Now, Macaulay was a rhetorician, a consummate rhetorician, who wrote
powerful invectives or panegyrics in massive rhetoric which differed
from speeches mainly in their very close fibre, in their chiselled
phrasing, and above all in their dazzling profusion of literary
illustration. If it was oratory, it was the oratory of a speaker of
enormous reading, inexhaustible memory, and consummate skill with words.

There is nothing at all exceptional about this passage which has been
chosen for analysis. It is a fair and typical piece of Macaulay's best
style. Indeed his method is so uniform and so mechanical that any page
of his writing exhibits the same force and the same defects as any
other. Take one of the most famous of his scenes, the trial of Warren
Hastings, toward the end of that elaborate essay, written in 1841.
Every one knows the gorgeous and sonorous description of Westminster
Hall, beginning--"The place was worthy of such a trial." In the next
sentence the word "hall" recurs five times, and the relative "which"
occurs three times, and is not related to the same noun. Ten sentences
in succession open with the pronoun "there." It is a perfect galaxy of
varied colour, pomp, and illustration; but the effect is somewhat
artificial, and the whole scene smells of the court upholsterer. The
"just sentence of Bacon" pairs off with "the just absolution of
Somers"; the "greatest painter" sits beside the "greatest scholar of
the age"; ladies have "lips more persuasive than those of Fox"; there,
too, is "the beautiful mother of a beautiful race." And in the midst
of these long-drawn superlatives and glittering contrasts come in short
martial phrases, as brief and sharp as a drill-sergeant's word of
command. "Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting"--"The avenues
were lined with grenadiers"--"The streets were kept clear by cavalry."
No man can forget these short, hard decisive sentences.