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Of the essay on Warren Hastings he thought better, "bating some vulgarity and Macaulay's usual want of all power of reasoning." Lord Cockburn wrote to Mr. Napier a word or two on Macaulay. "Delighting as I do," says Lord Cockburn, "in his thoughts, views, and knowledge, I feel too often compelled to curse and roar at his words and the structure of his composition.
It was hard for Macaulay to realize that the time had come when he must leave untold that portion of English history with which he was more familiar than any other living man; but he submitted to the inevitable without repining. He had done what he could. Even when he was compelled to give up his daily task, his love of reading remained; a book was his solace to the last.
Better than by all the reading you have ever done you absorb a sense and realization of the splendor of England's past when you go to Westminster Abbey and stand figuratively with one foot on Jonson and another on Dryden; and if, overcome by the presence of so much dead-and-gone greatness, you fall in a fit you commit a trespass on the last resting-place of Macaulay or Clive, or somebody of equal consequence.
Perhaps Lord Macaulay puts the case as bluntly as any one, and we may as well quote him because he, too, was no Catholic, and held no brief for the Church of Rome. This brilliant writer, who was, perhaps, an historian before all things, tells us that the work of the Reformation was the work, not of three saints, nor even of three ordinary decent men, but of three notorious murderers!
He does not adopt the modern idea that history is a record of social growth, moral as well as physical. While a graphic picture of the exterior aspects of society is presented, we are given no profound insight into the interior movements of a great constitutional epoch. We may say of both Gibbon and Macaulay that they are too often mere surveyors, rather than geologists, of the historic field.
In the language of Macaulay, "He carries his love of effect far beyond the limits of moderation. He tells a fine story finely, but he cannot tell a plain story plainly. Her., 1828.
Buckle declared that Macaulay was perfectly accurate in all the facts which Buckle had himself investigated to write his "History of Civilization;" and so particular was he in the selection of words that he never allowed a sentence to pass muster until it was as good as he could make it.
What was once the home of Zachary Macaulay stands almost within the swing of the bell of a stately and elegant Roman Catholic chapel; and the pleasant mansion of Lord Teignmouth, the cradle of the Bible Society, is now a religious house of the Redemptorist Order.
Some of us do not even know what those principles were. I have met many intelligent men, in different states of the Union, who could not even repeat the names of the senators who sat for them in Congress. Macaulay said, in 1852, "We now know, by the clearest of all proof, that universal suffrage, even united with secret voting, is no security, against the establishment of arbitrary power."
I am engaged on Wednesday to dine at the Albion Tavern with the Directors of the East India Company; now my servants; next week, I hope, to be my masters. Ever yours To Hannah M. Macaulay. London: November 22, 1833. My dear Sister, The decision is postponed for a week; but there is no chance of an unfavourable result.
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