speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed
paper. All that a "man of letters," of great genius and lofty spirit,
could do by consuming and producing mere printed paper, he did. And as
the "supreme man of letters" of his time he will ever be honoured and
long continue to be read. He deliberately cultivated a form of speech
which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and
intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them.
He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather
personal, dialect. And thus he deprived himself of that world-wide and
European influence which belongs to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Scott,
Byron--even to Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Spencer. But
his name will stand beside theirs in the history of British thought in
the nineteenth century; and a devoted band of chosen readers, wherever
the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard, will for generations to come continue
to drink inspiration from the two or three masterpieces of the
Annandale peasant-poet.




III

LORD MACAULAY

Macaulay, who counted his years of life by those of this century, may
fairly claim to have had the greatest body of readers, and to be the
most admired prose-writer of the Victorian Age. It is now some seventy
years since his first brilliant essay on "Milton" took the world by
storm. It is half a century since that fascinating series of _Essays_
was closed, and little short of that time since his famous _History_