Pattison have given us vignettes; Cotter Morison has adorned the Men of Letters series with a delightful and sympathetic sketch; and John Morley and Leslie Stephen have weighed his work in the balance with judicial acumen and temperate firmness.  There is but one voice in all this company.  It was a fine, generous, honourable, and sterling nature.  His books deserve their vast popularity and may long continue to maintain it.  But Macaulay must not be judged amongst philosophers—­nor even amongst the real masters of the English language.  And, unless duly corrected, he may lead historical students astray and his imitators into an obtrusive mannerism.

Let us take a famous passage from one of his most famous essays, written in the zenith of his powers after his return from India, at the age of forty—­an essay on a grand subject which never ceased to fascinate his imagination, composed with all his amazing resources of memory and his dazzling mastery of colour.  It is the third paragraph of his well-known review of Von Ranke’s History of the Popes.  The passage is familiar to all readers, and some of its phrases are household words.  It is rather long as well as trite; but it contains in a single page such a profusion of historical suggestion; it is so vigorous, so characteristic of Macaulay in all his undoubted resources as in all his mannerism and limitations; it is so essentially true, and yet so thoroughly obvious; it is so grand in form, and yet so meagre in philosophic logic, that it may be worth while to analyse it in detail; and for that purpose it must be set forth, even though it convey to most readers little more than a sonorous truism.

There is not, and there never was on this earth, a work of human policy so well deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church.  The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation.  No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the times when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre.  The proudest royal houses are but of yesterday when compared with the line of the Supreme Pontiffs.  That line we trace back in unbroken series, from the Pope who crowned Napoleon in the nineteenth century to the Pope who crowned Pepin in the eighth; and far beyond Pepin the august dynasty extends, till it is lost in the twilight of fable.  The republic of Venice came next in antiquity.  But the republic of Venice was modern when compared with the Papacy; and the republic of Venice is gone, and the Papacy remains.  The Papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigour.  The Catholic Church is still sending forth, to the farthest ends of the world, missionaries as zealous as those who landed in Kent with Augustin, and still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila.  The number of her