on
the grammar and mechanism of writing, but on what De Quincey described
as its _organology_; style, that is to say, in its relation to ideas and
feelings, its commerce with thought, and its reaction on what one may
call the temper or conscience of the intellect.

Let no man suppose that it matters little whether the most universally
popular of the serious authors of a generation--and Macaulay was nothing
less than this--affects _style coupe_ or _style soutenu_. The critic of
style is not the dancing-master, declaiming on the deep ineffable things
that lie in a minuet. He is not the virtuoso of supines and gerundives.
The morality of style goes deeper 'than dull fools suppose.' When Comte
took pains to prevent any sentence from exceeding two lines of his
manuscript or five of print; to restrict every paragraph to seven
sentences; to exclude every hiatus between two sentences, or even
between two paragraphs; and never to reproduce any word, except the
auxiliary monosyllables, in two consecutive sentences; he justified his
literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness alike to heart and
intelligence of submission to artificial institutions. He felt, after he
had once mastered the habit of the new yoke, that it became the source
of continual and unforeseeable improvements even in thought, and he
perceived that the reason why verse is a higher kind of literary
perfection than prose, is that verse imposes a greater number of
rigorous forms. We may add that verse itself is perfected, in the hands
of men of poetic genius, in proportion to the severity of this
mechanical regulation. Where Pope or Racine had one rule of metre,
Victor Hugo has twenty, and he observes them as rigorously as an
algebraist or an astronomer observes the rules of calculation or
demonstration. One, then, who touches the style of a generation acquires
no trifling authority over its thought and temper, as well as over the
length of its sentences.

* * * * *

The first and most obvious secret of Macaulay's place on popular
bookshelves is that he has a true genius for narration, and narration
will always in the eyes, not only of our squatters in the Australian
bush, but of the many all over the world, stand first among literary
gifts. The common run of plain men, as has been noticed since the
beginning of the world, are as eager as children for a story, and like
children they will embrace the man who will tell them