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To it he contributed the following account, accompanied with a portrait the source of much of Macaulay's indictment. 'One of the most remarkable masks upon this occasion was James Boswell, Esq., in the dress of an armed Corsican chief. He entered the amphitheatre about twelve o'clock.
He has a sort of sympathy with Lord Macaulay's traveller of a hundred and fifty years since, who amid the 'horrible desolation' of the Scotch highlands, sighs for 'the true mountain scenery of Richmond- hill. The most beautiful landscape he has ever seen, or cares to see, is the vale of Thames from Taplow or from Cliefden, looking down towards Windsor, and up toward Reading; to him Bramshill, looking out far and wide over the rich lowland from its eyrie of dark pines, or Littlecote nestling between deer-spotted upland and rich water- meadow, is a finer sight than any robber castle of the Rhine.
As a child, even, he had shown himself to be no faint-hearted creature. When the great Civil War broke out he had joined his father's army. It met with disaster at Edgehill, and was finally shattered by the crushing defeat of Naseby, which afterward inspired Macaulay's most stirring ballad.
'The two beautiful sisters were going on the stage, when they were at once exalted almost as high as they could be, were Countessed and double-Duchessed. Ib. ix. 358. Their maiden name was Gunning. The Duchess of Argyle was alive when Boswell published his Journal. See ante, iv. 397, and v. 210. It was Lord Macaulay's grandfather who was thus reprimanded. Mr. See ante, ii. 264, note 2.
This leads us to the conclusive plea which we enter to Mr. Macaulay's indictment, namely that all those acts alleged as the excuses of rebellion and regicide occurred after the rebellion had broken out, and were at worst only devices of the unhappy King to escape from the regicide which he early foresaw. It was really the old story of the wolf and the lamb.
The powers of analysis, generalization, statement, and narrative in Macaulay's historical essays were fully equal to any powers he displayed in the "History of England from the Reign of James II." No candid critic can deny that there is little in his "History" which, as far as regards essential facts and principles, had not been previously stated in a more sententious form in his Essays.
We have had historical novels of all classes and grades. We have had served up in this form the Norman Conquest and the Wars of the Roses, the Gunpowder Plot and the Fire of London, Darnley and Richelieu and almost at the same moment with Mr. Macaulay's appeared a professed romance of Mr.
Macaulay's intimate knowledge of the ground, and his literary resources, enabled him to picture the dazzling successes of Clive and Hastings; so that the careers of those superb military chieftains and commercial robber-statesmen, in securing for their country the control of a distant province larger than France, and in enriching the British Empire and themselves beyond all precedent in conquest, stand splendidly portrayed forever.
Macaulay's Essays, Holmes' Autocrat, Gibbons' History, Jefferies' Story of my Heart, Carlyle's Life, Pepys' Diary, and Borrow's Lavengro were among his inner circle of literary friends. The sturdy East Anglian, half prize-fighter, half missionary, was a particular favourite of his, and so was the garrulous Secretary of the Navy.
At this juncture appeared in the Edinburgh Review, Macaulay's famous attack on my father's Essay on Government. This gave me much to think about.
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