rhetorical artifice has been imitated with success in many a prize
essay and not a few tall-talking journals. How much more pathos is
there in a stanza from Gray's _Elegy_, or a sentence from Carlyle's
_Bastille_, or Burke's _French Revolution_!

The habit of false emphasis and the love of superlatives is a far worse
defect, and no one has attempted to clear Macaulay of the charge. It
runs through every page he wrote, from his essay on Milton, with which
he astonished the town at the age of twenty-five, down to the close of
his _History_ wherein we read that James II. valued Lord Perth as
"author of the last improvements on the thumb-screw." Indeed no more
glaring example of Macaulay's _megalomania_ or taste for exaggeration
can be found than the famous piece in the _Milton_ on the Restoration
of Charles II.


Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of
servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish
talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow
minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. The
king cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank
into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her
degrading insults, and her more degrading gold. The caresses of
harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the State.
The government had just ability enough to deceive and just religion
enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every
grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean.
In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and
Moloch; and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the
blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and