of an original or truly philosophic intellect, like Coleridge’s or De Quincey’s.  He always had at hand explanations of events or of characters which were admirably easy and simple—­too simple, indeed, for the complicated phenomena which they professed to explain.  His style was clear, animated, showy, and even its faults were of an exciting kind.  It was his habit to give piquancy to his writing by putting things concretely.  Thus, instead of saying, in general terms—­as Hume or Gibbon might have done—­that the Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200, he says:  “The great-grandsons of those who had fought under William and the great grandsons of those who had fought under Harold began to draw near to each other.”  Macaulay was a great scene painter, who neglected delicate truths of detail for exaggerated distemper effects.  He used the rhetorical machinery of climax and hyperbole for all that it was worth, and he “made points”—­as in his essay on Bacon—­by creating antithesis.  In his History of England he inaugurated the picturesque method of historical writing.  The book was as fascinating as any novel.  Macaulay, like Scott, had the historic imagination, though his method of turning history into romance was very different from Scott’s.  Among his essays the best are those which, like the ones on Lord Clive, Warren Hastings, and Frederick the Great, deal with historical subjects; or those which deal with literary subjects under their public historic relations, such as the essays on Addison, Bunyan, and The Comic Dramatists of the Restoration.  “I have never written a page of criticism on poetry, or the fine arts,” wrote Macaulay, “which I would not burn if I had the power.”  Nevertheless his own Lays of Ancient Rome, 1842, are good, stirring verse of the emphatic and declamatory kind, though their quality may be rather rhetorical than poetic.

Our critical time has not forborne to criticize itself, and perhaps the writer who impressed himself most strongly upon his generation was the one who railed most desperately against the “spirit of the age.”  Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was occupied between 1822 and 1830 chiefly in imparting to the British public a knowledge of German literature.  He published, among other things, a Life of Schiller, a translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, and two volumes of translations from the German romancers—­Tieck, Hoffmann, Richter, and Fouque—­and contributed to the Edinburgh and Foreign Review articles on Goethe, Werner, Novalis, Richter, German playwrights, the Nibelungen Lied, etc.  His own diction became more and more tinctured with Germanisms.  There was something Gothic in his taste, which was attracted by the lawless, the grotesque, and the whimsical in the writings of Jean Paul Richter.  His favorite among English humorists was Sterne, who has a share of these same qualities.  He spoke disparagingly