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Updated: May 27, 2025
Heine has spoken of Martin, as has Théophile Gautier; and his name, by some kink of destiny, is best known to the present generation because of Macaulay's mention of it in an essay. The Vale of Tempe is one of Martin's larger plates seldom seen in the collector's catalogue. We have viewed it and other rare prints in the choice collection referred to already.
Macaulay's brilliant description of the Italian tyrant in his essay on Machiavelli deserves careful study. It may, however, be remarked that the picture is too favorable. Macaulay omits the darker crimes of the despots, and draws his portrait almost exclusively from such men as Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Francesco and Lodovico Sforza, Frederick of Urbino, and Lorenzo de' Medici.
He was a brilliant partisan, hating Spaniards and Calvinists; and wrote all the better for this bias. He was an admirable sketcher of historical portraits, and had Macaulay's skill in composing special chapters devoted to the tendencies and qualities of an epoch or to the characteristics of a dynasty. Between 1860 and 1868 he produced the four volumes of the "History of the United Netherlands."
Those best known and most frequently quoted are "On His Deceased Wife," "To the Nightingale," "On Reaching the Age of Twenty-three," "The Massacre in Piedmont," and the two "On His Blindness." MILTON'S PROSE. Of Milton's prose works there are many divergent opinions, ranging from Macaulay's unbounded praise to the condemnation of some of our modern critics.
George Eliot, on the other hand, who had the inward eye that was not among Macaulay's gifts, found the Prelude full of material for a daily liturgy, and it is easy to imagine how she fondly lingered, as she did, over such a thought as this "There is One great society alone on earth: The noble Living and the noble Dead."
One reason is, no doubt, that the effect of a pungent paragraph is seldom obliterated by a painstaking exposure of its errors requiring many pages of careful and guarded reasoning. Macaulay's narrative could be superseded in popular esteem only by a writer who should condense a more correct but equally dogmatic statement into language as terse and vivid as his own.
That is Macaulay's pre-eminent gift. He goes on to apply this in detail. It may be useful to point out faults now; though his criticisms upon anything which Fitzjames may publish in 1890 shall be 'all saccharine. In a letter of April 27, 1856, he shows an alarm which was certainly not unnatural.
Hayden pronounces my profile a gem of art, perfectly antique; and, what is worth the praise of ten Haydens, I was told yesterday that Mrs. Littleton, the handsomest woman in London, had paid me exactly the same compliment. She pronounced Mr. Macaulay's profile to be a study for an artist.
He was, however, helpful in other ways. He was one of the subscribers to a Reading Club, and through him I had access to newspapers and magazines. The South Australian Institute was a treasure to the family. I recollect a newcomer being astonished at my sister Mary having read Macaulay's History. "Why, it was only just out when I left England," said he.
Gardiner. Croker's Boswell, p.739. See ante, iii.157, note 3. Dr. Burney had just lost Mr. Crisp. Dr. Burney's Memoirs, ii.323, 352. For Mr. Crisp, see Macaulay's Review of Mme. D'Arblay's Diary. Essays, ed. 1874, iv.104. He wrote of her to Mrs. Montagu: 'Her curiosity was universal, her knowledge was very extensive, and she sustained forty years of misery with steady fortitude.
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