It is a curious and, to persons of our opinions, not unsatisfactory circumstance, that, though Mr. Macaulay almost invariably applies the term Tory in an opprobrious or contemptuous sense, yet so great is the power of truth in surmounting the fantastical forms and colours laid over it by this brilliant badigeonneur, that on the whole no one, we believe, can rise from the work without a conviction that the Tories (whatever may be said of their prejudices) were the honestest and most conscientious of the whole dramatis personae; and it is this fact that in several instances and circumstances imprints, as it were by force, upon Mr. Macaulay’s pages an air of impartiality and candour very discordant from their general spirit.

We are now arrived at the fourth chapter—­really the first, strictly speaking, of Mr. Macaulay’s history—­the accession of James II, where also Sir James Mackintosh’s history commences.  And here we have to open to our readers the most extraordinary instance of parallelism between two writers, unacknowledged by the later one, which we have ever seen.  Sir James Mackintosh left behind him a history of the Revolution, which was published in 1834, three years after his death, in quarto:  it comes down to the Orange invasion, and, though it apparently had not received the author’s last corrections, and was clumsily edited, and tagged with a continuation by a less able hand, the work is altogether (bating not a little ultra-Whiggery) very creditable to Mackintosh’s diligence, taste, and power of writing; it is indeed, we think, his best and most important work, and that by which he will be most favourably known to posterity.  From that work Mr. Macaulay has borrowed largely—­prodigally—­ helped himself with both hands—­not merely without acknowledging his obligation, but without so much as alluding to the existence of any such work.  Nay—­though this we are sure was never designed—­he inserts a note full of kindness and respect to Sir James Mackintosh, which would naturally lead an uninformed reader to conclude that Sir James Mackintosh, though he had meditated such a work, had never even begun writing it.  On the 391st page of Mr. Macaulay’s first volume, at the mention of the old news-letters which preceded our modern newspapers, Mr. Macaulay says, that “they form a valuable part of the literary treasures collected by the late Sir James Mackintosh”; and to this he adds the following foot-note: 

I take this opportunity of expressing my warm gratitude to the family of my dear and honoured friend Sir James Mackintosh, for confiding to me the materials collected by him at a time when he meditated a work similar to that which I have undertaken. I have never seen, and I do not believe that there anywhere exists, within the same compass, so noble a collection of extracts from public and private archives.  The judgment with which Sir James, in great masses of the rudest ore of history, selected