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Updated: May 27, 2025
"What proportion, do you suppose," she went on, "of all these roomfuls of people behind us without saying anything uncharitable what proportion of them, if compelled to amuse themselves for two hours at a bookcase, would pitch upon Macaulay's Essays, or anything like them, to spend the time?"
What are some of the qualities that cause Macaulay's writings to outstrip in popularity other works of a similar nature? What qualities in his style may be commended to young writers? What are his special defects? Contrast his narrative style in Chap. IX. of the History with Carlyle's in The French Revolution, Vol. Newman.
Trevelyan's two volumes, it is perhaps worth while, on Strafford's plan, to ask ourselves shortly what kind of significance or value belongs to Lord Macaulay's achievements, and to what place he has a claim among the forces of English literature.
On the other hand, it was he who, supported by Macaulay's famous minute, but contrary to official opinion in Leadenhall Street, issued the ordinance constituting English the official language of India.
An earnest purpose will either find time or make time. Nor is it necessary that much time should be taken. The spare moments, the mere fragments of time, often worse than wasted, will, if carefully improved, make both mind and heart a store-house of the most precious treasure. It is said that Spurgeon read the whole of Macaulay's History of England between the courses at dinner.
He said 'The Battle of the Baltic', and 'Gray's Elegy', right through, though I think he got wrong in places, and the 'Revenge', and Macaulay's thing about Lars Porsena and the Nine Gods. And when it was his turn he waved like a man. I will try not to call him a white mouse any more. He was a brick that day, and no mouse.
The half century of Macaulay's prophecy has come, and that prophecy has been fulfilled as to the rarity of Southey's readers as a poet. Has the other part come true too? I should hesitate to say that it has. Esteem not merely for the man but for the writer can never fail Southey whenever he is read by competent persons: admiration may be less prompt to come at call.
Croker tells us that the great Marquis of Montrose was beheaded at Edinburgh in 1650. There is not a forward boy at any school in England who does not know that the Marquis was hanged. Macaulay's Essays, ed. 1843, i. 357 It is observable that men of the first rank spelt very ill in the last century. In the first of these letters I have preserved the original spelling. See ante, i., 127.
The defect in Macaulay's criticism is that he makes Bacon interested in mere outward phenomena, or matters of practical utility, a worldly utilitarian of whom Epicureans may be proud. In reality he soared to the realm of Plato as well as of Aristotle. Take, for instance, his Idola Mentis Humanae, or "Phantoms of the Human Mind," which compose the best-known part of the "Novum Organum."
To quote a phrase of Macaulay's quoted in turn by William James in one of his letters, there is a type of mind "utterly wanting in the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible supposition," and there has been amongst us of late a marked increase of this type of mind. There has been up to our own time no great amount of such speculation as this in the West.
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