e fruitful 'leisures of the
spirit.' We can picture Macaulay talking, or making a speech in the
House of Commons, or buried in a book, or scouring his library for
references, or covering his blue foolscap with dashing periods, or
accentuating his sentences and barbing his phrases; but can anybody
think of him as meditating, as modestly pondering and wondering, as
possessed for so much as ten minutes by that spirit of inwardness, which
has never been wholly wanting in any of those kings and princes of
literature, with whom it is good for men to sit in counsel? He seeks
Truth, not as she should be sought, devoutly, tentatively, and with the
air of one touching the hem of a sacred garment, but clutching her by
the hair of the head and dragging her after him in a kind of boisterous
triumph, a prisoner of war and not a goddess.

All this finds itself reflected, as the inner temper of a man always is
reflected, in his style of written prose. The merits of Macaulay's prose
are obvious enough. It naturally reproduces the good qualities I of his
understanding, its strength, manliness, and directness. That exultation
in material goods and glories of which we have already spoken, makes his
pages rich in colour, and gives them the effect of a sumptuous
gala-suit. Certainly the brocade is too brand-new, and has none of the
delicate charm that comes to such finery when it is a little faded.
Again, nobody can have any excuse for not knowing exactly what it is
that Macaulay means. We may assuredly say of his prose what Boileau says
of his own poetry--'Et mon vers, bien ou mal, dit toujours quelque
chose.' This is a prodigious merit, when we reflect with what fatal
alacrity human language lends itself in the hands of so many performers
upon the pliant instrument, to all sorts of obscurity, ambiguity,
disguise, and pretentious mystification. Scaliger is supposed to have
remarked of the Basques and their desperate tongue: ''Tis said the
Basques understand one another; for my part, I will never believe it.'
The same pungent doubt might apply to loftier members of the hierarchy
of speech than that forlorn dialect, but never to English as handled by
Macaulay. He never wrote an obscure sentence in his life, and this may
seem a small merit, until we remember of how few writers we could say
the same.

Macaulay is of those who think prose as susceptible of polished and
definite form as verse, and he was, we should suppose, of those also who
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