was never satisfied with his own productions; and the only comfort he took in the impossibility of realizing his ideal was in the comparison he made of his own works with similar ones by contemporary authors.  Then he was content; and then only appeared in his letters and diary that good-natured, self-satisfied feeling which arose from the consciousness that he was one of the most fortunate authors who had ever lived.  There was nothing cynical in his sense of superiority, but an amiable self-assertion and self-confidence that only made men smile,—­as when Lord Palmerston remarked that “he wished he was as certain of any one thing as Tom Macaulay was of everything.”  This self-confidence rarely provoked opposition, except when he was positive as to things outside his sphere.  He wrote and talked sensibly and luminously on financial and social questions, on art, on poetry and the drama, on philosophy and theology; but on these subjects he was not an authority with specialists.  In other words, he did not, so to speak, know everything profoundly, but only superficially; yet in history, especially English history, he was profound in analysis as well as brilliant in the narration of facts, even when there was disagreement between himself and others as to inductions he drew from those facts,—­inductions colored by his strong prejudices and aristocratic surroundings.

Macaulay was not always consistent with his own theories, however.  For instance, he was a firm believer in the progress of society and of civilization.  He saw the enormous gulf between the ninth and the nineteenth centuries, and the unmistakable advance which, since the times of Hildebrand, the world had made in knowledge, in the arts, in liberty, and in the comforts of life, although the tide of progress had its ebb and flow in different ages and countries.  Yet when he cast his eye on America, where perhaps the greatest progress had been made in the world’s history within fifty years, he saw nothing but melancholy signs of anarchy and decay,—­signs portending the collapse of liberty and the triumph of ignorance and crime.  Thus he writes in 1857 to an American correspondent:—­

“As long as you have a boundless extent of fertile and unoccupied land, your laboring population will be far more at ease than the laboring population of the Old World; but the time will come when wages will be as low, and will fluctuate as much, with you as with us.  Then your institutions will fairly be brought to the test.  Distress everywhere makes the laborer mutinous and discontented, and inclines him to listen with eagerness to agitators who tell him that it is a monstrous iniquity that one man should have a million, while another cannot get a full meal.  In bad years there is plenty of grumbling here, and sometimes a little rioting; but it matters little, for here the sufferers are not the rulers.  The supreme power is in the hands of a class deeply interested in the security of property and the maintenance of