Mr. Macaulay, too mature not to have well measured his own peculiar capacities, not rich in invention but ingenious in application, saw the use that might be made of this principle, and that history itself would be much more popular with a large embroidery of personal, social, and even topographical anecdote and illustration, instead of the sober garb in which we had been in the habit of seeing it.  Few histories indeed ever were or could be written without some admixture of this sort.  The father of the art himself, old Herodotus, vivified his text with a greater share of what we may call personal anecdote than any of his classical followers.  Modern historians, as they happened to have more or less of what we may call artistic feeling, admitted more or less of this decoration into their text, but always with an eye (which Mr. Macaulay never exercises) to the appropriateness and value of the illustration.  Generally, however, such matters have been thrown into notes, or, in a few instances—­as by Dr. Henry and in Mr. Knight’s interesting and instructive “Pictorial History”—­into separate chapters.  The large class of memoir-writers may also be fairly considered as anecdotical historians—­and they are in fact the sources from which the novelists of the new school extract their principal characters and main incidents.

Mr. Macaulay deals with history, evidently, as we think, in imitation of the novelists—­his first object being always picturesque effect—­his constant endeavour to give from all the repositories of gossip that have reached us a kind of circumstantial reality to his incidents, and a sort of dramatic life to his personages.  For this purpose he would not be very solicitous about contributing any substantial addition to history, strictly so called; on the contrary, indeed, he seems to have willingly taken it as he found it, adding to it such lace and trimmings as he could collect from the Monmouth-street of literature, seldom it may be safely presumed of very delicate quality.  It is, as Johnson drolly said, “an old coat with a new facing—­the old dog in a new doublet.”  The conception was bold, and—­so far as availing himself, like other novelists, of the fashion of the day to produce a popular and profitable effect—­the experiment has been eminently successful.

But besides the obvious incentives just noticed, Mr. Macaulay had also the stimulus of what we may compendiously call a strong party spirit.  One would have thought that the Whigs might have been satisfied with their share in the historical library of the Revolution:—­besides Rapin, Echard, and Jones, who, though of moderate politics in general, were stout friends to the Revolution, they have had of professed and zealous Whigs, Burnet, the foundation of all, Kennett, Oldmixon, Dalrymple, Laing, Brodie, Fox, and finally Mackintosh and his continuator, besides innumerable writers of less note, who naturally adopted the successful side; and we should not have supposed that the reader of any of