s, rather than the exposition and
valuation of the subject, was what he had first at heart. He was too
well informed (though, especially in the Indian Essays, he was sometimes
led astray by his authorities), and he was too honest a man, to be
untrustworthy in positive statement. But though he practised little in
the courts, he had the born advocate's gift, or drawback, of inclination
to _suppressio veri_ and _suggestio falsi_, and he has a heavy account
to make up under these heads. Even under them perhaps he has less to
answer for than on the charge of a general superficiality and
shallowness, which is all the more dangerous because of the apparently
transparent thoroughness of his handling, and because of the actual
clearness and force with which he both sees and puts his view. For a
first draft of a subject Macaulay is incomparable, if his readers will
only be content to take it for a first draft, and to feel that they must
fill up and verify, that they must deepen and widen. But the heights and
depths of the subject he never gives, and perhaps he never saw them.

Part of this is no doubt to be set down to the quality of his style;
part to a weakness of his, which was not so much readiness to accept any
conclusion that was convenient as a constitutional incapacity for not
making up his mind. To leave a thing in half lights, in compromise, to
take it, as the legal phrase of the country of his ancestors has it, _ad
avizandum_, was to Macaulay abhorrent and impossible. He must
"conclude," and he was rather too apt to do so by "quailing, crushing,
and quelling" all difficulties of opposing arguments and qualifications.
He simply would not have an unsolved problem mystery. Strafford was a
"rancorous renegade"; Swift a sort of gifted Judas; Bacon a mean fellow
with a great intellect; Dryden again a renegade, though not rancorous;
Marlborough a self-seeking traitor of genius. And all these conclusions
were enforced in their own style--the style of _l'homme meme_. It was
rather teasingly antithetical, "Tom's snip-snap" as the jealous
smartness of Brougham called it; it was somewhat mechanical in its
arrangement of narrative, set passages of finer writing, cunningly
devised summaries of facts, comparisons, contrasts (to show the
writer's learning and dazzle the reader with names), exordium,
iteration, peroration, and so forth. But it observed a very high
standard of classical English, a little intolerant of neologism, but not