We now arrive at what we have heard called the celebrated third chapter —­celebrated it deserves to be, and we hope our humble observations may add something to its celebrity.  There is no feature of Mr. Macaulay’s book on which, we believe, he more prides himself, and which has been in truth more popular with his readers, than the descriptions which he introduces of the residences, habits, and manners of our ancestors.  They are, provided you do not look below the surface, as entertaining as Pepys or Pennant, or any of the many scrap-book histories which have been recently fabricated from those old materials; but when we come to examine them, we find that in these cases, as everywhere else, Mr. Macaulay’s propensity to caricature and exaggerate leads him not merely to disfigure circumstances, but totally to forget the principle on which such episodes are admissible into regular history—­namely, the illustration of the story.  They should be, as it were, woven into the narrative, and not, as Mr. Macaulay generally treats them, stitched on like patches.  This latter observation does not of course apply to the collecting a body of miscellaneous facts into a separate chapter, as Hume and others have done; but Mr. Macaulay’s chapter, besides, as we shall show, the prevailing inaccuracy of its details, has one general and essential defect specially its own.

The moment Mr. Macaulay has selected for suspending his narrative to take a view of the surface and society of England is the death of Charles II.  Now we think no worse point of time could have been chosen for tracing the obscure but very certain connection between political events and the manners of a people.  The restoration, for instance, was an era in manners as well as in politics—­so was in a fainter degree the Revolution—­either, or both, of those periods would have afforded a natural position for contemplating a going and a coming order of things; but we believe that there are no two periods in our annals which were so identical in morals and politics—­so undistinguishable, in short, in any national view—­as the latter years of Charles and the earlier years of James.  Here then is an objection in limine to this famous chapter—­and not in limine only, but in substance; for in fact the period he has chosen would not have furnished out the chapter, four-fifths of which belong to a date later than that which he professes to treat of.  In short, the chapter is like an old curiosity-shop, into which—­no matter whether it happens to stand in Charles Street, William Street, or George Street—­the knick-knacks of a couple of centuries are promiscuously jumbled.  What does it signify, in a history of the reign of Charles II, that a writer, “sixty years after the Revolution” (i. 347), says that in the lodging-houses at Bath “the hearth-slabs” were “freestone, not marble”—­that “the best apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff, and furnished with rush-bottomed chairs"?—­nay, that he should have the personal good taste to lament that in those Boeotian days “not a wainscot was painted” (348); and yet this twaddle of the reign of George II, patched into the times of Charles II, is the appropriate occasion which he takes to panegyrise this new mode of elucidating history?—...