he mere composite of
the rhetorician's imagination, assiduously working to order?

This remark is no disparagement of Macaulay's genius, but a
classification of it. We are interrogating our own impressions, and
asking ourselves among what kind of writers he ought to be placed.
Rhetoric is a good and worthy art, and rhetorical authors are often more
useful, more instructive, more really respectable than poetical authors.
But it is to be said that Macaulay as a rhetorician will hardly be
placed in the first rank, by those who have studied both him and the
great masters. Once more, no amount of embellishment or emphasis or
brilliant figure suffices to produce this intense effect of agitation
rigorously restrained; nor can any beauty of decoration be in the least
a substitute for that touching and penetrative music, which is made in
prose by the repressed trouble of grave and high souls. There is a
certain music, we do not deny, in Macaulay, but it is the music of a man
everlastingly playing for us rapid solos on a silver trumpet, never the
swelling diapasons of the organ, and never the deep ecstasies of the
four magic strings. That so sensible a man as Macaulay should keep clear
of the modern abomination of dithyrambic prose, that rank and sprawling
weed of speech, was natural enough; but then the effects which we miss
in him, and which, considering how strong the literary faculty in him
really was, we are almost astonished to miss, are not produced by
dithyramb but by repression. Of course the answer has been already
given; Macaulay, powerful and vigorous as he was, had no agitation, no
wonder, no tumult of spirit to repress. The world was spread out clear
before him; he read it as plainly and as certainly as he read his books;
life was all an affair of direct categoricals.

This was at least one secret of those hard modulations and shallow
cadences. How poor is the rhythm of Macaulay's prose we only realise by
going with his periods fresh in our ear to some true master of harmony.
It is not worth while to quote passages from an author who is in
everybody's library, and Macaulay is always so much like himself that
almost any one page will serve for an illustration exactly as well as
any other. Let any one turn to his character of Somers, for whom he had
so much admiration, and then turn to Clarendon's character of
Falkland;--'a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge,
of that inimitable sweetness and de