rns and casts of mind, as to end in work with little grace
or harmony or fine tracery about it, but only overweening purpose and
vehement will. And it is overweeningness and self-confident will that
are the chief notes of Macaulay's style. It has no benignity. Energy is
doubtless a delightful quality, but then Macaulay's energy is perhaps
energy without momentum, and he impresses us more by a strong volubility
than by volume. It is the energy of interests and intuitions, which
though they are profoundly sincere if ever they were sincere in any man,
are yet in the relations which they comprehend, essentially superficial.

Still, trenchancy whether in speaker or writer is a most effective tone
for a large public. It gives them confidence in their man, and prevents
tediousness--except to those who reflect how delicate is the poise of
truth, and what steeps and pits encompass the dealer in unqualified
propositions. To such persons, a writer who is trenchant in every
sentence of every page, who never lapses for a line into the contingent,
who marches through the intricacies of things in a blaze of certainty,
is not only a writer to be distrusted, but the owner of a doubtful and
displeasing style. It is a great test of style to watch how an author
disposes of the qualifications, limitations, and exceptions that clog
the wings of his main proposition. The grave and conscientious men of
the seventeenth century insisted on packing them all honestly along with
the main proposition itself, within the bounds of a single period.
Burke arranges them in tolerably close order in the paragraph. Dr.
Newmann, that winning writer, disperses them lightly over his page. Of
Macaulay it is hardly unfair to say that he despatches all
qualifications into outer space before he begins to write, or if he
magnanimously admits one or two here and there, it is only to bring them
the more imposingly to the same murderous end.

We have spoken of Macaulay's interests and intuitions wearing a certain
air of superficiality; there is a feeling of the same kind about his
attempts to be genial. It is not truly festive. There is no abandonment
in it. It has no deep root in moral humour, and is merely a literary
form, resembling nothing so much as the hard geniality of some clever
college tutor of stiff manners, entertaining undergraduates at an
official breakfast-party. This is not because his tone is bookish; on
the contrary, his tone and level are distinctly