's or De
Quincey's. He always had at hand explanations of events or of characters
which were admirably easy and simple--too simple, indeed, for the
complicated phenomena which they professed to explain. His style was
clear, animated, showy, and even its faults were of an exciting kind. It
was his habit to give piquancy to his writing by putting things
concretely. Thus, instead of saying, in general terms--as Hume or Gibbon
might have done--that the Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200,
he says: "The great-grandsons of those who had fought under William and
the great grandsons of those who had fought under Harold began to draw
near to each other." Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected
delicate truths of detail for exaggerated distemper effects. He used the
rhetorical machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth,
and he "made points"--as in his essay on _Bacon_--by creating
antithesis. In his _History of England_ he inaugurated the picturesque
method of historical writing. The book was as fascinating as any novel.
Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method of
turning history into romance was very different from Scott's. Among his
essays the best are those which, like the ones on _Lord Clive, Warren
Hastings_, and _Frederick the Great_, deal with historical subjects; or
those which deal with literary subjects under their public historic
relations, such as the essays on _Addison, Bunyan_, and _The Comic
Dramatists of the Restoration_. "I have never written a page of
criticism on poetry, or the fine arts," wrote Macaulay, "which I would
not burn if I had the power." Nevertheless his own _Lays of Ancient
Rome_, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory
kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic.

Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the
writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the
one who railed most desperately against the "spirit of the age." Thomas
Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly in
imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature. He
published, among other things, a _Life of Schiller_, a translation of
Goethe's _Wilhelm Meister_, and two volumes of translations from the
German romancers--Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque--and contributed
to the _Edinburgh_ and _Foreign Review_ articles on Goethe, Werner,
Novalis,