benefits incident to their work. There is no puny carping
nor cavilling in the process. It is because such men are strong that
they are able to do harm; they may injure the taste and judgment of a
whole generation, just because they are never mediocre. That is implied
in strength. Macaulay is not to be measured now merely as if he were the
author of a new book. His influence has been a distinct literary force,
and in an age of reading, this is to be a distinct force in deciding the
temper, the process, the breadth, of men's opinions, no less than the
manner of expressing them. It is no new observation that the influence
of an author becomes in time something apart from his books: a certain
generalised or abstract personality impresses itself on our minds, long
after we have forgotten the details of his opinions, the arguments by
which he enforced them, and even, what are usually the last to escape
us, the images by which he illustrated them. Phrases and sentences are a
mask: but we detect the features of the man behind the mask. This
personality of a favourite author is a real and powerful agency.
Unconsciously we are infected with his humours; we apply his methods; we
find ourselves copying the rhythm and measure of his periods; we wonder
how he would have acted, or thought, or spoken in our circumstances.
Usually a strong writer leaves a special mark in some particular region
of mental activity: the final product of him is to fix some persistent
religious mood, or some decisive intellectual bias, or else some trick
of the tongue. Now Macaulay has contributed no philosophic ideas to the
speculative stock, nor has he developed any one great historic or social
truth. His work is always full of a high spirit of manliness, probity,
and honour; but he is not of that small band to whom we may apply
Mackintosh's thrice and four times enviable panegyric on the eloquence
of Dugald Stewart, that its peculiar glory consisted in having 'breathed
the love of virtue into whole generations of pupils.' He has painted
many striking pictures, and imparted a certain reality to our conception
of many great scenes of the past. He did good service in banishing once
for all those sentimental Jacobite leanings and prejudices which had
been kept alive by the sophistry of the most popular of historians, and
the imagination of the most popular of romance writers. But where he set
his stamp has been upon style; style in its widest sense, not merely