He loves, too, to mark the sympathies of nature with event—­the rain falling upon the black-hung scaffold, or the laughter of gay sunshine mingling with the shouts of a great victory.  And here he differs, as indeed he does in almost every other respect, with Macaulay.  The Englishman thinks little of nature; as he himself says of Dante, ’He leaves to others the earth, the ocean, and the sky; his business is with man.’  Indeed, the absence of a true and universal sympathy is the one vast defect of Macaulay.  No position is so high that it may not be overshadowed by the giant form of his violent partisanship, no character so small that it may not be raised to the semblance of greatness by the mere force of his political preferences.  His scholarship was splendid, his genius commanding, the beauty of his style unsurpassed; but he perverted his knowledge to subserve certain public ends, and wielded his magnificent powers too often in the defence of an undeserving cause.  Fascinated by his dazzling rhetoric, borne along by its rapid and tumultuous current to the most brilliant conclusions, we forget the narrowness of the stream.  His scope of vision was indeed great, but it had its limits, and these were not imposed by time or necessity, but by the unyielding will of his own prejudices.  As his virtues were massive, so were his errors grievous.  He ventured to grasp the great speculative themes of existence with a mind that was neither profound nor suggestive.  He swam with all the wondrous ease of an athlete through the billows and across the currents and counter-currents of elegant literature, of politics, of theology, yet possessed not the diver’s power to win their sunken but priceless jewels.  Rich he was with the accumulated intellectual spoil of centuries, but the power of exhaustive generalization was denied him.  His perceptions were vigorous and acute, and none knew more perfectly to exhaust a subject, if its requirements were of the actual and tangible rather than of the ideal and spiritual order.  He was a thorough logician, but a superficial philosopher; a master of style, but oblivious of those great religious truths of which the events of his great history were but the natural outgrowth and product.  But nothing can exceed the power of his rhetoric, that is uncontrolled by any laws, yet offends none, unless it be the arbitrariness of his dogmatism, that concedes no favors and asks no gifts.

Less vehement, less ornate, possibly less learned than Macaulay, with frequent though trifling inequalities of style, Motley goes far beyond him in real practical insight into the heart of affairs.  There is a unity in all visible life, whether of nation, of individual, of church, or of inarticulate nature, that escaped Macaulay and impresses Motley.  The one would govern the universe with the arbitrary rules of a political clique; the other applies to all the infallible test of a universal philosophy.  Both writers are thoroughly incorporated with their subject; but where Macaulay was the captive of a mighty and often just prejudice, Motley is the exponent of a living principle.  Everywhere Macaulay was a Whig and an Englishman; everywhere Motley is a Republican and a cosmopolite.