es beginning "It will be
seen"--and the last sentence has again three clauses each beginning
with "how." The fourth paragraph contains the word "I" four times in
as many lines. This method of composition has its own merits. The
repetition of words and phrases helps the perception and prevents the
possibility of misunderstanding. Where effects are simply enumerated,
the monotony of form is logically correct. Every successive sentence
heralded by a repeated "how," or "there," or "I," adjusts itself into
its proper line without an effort of thought on the reader's part. It
is not graceful; it is pompous, and distinctly rhetorical. But it is
eminently clear, emphatic, orderly, and easy to follow or to remember.
Hence it is unpleasing to the finely-attuned ear, and is counted
somewhat vulgar by the trained lover of style, whilst it is immensely
popular with those who read but little, and is able to give them as
much pleasure as it gives instruction.

The famous passage about Westminster Hall, written in 1841, may be
compared with the equally known passage on the Chapel in the Tower
which occurs in the fifth chapter of the _History_, written in 1848.
It begins as all lovers of English remember--"In truth there is no
sadder spot on the earth than this little cemetery." The passage
continues with "there" and "thither" repeated eight times; it bristles
with contrasts, graces and horrors, antithesis, climax, and sonorous
heraldries. "Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth
mingled." It is a fine paragraph, which has impressed and delighted
millions. But it is, after all, rather facile moralising; its
rhetorical artifice has been imitated with success in many a prize
essay and not a few tall-talking journals. How much more pathos is
there in a stanza from Gray's _Elegy_, or a sentence from Carlyle's
_Bastille_, or Burke's _French Revolution_!

The habit of false emphasis and the love of superlatives is a far worse
defect, and no one has attempted to clear Macaulay of the charge. It
runs through every page he wrote, from his essay on Milton, with which
he astonished the town at the age of twenty-five, down to the close of
his _History_ wherein we read that James II. valued Lord Perth as
"author of the last improvements on the thumb-screw." Indeed no more
glaring example of Macaulay's _megalomania_ or taste for exaggeration
can be found than the famous piece in the _Milton_ on the Restoration
of Charles II.