to a peculiar specialism.
Henderson's 'Iceland' was "a favorite breakfast-book" with him. "Some
books which I would never dream of opening at dinner please me at
breakfast, and _vice versa_!" There is more subtlety in this distinction
than could easily be found in any passage of his writings. But how
quietly both meals are handed over to the dominion of the master
propensity! This devotion, however, was not without its drawbacks.
Thought, apart from books and from composition, perhaps he disliked;
certainly he eschewed. Crossing that evil-minded sea the Irish Channel
at night in rough weather, he is disabled from reading; he wraps himself
in a pea-jacket and sits upon the deck. What is his employment? He
cannot sleep, or does not. What an opportunity for moving onward in the
processes of thought, which ought to weigh on the historian! The wild
yet soothing music of the waves would have helped him to watch the
verging this way or that of the judicial scales, or to dive into the
problems of human life and action which history continually is called
upon to sound. No, he cared for none of this. He set about the marvelous
feat of going over 'Paradise Lost' from memory, when he found he could
still repeat half of it. In a word, he was always conversing, or
recollecting, or reading, or composing; but reflecting never.

The laboriousness of Macaulay as an author demands our gratitude; all
the more because his natural speech was in sentences of set and ordered
structure, well-nigh ready for the press. It is delightful to find that
the most successful prose writer of the day was also the most
painstaking. Here is indeed a literary conscience. The very same
gratification may be expressed with reference to our most successful
poet, Mr. Tennyson. Great is the praise due to the poet; still greater,
from the nature of the case, that share which falls to the lot of
Macaulay. For a poet's diligence is, all along, a honeyed work. He is
ever traveling in flowery meads. Macaulay, on the other hand,
unshrinkingly went through an immense mass of inquiry, which even he
sometimes felt to be irksome, and which to most men would have been
intolerable. He was perpetually picking the grain of corn out of the
bushel of chaff. He freely chose to undergo the dust and heat and strain
of battle, before he would challenge from the public the crown of
victory. And in every way it was remarkable that he should maintain his
lofty standard of conception and