of speech which made him unreadable to all except English-speaking readers, and intelligible only to a select and cultivated body even amongst them.  He wrote in what, for practical purposes, is a local, or rather personal, dialect.  And thus he deprived himself of that world-wide and European influence which belongs to such men as Hume, Gibbon, Scott, Byron—­even to Macaulay, Tennyson, Dickens, Ruskin, and Spencer.  But his name will stand beside theirs in the history of British thought in the nineteenth century; and a devoted band of chosen readers, wherever the Anglo-Saxon tongue is heard, will for generations to come continue to drink inspiration from the two or three masterpieces of the Annandale peasant-poet.

III

LORD MACAULAY

Macaulay, who counted his years of life by those of this century, may fairly claim to have had the greatest body of readers, and to be the most admired prose-writer of the Victorian Age.  It is now some seventy years since his first brilliant essay on “Milton” took the world by storm.  It is half a century since that fascinating series of Essays was closed, and little short of that time since his famous History appeared.  The editions of it in England and in America are counted by thousands; it has six translations into German, and translations into ten other European languages.  It made him rich, famous, and a peer.  Has it given him a foremost place in English literature?

Here is a case where the judgment of the public and the judgment of experts is in striking contrast.  The readers both of the Old and of the New World continue to give the most practical evidence that they love his books.  Macaulay is a rare example of a writer all of whose works are almost equally popular, and believed by many to be equally good. Essays, Lays, History, Lives—­all are read by millions:  as critic, poet, historian, biographer, Macaulay has achieved world-wide renown.  And yet some of our best critics deny him either fine taste, or subtlety, or delicate discrimination, catholic sympathies, or serene judgment.  They say he is always more declaimer than thinker—­more advocate than judge.  The poets deny that the Lays are poetry at all.  The modern school of scientific historians declare that the History is a splendid failure, and it proves how rotten was the theory on which it is constructed.  The purists in style shake their heads over his everlasting antitheses, the mannerism of violent phrases and the perpetual abuse of paradox.  His most indulgent friends admit the force of these defects, which they usually speak of as his “limitations” or his “methods.”  Here, indeed, is an opportunity for one of those long-drawn antitheses of which Macaulay was so great a master.  How he would himself have revelled in the paradox—­“that books which were household words with every cow-boy in Nevada, and every