fixes indelibly in your mind
the impression which he desires to create. It is all like a great
piece of legerdemain; your eyes cannot follow the processes, but your
mind is amazed and then convinced by the triumphant proof of the
conjuror's skill.

Macaulay had one of the most successful of lives. His early advantag