and member of numerous academies. Carlyle was poor, despondent,
morbid, and cynical: Macaulay was rich, optimist, overflowing with
health, high spirits, and good nature. The one hardly ever knew what
the world called success: the other hardly ever knew failure. Carlyle
had in him the elements that make the poet, the prophet, the apostle,
the social philosopher. In Macaulay these were singularly wanting; he
was the man of affairs, the busy politician, the rhetorician, the
eulogist of society as it is, the believer in material progress, in the
ultimate triumph of all that is practical and commonplace, and in the
final discomfiture of all that is visionary and Utopian. The
Teufelsdröckhian dialect is obscure even to its select students: the
Macaulay sentence is plain as that of Swift himself. Carlyle's gospel
is full of passion, novelty, suggestion, theory, and social problems.
Macaulay turned his back on social problems and disdained any kind of
gospel. He had no mission to tell the world how bad it is; on the
contrary, he was never wearied with his proofs that it ought to be well
satisfied with its lot and its vast superiority in all things to its
ancestors.

The great public, wherever English books penetrate, from the White Sea
to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the
brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers
care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not
decide the matter; and it does not follow that either public or critic
has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect, and
with the apocalyptic spirit of _Sartor_, it is certain that millions
would cease to read books, and could gain little from books if they
did. And if the only books were such "purple patches" of history as
Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into sheep
and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees,