tenor
of his tastes and attachments, but is in itself a circumstance of much
interest.

We remember however at least one observation of Macaulay's in regard to
art, which is worth preserving. He observed that the mixture of gold
with ivory in great works of ancient art--for example, in the Jupiter of
Phidias--was probably a condescension to the tastes of the people who
were to be the worshipers of the statue; and he noticed that in
Christian times it has most rarely happened that productions great in
art have also been the objects of warm popular veneration....

It has been felt and pointed out in many quarters that Macaulay as a
writer was the child, and became the type, of his country and his age.
As fifty years ago the inscription "Bath" used to be carried on our
letter-paper, so the word "English" is, as it were, in the water-mark of
every leaf of Macaulay's writing. His country was not the Empire, nor
was it the United Kingdom. It was not even Great Britain. Though he was
descended in the higher, that is the paternal, half from Scottish
ancestry, and was linked specially with that country through the signal
virtues, the victorious labors, and the considerable reputation of his
father Zachary,--his country was England. On this little spot he
concentrated a force of admiration and of worship which might have
covered all the world. But as in space, so in time, it was limited. It
was the England of his own age.

The higher energies of his life were as completely summed up in the
present as those of Walter Scott were projected upon the past. He would
not have filled an Abbotsford with armor and relics of the Middle Ages.
He judges the men and institutions and events of other times by the
instruments and measures of the present. The characters whom he admires
are those who would have conformed to the type that was before his eyes:
who would have moved with effect in the court, the camp, the senate,
the drawing-room of to-day. He contemplates the past with no
_desiderium_, no regretful longing, no sense of things admirable which
are also lost and irrecoverable. Upon this limitation of his retrospects
it follows in natural sequence that of the future he has no glowing
anticipations, and even the present he is not apt to contemplate on its
mysterious and ideal side. As in respect to his personal capacity of
loving, so in regard to the corresponding literary power. The faculty
was singularly intense, and yet it was spent