mined lantern held
In midnight by the master of the show.

Every object is seen against the background of eternal mystery. In
Macaulay's pages this element is altogether absent. We see a figure from
the past as vividly as if he were present. We observe the details of his
dress, the odd oaths with which his discourse is interlarded, the minute
peculiarities of his features or manner. We laugh or admire as we should
do at a living man; and we rightly admire the force of the illusion. But
the thought never suggests itself that we too are passing into oblivion,
that our little island of daylight will soon be shrouded in the
gathering mist, and that we tread at every instant on the dust of
forgotten continents. We treat the men of past ages quite at our ease.
We applaud and criticise Hampden or Chatham as we should applaud Peel or
Cobden. There is no atmospheric effect--no sense of the dim march of
ages, or of the vast procession of human life. It is doubtless a great
feat to make the past present. It is a greater to emancipate us from the
tyranny of the present, and to raise us to a point at which we feel that
we too are almost as dreamlike as the men of old time. To gain clearness
and definition Macaulay has dropped the element of mystery. He sees
perfectly whatever can be seen by the ordinary lawyer, or politician, or
merchant; he is insensible to the visions which reveal themselves only
to minds haunted by thoughts of eternity, and delighting to dwell in the
border-land where dreams blend with realities. Mysticism is to him
hateful, and historical figures form groups of individuals, not symbols
of forces working behind the veil.

Macaulay, therefore, can be no more a poet in the sense in which the
word is applied to Spenser, or to Wordsworth, both of whom he holds to
be simply intolerable bores, than he can be a metaphysician or a
scientific thinker. In common phraseology, he is a Philistine--a word
which I understand properly to denote indifference to the higher
intellectual interests. The word may also be defined, however, as the
name applied by prigs to the rest of their species. And I hold that the
modern fashion of using it as a common term of abuse amounts to a
literary nuisance. It enables intellectual coxcombs to brand men with an
offensive epithet for being a degree more manly than themselves. There
is much that is good in your Philistine; and when we ask what Macaulay
was, instead of showing what he was no