those of the man of the
world. But one always seems to find that neither a wide range of
cultivation, nor familiar access to the best Whig circles, had quite
removed the stiffness and self-conscious precision of the Clapham Sect.
We would give much for a little more flexibility, and would welcome ever
so slight a consciousness of infirmity. As has been said, the only
people whom men cannot pardon are the perfect. Macaulay is like the
military king who never suffered himself to be seen, even by the
attendants in his bed-chamber, until he had had time to put on his
uniform and jack-boots. His severity of eye is very wholesome; it makes
his writing firm, and firmness is certainly one of the first qualities
that good writing must have. But there is such a thing as soft and
considerate precision, as well as hard and scolding precision. Those
most interesting English critics of the generation slightly anterior to
Macaulay,--Hazlitt, Lamb, De Quincey, Leigh Hunt,--were fully his equals
in precision, and yet they knew how to be clear, acute, and definite,
without that edginess and inelasticity which is so conspicuous in
Macaulay's criticisms, alike in their matter and their form.

To borrow the figure of an old writer, Macaulay's prose is not like a
flowing vestment to his thought, but like a suit of armour. It is often
splendid and glittering, and the movement of the opening pages of his
History is superb in its dignity. But that movement is exceptional. As a
rule there is the hardness, if there is also often the sheen, of
highly-wrought metal. Or, to change our figure, his pages are composed
as a handsome edifice is reared, not as a fine statue or a frieze 'with
bossy sculptures graven' grows up in the imaginative mind of the
statuary. There is no liquid continuity, such as indicates a writer
possessed by his subject and not merely possessing it. The periods are
marshalled in due order of procession, bright and high-stepping; they
never escape under an impulse of emotion into the full current of a
brimming stream. What is curious is that though Macaulay seems ever to
be brandishing a two-edged gleaming sword, and though he steeps us in an
atmosphere of belligerency, yet we are never conscious of inward
agitation in him, and perhaps this alone would debar him from a place
among the greatest writers. For they, under that reserve, suppression,
or management, which is an indispensable condition of the finest
rhetorical art, even