balance with judicial acumen and temperate firmness. There is but one
voice in all this company. It was a fine, generous, honourable, and
sterling nature. His books deserve their vast popularity and may long
continue to maintain it. But Macaulay must not be judged amongst
philosophers--nor even amongst the real masters of the English
language. And, unless duly corrected, he may lead historical students
astray and his imitators into an obtrusive mannerism.

Let us take a famous passage from one of his most famous essays,
written in the zenith of his powers after his return from India, at the
age of forty--an essay on a grand subject which never ceased to
fascinate his imagination, composed with all his amazing resources of
memory and his dazzling mastery of colour. It is the third paragraph
of his well-known review of Von Ranke's _History of the Popes_. The
passage is familiar to all readers, and some of its phrases are
household words. It is rather long as well as trite; but it contains
in a single page such a profusion of historical suggestion; it is so
vigorous, so characteristic of Macaulay in all his undoubted resources
as in all his mannerism and limitations; it is so essentially true, and
yet so thoroughly obvious; it is so grand in form, and yet so meagre in
philosophic logic, that it may be worth while to analyse it in detail;
and for that purpose it must be set forth, even though it convey to
most readers little more than a sonorous truism.


There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy
so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The
history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human
civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the
mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the