ar.

We do not call you rebels and traitors. We do not call for the
vengeance of the crown against you. We do not know how to qualify
millions of our countrymen, contending with one heart for an
admission to privileges which we have ever thought our own happiness
and honour, by odious and unworthy names. On the contrary, we highly
revere the principles on which you act, though we lament some of
their effects. Armed as you are, we embrace you, as our friends and
as our brethren by the best and dearest ties of relation.

It may be said that there is a patent injustice in comparing the prose
of a historian criticising or describing great events at second hand,
with the prose of a statesman taking active part in great events, fired
by the passion of a present conflict, and stimulated by the vivid
interest of undetermined issues. If this be a well-grounded plea, and it
may be so, then of course it excludes a contrast not only with Burke,
but also with Bolingbroke, whose fine manners and polished gaiety give
us a keen sense of the grievous garishness of Macaulay. If we may not
institute a comparison between Macaulay and great actors on the stage of
affairs, at least there can be no objection to the introduction of
Southey as a standard of comparison. Southey was a man of letters pure
and simple, and it is worth remarking that Macaulay himself admitted
that he found so great a charm in Southey's style, as nearly always to
read it with pleasure, even when Southey was talking nonsense. Now, take
any page of the Life of Nelson or the Life of Wesley; consider how easy,
smooth, natural, and winning is the diction and the rise and fall of the
sentence, and yet how varied the rhythm and how nervous the phrases; and
then turn to a page of Macaulay, and wince under its stamping emphasis,
its over-coloured tropes, its exaggerated expressions, its unlovely
staccato. Southey's History of the Peninsular War is now dead, but if
any of my readers has a copy on his highest shelves, I would venture to
ask him to take down the third volume, and read the concluding pages,
of which Coleridge used to say that they were the finest specimen of
historic eulogy he had ever read in English, adding with forgivable
hyperbole, that they were more to the Duke's fame and glory than a
campaign. 'Foresight and enterprise with our commander went hand in
hand; he never advanced but so as to be sure of his retreat; and never
retreated bu