" alternating between the buffoon
and the pedagogue. James II. "amused himself with hearing Covenanters
shriek"; he was "a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in
understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving." The country
gentleman of that age talked like "the most ignorant clown"; his wife
and daughter were in taste "below a stillroom maid of the present day."
The chaplain was a mere servant, and was expected to marry a servant
girl whose character had been blown upon.

But it ought to be remembered that all of these descriptions are
substantially true. Macaulay's pictures of the Stuarts, of Cromwell,
of the Restoration and its courtiers, of Milton, of William III., are
all faithful and just; Boswell _was_ often absurd; Southey _was_
shallow; Montgomery _was_ an impostor; Frederick William _did_ treat
his son brutally; the country squire and the parson two centuries ago
were much rougher people than they are to-day. And if Macaulay had
simply told us this in measured language of this kind, he would have
failed in beating his lesson into the mind. Not only was "a little of
fictitious narrative judiciously employed," but not a little of
picturesque exaggeration and redundant superlatives. Carlyle is an
even worse offender in this line. Did he not call Macaulay himself
"squat, low-browed, commonplace"--"a poor creature, with his dictionary
literature and his saloon arrogance"--"no vision in him"--"will neither
see nor do any great thing"?[1] Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, and others
have been tempted to deal in gross superlatives. But with all these it
has been under the stimulus of violent indignation. With Macaulay the
superlatives pour out as his native vernacular without heat or wrath,
as a mere rhetorician's trick, as the favourite tones of a great
colourist. And though the trick, like all literary tricks, grows upon
the artist, and becomes singularly offensive to the man of taste, it
must always be remembered that, with Macaulay, the praise or blame is
usually just and true; he is very rarely grossly unfair and wrong, as
Carlyle so often is; and if Macaulay resorts too often to the
superlative degree, he is usually entitled to use the comparative
degree of the same adjective.

The style, with all its defects, has had a solid success and has done
great things. By clothing his historical judgments and his critical
reflections in these cutting and sonorous periods, he has forced them
on the attention of a