learn to be outspoken, lucid, and brisk.

It is the very perfection of his qualities in rousing the interest of
the great public which has drawn down on Macaulay the grave rebukes of
so many fine judges of the higher historical literature. Cotter
Morison, Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen, and John Morley all agree that
his style has none of the subtler charms of the noblest prose, that his
conception of history is radically unsound, that, in fact, it broke
down by its own unwieldy proportions. Mr. Morison has very justly
remarked that if the _History of England_ had ever been completed on
the same scale for the whole of the period as originally designed, it
would have run to fifty volumes, and would have occupied in composition
one hundred and fifty years. As it is, the eight duodecimo volumes
give us the events of sixteen years, from 1685 to 1701; so that the
history of England from Alfred would require five hundred similar
volumes. Now, Gibbon's eight octavo volumes give us the history of the
world for thirteen centuries; that is to say, Gibbon has recounted the
history of a century in nearly the same space that Macaulay records the
history of a year. There cannot be a doubt that Gibbon's _Decline and
Fall_ is immeasurably superior to Macaulay's fragment, in thought, in
imagination, in form, in all the qualities of permanent history; it
stands on a far higher plane; it will long outlast and overshadow it.
Compared with this, Macaulay's delightful and brilliant pictures are
mere glorified journalism.

Macaulay, who was no braggart, has put it on record that his conception
of history was more just than that of Hume, Robertson, Voltaire, and
Gibbon. It is perfectly true that his conception was different from
theirs, his execution was different, and he does not address the same
class of readers. But his conception of history was not just; it was a