portraying of every-day humanity, by her delicately
skilful reproduction of its homely wit and harmless absurdity.
Happily neither these writers, nor the purveyors of mere sensation
who cannot get on without crime and mystery, exhaust the list of our
romancers, many of whom are altogether healthful, cheerful, and
helpful; and it is no unreasonable hope that these may increase and
their gloomier rivals decrease, or at least grow gayer and wiser.

[Illustration: Lord Macauley.]

There are many other great writers, working in other fields, whom we
may claim as belonging altogether or almost to the Victorian age.
Within that period lies almost entirely the brilliantly successful
career of Macaulay, essayist, poet, orator, and historian. For the
last-named _role_ Macaulay seemed sovereignly fitted by his
extraordinary faculty for assimilating and retaining historical
knowledge, and by the vividness of imagination and mastery of words
which enabled him to present his facts in such attractive guise as
made them fascinating far beyond romance. His "History of England
from the Accession of James II," whereof the first volumes appeared
in 1849, remains a colossal fragment; the fulness of detail with
which he adorned it, the grand scale on which he worked, rendered its
completion a task almost impossible for the longest lifetime; and
Macaulay died in his sixtieth year. Despite the defects of
partisanship and exaggeration freely and not quite unjustly charged
upon his great work, it remains a yet unequalled record of the period
dealt with, just as his stirring ballads, so seemingly easy of
imitation in their ringing, rolling numbers, hold their own against
very able rivals and are yet unequalled in our time.

[Illustration: Thomas Carlyle.]

Macaulay was not the first, and he is not the last, of our
picturesque historians. It was in 1837 that Carlyle, who four years
before had startled the English-reading public by his strangely
worded, bewildering "Sartor Resartus," brought out his astonishing
"History of the French Revolution"--a prose poem, an epic without a
hero, revealing as by "flashes of lightning" the ghastly tragedy and
comedy of that tremendous upheaval; and in 1845 he followed up the
vein thus opened by his lifelike study of "Oliver Cromwell," which
was better received by his English readers than the later "History of
Friedrich II," marvel of careful research and graphic reproduction
though it be. To Carlyle theref