Our second complaint is of one of the least important, perhaps, but most prominent defects of Mr. Macaulay’s book—­his Style—­not merely the choice and order of words, commonly called style, but the turn of mind which prompts the choice of expressions as well as of topics.  We need not repeat that Mr. Macaulay has a great facility of language, a prodigal copia verborum—­that he narrates rapidly and clearly—­that he paints very forcibly,—­and that his readers throughout the tale are carried on, or away, by something of the sorcery which a brilliant orator exercises over his auditory.  But he has also in a great degree the faults of the oratorical style.  He deals much too largely in epithets—­a habit exceedingly dangerous to historical truth.  He habitually constructs a piece of what should be calm, dispassionate narrative, upon the model of the most passionate peroration—­adhering in numberless instances to precisely the same specific formula of artifice.  His diction is often inflated into fustian, and he indulges in exaggeration till it sometimes, unconsciously no doubt, amounts to falsehood.  It is a common fault of those who strive at producing oratorical effects, to oscillate between commonplace and extravagance; and while studying Mr. Macaulay, one feels as if vibrating between facts that every one knows and consequences which nobody can believe.  We are satisfied that whoever will take, as we have been obliged to do, the pains of sifting what Mr. Macaulay has produced from his own mind with what he has borrowed from others, will be entirely of our opinion.  In truth, when, after reading a page or two of this book, we have occasion to turn to the same transaction in Burnet, Dalrymple, or Hume, we feel as if we were exchanging the glittering agility of a rope-dancer for gentlemen in the attire and attitude of society.  And we must say that there is not one of those writers that does not give a clearer and more trustworthy account of all that is really historical in the period than can be collected from Mr. Macaulay’s more decorated pages.  We invite our readers to try Mr. Macaulay’s merits as an historian by the test of comparison with his predecessors.

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Every great painter is supposed to make a larger use of one particular colour.  What a monstrous bladderful of infamy Mr. Macaulay must have squeezed on his palette when he took to portrait-painting!  We have no concern, except as friends to historical justice, for the characters of any of the parties thus stigmatized, nor have we room or time to discuss these, or the hundred other somewhat similar cases which the volumes present; but we have looked at the authorities cited by Mr. Macaulay, and we do not hesitate to say that, “as is his wont,” he has, with the exception of Jeffries, outrageously exaggerated them.