ntercalary pish!
here and there; but we are fascinated and we remember. The actual amount
of intellectual force which goes to the composition of such written
archives is immense, though the quality may leave something to be
desired. Shrewd common-sense may be an inferior substitute for
philosophy, and the faculty which brings remote objects close to the eye
of an ordinary observer for the loftier faculty which tinges everyday
life with the hues of mystic contemplation. But when the common
faculties are present in so abnormal a degree, they begin to have a
dignity of their own.

It is impossible in such matters to establish any measure of comparison.
No analysis will enable us to say how much pedestrian capacity may be
fairly regarded as equivalent to a small capacity for soaring above the
solid earth, and therefore the question as to the relative value of
Macaulay's work and that of some men of loftier aims and less perfect
execution must be left to individual taste. We can only say that it is
something so to have written the history of many national heroes as to
make their faded glories revive to active life in the memory of their
countrymen. So long as Englishmen are what they are--and they don't seem
to change as rapidly as might be wished--they will turn to Macaulay's
pages to gain a vivid impression of our greatest achievements during an
important period.

Nor is this all. The fire which glows in Macaulay's history, the intense
patriotic feeling, the love of certain moral qualities, is not
altogether of the highest kind. His ideal of national and individual
greatness might easily be criticised. But the sentiment, as far as it
goes, is altogether sound and manly. He is too fond, it has been said,
of incessant moralising. From a scientific point of view the moralising
is irrelevant. We want to study the causes and the nature of great
social movements; and when we are stopped in order to inquire how far
the prominent actors in them were hurried beyond ordinary rules, we are
transported into a different order of thought. It would be as much to
the purpose if we approved an earthquake for upsetting a fort, and
blamed it for moving the foundations of a church. Macaulay can never
understand this point of view. With him, history is nothing more than a
sum of biographies. And even from a biographical point of view his
moralising is often troublesome. He not only insists upon transporting
party prejudice into his estimates