e concrete
to the abstract, and his dislike, already noticed, to analysis. He has a
thirst for distinct and vivid images. He reasons by examples instead of
appealing to formulae. There is a characteristic account in Mr.
Trevelyan's volumes of his habit of rambling amongst the older parts of
London, his fancy teeming with stories attached to the picturesque
fragments of antiquity, and carrying on dialogues between imaginary
persons as vivid, if not as forcible, as those of Scott's novels. To
this habit--rather inverting the order of cause and effect--he
attributes his accuracy of detail. We should rather say that the
intensity of the impressions generated both the accuracy and the
day-dreams. A philosopher would be arguing in his daily rambles where an
imaginative mind is creating a series of pictures. But Macaulay's
imagination is as definitely limited as his speculation. The genuine
poet is also a philosopher. He sees intuitively what the reasoner
evolves by argument. The greatest minds in both classes are equally
marked by their naturalisation in the lofty regions of thought,
inaccessible or uncongenial to men of inferior stamp. It is tempting in
some ways to compare Macaulay to Burke. Burke's superiority is marked by
this, that he is primarily a philosopher, and therefore instinctively
sees the illustration of a general law in every particular fact.
Macaulay, on the contrary, gets away from theory as fast as possible,
and tries to conceal his poverty of thought under masses of ingenious
illustration.

His imaginative narrowness would come out still more clearly by a
comparison with Carlyle. One significant fact must be enough. Everyone
must have observed how powerfully Carlyle expresses the emotion
suggested by the brief appearance of some little waif from past history.
We may remember, for example, how the usher, De Breze, appears for a
moment to utter the last shriek of the old monarchical etiquette, and
then vanishes into the dim abysses of the past. The imagination is
excited by the little glimpse of light flashing for a moment upon some
special point in the cloudy phantasmagoria of human history. The image
of a past existence is projected for a moment upon our eyes, to make us
feel how transitory is life, and how rapidly one visionary existence
expels another. We are such stuff as dreams are made of:--

None other than a moving row
Of visionary shapes that come and go
Around the sun-illu