s
an intolerable jar.

For the same reason, Macaulay's genuine eloquence is marred by the
symptoms of malice prepense. When he sews on a purple patch, he is
resolved that there shall be no mistake about it; it must stand out from
a radical contrast of colours. The emotion is not to swell by degrees,
till you find yourself carried away in the torrent which set out as a
tranquil stream. The transition is deliberately emphasised. On one side
of a full stop you are listening to a matter-of-fact statement; on the
other, there is all at once a blare of trumpets and a beating of drums,
till the crash almost deafens you. He regrets in one of his letters that
he has used up the celebrated, and, it must be confessed, really
forcible passage about the impeachment scene in Westminster Hall. It
might have come in usefully in the 'History,' which, as he then hoped,
would reach the time of Warren Hastings. The regret is unpleasantly
suggestive of that deliberation in the manufacture of eloquence which
stamps it as artificial.

Such faults may annoy critics, even of no very sensitive fibre. What is
it that redeems them? The first answer is, that the work is impressive
because it is thoroughly genuine. The stream, it is true, comes forth by
spasmodic gushes, when it ought to flow in a continuous current; but it
flows from a full reservoir instead of being pumped from a shallow
cistern. The knowledge and, what is more, the thoroughly-assimilated
knowledge, is enormous. Mr. Trevelyan has shown in detail what we had
all divined for ourselves, how much patient labour is often employed in
a paragraph or the turn of a phrase. To accuse Macaulay of
superficiality is, in this sense, altogether absurd. His speculation may
be meagre, but his store of information is simply inexhaustible. Mill's
writing was impressive, because one often felt that a single argument
condensed the result of a long process of reflection. Macaulay has the
lower but similar merit that a single picturesque touch implies
incalculable masses of knowledge. It is but an insignificant part of the
building which appears above ground. Compare a passage with the assigned
authority, and you are inclined to accuse him--sometimes it may be
rightfully--of amplifying and modifying. But more often the particular
authority is merely the nucleus round which a whole volume of other
knowledge has crystallised. A single hint is significant to a
properly-prepared mind of a thousand facts n