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Hume, Gibbon, Hallam, and Macaulay, Sismondi, Guizot, and Michelet, all have in their characters something which invites and provokes opposition. But the spirit which underlies Mr.
Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin, Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke why! there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value.
Further on is the historical side, where the chief prose writers are to be found; the venerable Camden is close to Grote and Bishop Thirlwall, historians whose bodies rest in one grave. The busts of Lord Macaulay and of Thackeray are on each side of Addison's statue, and beneath the pavement in front of them is the tombstone of the ever-popular Charles Dickens.
On the publication of Moore's Life, Lord Macaulay had no hesitation in referring to Byron as "the most celebrated Englishman of the nineteenth century." Nor have we now; but in the interval between 1840-1870, it was the fashion to talk of him as a sentimentalist, a romancer, a shallow wit, a nine days' wonder, a poet for "green unknowing youth."
Their ancestors, we are told by Macaulay, suppressed bull baiting, not because it hurt the bull, but because it gave pleasure to the people. Here in New England they refused the Roman dogma of Purgatory and then with complete inconsistency, invented the boarding-house, in order, doubtless, to take as much of the joy as possible out of this life, as a preparation for endless bliss in the next.
"The Commission is welcome," Macaulay writes to his father, "and I am particularly glad that it has been given at a time when there is no ministry, and when the acceptance of it implies no political obligation. To Lord Lyndhurst I of course feel personal gratitude, and I shall always take care how I speak of him."
As far as we know, Shakespeare worked always for money, giving the best of his intellect to support his trade as an actor. In our own century what literary names stand higher than those of Byron, Tennyson, Scott, Dickens, Macaulay, and Carlyle? And I think I may say that none of those great men neglected the pecuniary result of their labours.
During an epoch when, at our principal seats of education, athletic pursuits are regarded as a leading object of existence rather than as a means of health and recreation, it requires some boldness to confess that Macaulay was utterly destitute of bodily accomplishments, and that he viewed his deficiencies with supreme indifference. He could neither swim, nor row, nor drive, nor skate, nor shoot.
"If she would but let him have Silesia, he would, he said, stand by her against any power which should try to deprive her of her other dominions; as if he was not already bound to stand by her, or as if his new promise could be of more value than the old one." That passage was written by Macaulay; but so far as the mere contemporary facts are concerned, it might have been written by me.
It must, too, be conceded that hitherto we have no rising, or nearly-risen poet, who answers fully to our ideal. Macaulay and Aytoun are content with being brilliant ballad-singers they never seek to touch the deeper spiritual chords of our being.
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