vast body of readers wherever English is read at
all, and on millions who have neither time nor attainments for any
regular studies of their own. How many men has Macaulay succeeded in
reaching, to whom all other history and criticism is a closed book, or
a book in an unknown tongue! If he were a sciolist or a wrong-headed
fanatic, this would be a serious evil. But, as he is substantially
right in his judgments, brimful of saving common-sense and generous
feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his favourite
literature, Macaulay has conferred most memorable services on the
readers of English throughout the world. He stands between philosophic
historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand
between the masses and great libraries. Macaulay is a glorified
journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to
the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he
could not make use of a merely learned book. He performs the office of
the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or
were common. And it is largely due to his influence that the best
journals and periodicals of our day are written in a style so clear, so
direct, so resonant. We need not imitate his mannerism; we may all
learn to be outspoken, lucid, and brisk.

It is the very perfection of his qualities in rousing the interest of
the great public which has drawn down on Macaulay the grave rebukes of
so many fine judges of the higher historical literature. Cotter
Morison, Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen, and John Morley all agree that
his style has none of the subtler charms of the noblest prose, that his
conception of history is radically unsound, that, in fact, it broke
down by its own unwieldy proportions. Mr. Morison has very justly
remarked that if the _History of England_ had ever been completed on
the same scale for the whole of the period as originally designed, it
would have run to fifty volumes, and would have occupied in composition
one hundred and fifty years. As it is, the eight duodecimo volumes
give us the events of sixteen years, from 1685 to 1701; so that the
history of England from Alfred would require five hundred similar
volumes. Now, Gibbon's eight octavo volumes give us the history of the
world for thirteen centuries; that is to say, Gibbon has recounted the
history of a century in nearly the same space that Macaulay records the
history of