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Updated: June 6, 2025
His reading, if desultory, was vast; and from the list of books which his biographer has noted it would seem that Macaulay never read more than Byron in a given time, all the noted historians of England, Germany, Rome, and Greece, with innumerable biographies, miscellanies, and even divinity, the raw material which he afterwards worked into his poems.
What he said long ago in his preface to the American edition of Carlyle's Miscellanies, that they were papers which had spoken to the young men of the time "with an emphasis that hindered them from sleep", is strikingly true of his own writings.
In none was any change from the original form made by me, except in the 'Fortune of the Republic, which was made up of several lectures for the occasion upon which it was read." The volume of "Miscellanies" contains no less than twenty-three pieces of very various lengths and relating to many different subjects.
To this decade belong songs by Lyly and Peele, Lodge and Greene, which have already caught the delicate daintiness and the exquisite lilt of Shakespeare's songs and a host of others found in the later songbooks qualities of which there is little more than a rare hint here and there in the earlier Miscellanies, for all the bravery of such titles as A Paradise of Dainty Devises : A Gorgeous Gallery of Gallant Inventions : or A Handefull of Pleasant Delites .
In the Preface to the Miscellanies, from which most of the foregoing account is taken, Fielding, as usual, refers its failure to other causes than its inherent defects. Its unfavourable reception, as Fielding must have known in his heart, was due to its artistic shortcomings, and also to the fact that a change was taking place in the public taste.
'Let no one', he says in the preface to the notes to the New Testament, 'take up this work, as he takes up Gellius's Noctes atticae or Poliziano's Miscellanies.... We are in the presence of holy things; here it is no question of eloquence, these matters are best recommended to the world by simplicity and purity; it would be ridiculous to display human erudition here, impious to pride oneself on human eloquence. But Erasmus never was so eloquent himself as just then.
I shall add but one other testimony of his merit, which if some should think unnecessary, yet it is pleasing; the lines are delightfully sweet and flowing. In his Miscellanies thus speaks Mr. Pope;
Williamson of Cardrona in Peeblesshire, was a strange humorist, of whom Sir Walter told many stories. The allusion here is to the anecdote of the Leetle Anderson in the first of Malachi's Epistles.: See Scott's Prose Miscellanies, vol. xxi. p. 289. The Omen, by Galt, had just been published. See Sir Walter's review of this novel in the Miscellaneous Prose Works, vol. xviii. p. 333.
But none of these restrictions or provisos is requisite, or could for a moment be thought of, in reference to Charles Lamb. Some of the Essays of Elia and his other miscellanies are or pretend to be actual letters.
If the old formulas have been theoretically dismissed, and a conscientious critic now endeavours to place himself in the position of his author, the change is largely due to the influence of Carlyle's Miscellanies. Carlyle first made it generally known in England, because he was the first fully to apprehend its meaning.
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