o create an appetite
proportioned to its abundance; for who has ever heard of the reader that
was cloyed with Macaulay? In none, perhaps, of our prose writers are
lessons such as he gives of truth and beauty, of virtue and of freedom,
so vividly associated with delight. Could some magician but do for the
career of life what he has done for the arm-chair and the study, what a
change would pass on the face (at least) of the world we live in, what
an accession of recruits would there be to the professing followers of
virtue!...

The truth is that Macaulay was not only accustomed, like many more of
us, to go out hobby-riding, but from the portentous vigor of the animal
he mounted was liable more than most of us to be run away with. His
merit is that he could keep his seat in the wildest steeple-chase; but
as the object in view is arbitrarily chosen, so it is reached by cutting
up the fields, spoiling the crops, and spoiling or breaking down the
fences needful to secure for labor its profit, and to man at large the
full enjoyment of the fruits of the earth. Such is the overpowering glow
of color, such the fascination of the grouping in the first sketches
which he draws, that when he has grown hot upon his work he seems to
lose all sense of the restraints of fact and the laws of moderation; he
vents the strangest paradoxes, sets up the most violent caricatures, and
handles the false weight and measure as effectively as if he did it
knowingly. A man so able and so upright is never indeed wholly wrong. He
never for a moment consciously pursues anything but truth. But truth
depends, above all, on proportion and relation. The preterhuman
vividness with which Macaulay sees his object, absolutely casts a shadow
upon what lies around; he loses his perspective; and imagination,
impelled headlong by the strong consciousness of honesty in purpose,
achieves the work of fraud. All things for him stand in violent contrast
to one another. For the shadows, the gradations, the middle and
transition touches, which make up the bulk of human life, character,
and action, he has neither eye nor taste. They are not taken account of
in his practice, and they at length die away from the ranges of his
vision.

In Macaulay all history is scenic; and philosophy he scarcely seems to
touch, except on the outer side, where it opens into action. Not only
does he habitually present facts in forms of beauty, but the fashioning
of the form predominates over