of Jeffrey's own, Hazlitt. But his private and
personal note was after all uppermost in the compound. It had appeared
early (it can be seen in things of his written when he was an
undergraduate). It owed much to the general atmosphere of the century,
to the habit of drawing phrase, illustration, idea, not merely from the
vernacular or from classical authorities, but from the great writers of
earlier European literature. And it would probably have been impossible
without the considerable body of forerunners which the _Edinburgh_, the
_Quarterly_, and other things of which some notice has been given in a
former chapter, had supplied. But still the individual character reigns
supreme.

Macaulay's Essays are in something more than the ordinary loose
acceptation of the term a household word; and it cannot be necessary to
single out individual instances where almost all are famous, and where
all deserve their fame. The "Milton" and the "Southey," the "Pitt" and
the "Chatham," the "Addison" and the "Horace Walpole," the "Clive" and
the "Hastings," the "Frederick the Great" and the "Madame D'Arblay," the
"Restoration Dramatists" and the "Boswell," the "Hallam" and the
"Ranke," present with a marvellous consistency the same merits and the
same defects. The defects are serious enough. In the first place the
system, which Macaulay did not invent, but which he carried to
perfection, of regarding the particular book in hand less as a subject
of elaborate and minute criticism and exposition than as a mere
starting-point from which to pursue the critic's own views of the
subject, inevitably leads to unfairness, especially in matters of pure
literature. Macaulay's most famous performance in this latter kind, the
crushing review of the unlucky Robert Montgomery, though well enough
deserved in the particular case, escapes this condemnation only to fall
under another, that of looking at the parts rather than at the whole. It
is quite certain that, given their plan, the two famous critiques of
Tennyson and Keats, in the _Quarterly_ and in _Blackwood_, are well
enough justified. The critic looks only at the weak parts, and he judges
the weak parts only by the stop-watch. But, on his own wide and more
apparently generous method, Macaulay was exposed to equal dangers, and
succumbed to them less excusably. He had strong prejudices, and it is
impossible for any one who reads him with knowledge not to see that the
vindication of those prejudice