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Hewitt's ballads to those of Lord Macaulay, while Mrs. Alaric Watts, in her capacity of Annual editor, wrote to assure her old friend and contributor that, 'In thy simplest poetry there are sometimes turns so exquisite as to bring the tears to my eyes.

Lord Macaulay once ventured the prediction that the Constitution would prove unworkable as soon as there were no longer large areas of undeveloped land and when the United States became a nation of great cities. That period of development has arrived. In 1880 only 15 per cent. of the American population lived in the cities and the remainder were still on the farms.

Among their belongings was a modest library of three thousand volumes, all of which, a wit has said, were read twice through by Macaulay on the outward voyage. India was safely reached, and Macaulay set himself with his accustomed vigor to learning the language and informing himself as to the actual status of things, in order that he might provide for their betterment.

To Hannah More Macaulay. London: May 30, 1831. Well, my dear, I have been to Holland House. I took a glass coach, and arrived, through a fine avenue of elms, at the great entrance towards seven o'clock.

Johnson and Franklin, Scott, Coleridge, and Southey, Byron and Montgomery, Macintosh and Macaulay, have exerted their philosophical acumen and poetic feeling to analyze his various spell, and account for his unequalled fame; and though the round-cornered copies, with their diverting woodcuts, have not disappeared from the poor man's ingle, illustrated editions blaze from the shelves of every sumptuous library, new pictures, from its exhaustless themes, light up the walls of each annual exhibition; and amidst the graceful litter of the drawing-room table, you are sure to take up designs from the Pilgrim's Progress.

Grattan died in 1820, and twenty years later, in 1844, another great English writer, Lord Macaulay, wrote a world-famous passage upon the great Lord Chatham in the Edinburgh Review: "Chatham sleeps near the northern door of the church, in a spot which has ever since been appropriated to statesmen, as the other end of the same transept has long been to poets.

He hated Croker, a hateful man, to be sure, and when the latter published his edition of Boswell, Macaulay saw his opportunity, and exclaimed before he had looked at the book, as you will remember, "Now I will dust his jacket." The standard of criticism does not lie with the individual in literature any more than it does in different periods as to fashions and manners.

But not much relief can be drawn from a man about to be burned alive, and history does not tempt us to keen sympathy with the recanting archbishop, at least if we agree with Macaulay rather than with Froude. I venture to think that historical tradition, as usual, offered a better motive than exact history.

We will not show Lord Macaulay the disrespect of supposing that he has attempted an elaborate piece of irony. It is possible that he may have been exercising his genius with a paradox, but the subject is not of the sort in which we can patiently permit such exercises.

At college Macaulay shirked mathematics and philosophy, spending his time and attention on things he liked better. The only study in which he excelled was composition. Even in babyhood his command of language had been a wonder to the neighborhood in which he lived.