what was valuable and rejected what was worthless, can be fully appreciated only by one who has toiled after him in the same mine.—­i. 391.

Could any one imagine from this that Mackintosh had not only meditated a work, but actually written, and that his friends had published, a large closely printed quarto volume, on the same subject, from the same materials, and sometimes in the very same words as Mr. Macaulay’s?

The coincidence—­the identity, we might almost say—­of the two works is so great, that, while we have been comparing them, we have often been hardly able to distinguish which was which.  We rest little on the similiarity of facts, for the facts were ready made for both; and Mr. Macaulay tells us that he worked from Mackintosh’s materials; there would, therefore, even if he had never seen Mackintosh’s work, be a community of topics and authorities; but, seeing as we do in every page that he was writing with Mackintosh’s volume before his eyes, we cannot account for his utter silence about it....

Having thus shown Mr. Macaulay’s mode of dealing with what forms the chief and most characteristic feature of his book—­its anecdotical gossip—­we shall now endeavour to exhibit the deceptive style in which he treats the larger historical facts:  in truth the style is the same—­a general and unhesitating sacrifice of accuracy and reality to picturesque effect and party prejudices.  He treats historical personages as the painter does his layman—­a supple figure which he models into what he thinks the most striking attitude, and dresses up with the gaudiest colours and most fantastical draperies.

It is very difficult to condense into any manageable space the proofs of a general system of accumulating and aggravating all that was ever, whether truly or falsely, reproached to the Tories, and alleviating towards the Whigs the charges which he cannot venture to deny or even to question.  The mode in which this is managed so as to keep up some show of impartiality is very dexterous.  The reproach, well or ill founded, which he thinks most likely to damage the character of any one he dislikes, is repeated over and over again in hope that the iteration will at last be taken for proof, such as the perfidy of Charles I, the profligacy and selfishness of Charles II, the cold and cruel stupidity of James, the baseness of Churchill, the indecent violence of Rochester, the contemptible subserviency of his brother, Clarendon, and so on through a whole dictionary of abuse on every one whom he takes or mistakes for a Tory, and on a few Whigs whom for some special reasons of his own he treats like Tories.  On the other hand, when he finds himself reluctantly forced to acknowledge even the greatest enormity of the Whigs—­corruption—­treason—­murder he finds much gentler terms for the facts; selects a scapegoat, some subaltern villain, or some one whom history has already gibbeted, “to bear upon him all their iniquities,” and that painful sacrifice once made, he avoids with tender care a recurrence to so disagreeable a subject....