Baboo in Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine and a mannerist”; “how ballads which were the delight of every child were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a prize in a public school”; “how the most famous of all modern reviewers scarcely gave us one example of delicate appreciation or subtle analysis”; how it comes about “that the most elaborate of modern histories does not contain an idea above the commonplaces of a crammer’s textbook”—­and so forth, in the true Black-and-White style which is so clear and so familiar.  But let us beware of applying to Macaulay himself that tone of exaggeration and laborious antithesis which he so often applied to others.  Boswell, he says, was immortal, “because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb.”  It would be a feeble parody to retort that Macaulay became a great literary power “because he had no philosophy, little subtlety, and a heavy hand.”  For my part, I am slow to believe that the judgment of the whole English-speaking race, a judgment maintained over more than half a century, can be altogether wrong; and the writer who has given such delight, has influenced so many writers, and has taught so much to so many persons, can hardly have been a shallow mannerist, or an ungovernable partisan.  No one denies that Macaulay had a prodigious knowledge of books; that in literary fecundity and in varied improvisation he has rarely been surpassed; that his good sense is unfailing, his spirit manly, just, and generous; and lastly, that his command over language had unequalled qualities of precision, energy, and brilliance.  These are all very great and sterling qualities.  And it is right to acknowledge them with no unstinted honour—­even whilst we are fully conscious of the profound shortcomings and limitations that accompanied but did not destroy them.

In a previous paper we discussed the permanent contribution to English literature of Thomas Carlyle; and it is curious to note how complete a contrast these two famous writers present.  Carlyle was a simple, self-taught, recluse man of letters:  Macaulay was legislator, cabinet minister, orator, politician, peer—­a pet of society, a famous talker, and member of numerous academies.  Carlyle was poor, despondent, morbid, and cynical:  Macaulay was rich, optimist, overflowing with health, high spirits, and good nature.  The one hardly ever knew what the world called success:  the other hardly ever knew failure.  Carlyle had in him the elements that make the poet, the prophet, the apostle, the social philosopher.  In Macaulay these were singularly wanting; he was the man of affairs, the busy politician, the rhetorician, the eulogist of society as it is, the believer in material progress, in the ultimate triumph of all that is practical and commonplace, and in the final discomfiture of all that is visionary and Utopian.  The Teufelsdroeckhian dialect is obscure even to its select students: