t is practical and commonplace, and in the
final discomfiture of all that is visionary and Utopian. The
Teufelsdroeckhian dialect is obscure even to its select students: the
Macaulay sentence is plain as that of Swift himself. Carlyle's gospel
is full of passion, novelty, suggestion, theory, and social problems.
Macaulay turned his back on social problems and disdained any kind of
gospel. He had no mission to tell the world how bad it is; on the
contrary, he was never wearied with his proofs that it ought to be well
satisfied with its lot and its vast superiority in all things to its
ancestors.

The great public, wherever English books penetrate, from the White Sea
to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the
brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers
care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not
decide the matter; and it does not follow that either public or critic
has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect, and
with the apocalyptic spirit of _Sartor_, it is certain that millions
would cease to read books, and could gain little from books if they
did. And if the only books were such "purple patches" of history as
Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into sheep
and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees,
narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely
emphatic style--this generation would have a very patchwork idea of
past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language.
There is room for both literary schools, and we need teachers of many
kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay
has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, to
know something of the past, and to enjoy reading. He will have done
them serious harm if he has persuaded them that this is the best that
can be done in historical literature, or that this is the way in which
the English language can be most fitly used. Let us be thankful for
his energy, learning, brilliance. He is no priest, philosopher, or
master. Let us delight in him as a fireside companion.

In one thing all agree--critics, public, friends, and opponents.
Macaulay's was a life of purity, honour, courage, generosity,
affection, and manly perseverance, almost without a stain or a defect.
His life, it was true, was singularly fortunate, and he had but few
trials, and