these are the stock-in-trade of the rhetorician, not of the master of written prose.  Now, Macaulay was a rhetorician, a consummate rhetorician, who wrote powerful invectives or panegyrics in massive rhetoric which differed from speeches mainly in their very close fibre, in their chiselled phrasing, and above all in their dazzling profusion of literary illustration.  If it was oratory, it was the oratory of a speaker of enormous reading, inexhaustible memory, and consummate skill with words.

There is nothing at all exceptional about this passage which has been chosen for analysis.  It is a fair and typical piece of Macaulay’s best style.  Indeed his method is so uniform and so mechanical that any page of his writing exhibits the same force and the same defects as any other.  Take one of the most famous of his scenes, the trial of Warren Hastings, toward the end of that elaborate essay, written in 1841.  Every one knows the gorgeous and sonorous description of Westminster Hall, beginning—­“The place was worthy of such a trial.”  In the next sentence the word “hall” recurs five times, and the relative “which” occurs three times, and is not related to the same noun.  Ten sentences in succession open with the pronoun “there.”  It is a perfect galaxy of varied colour, pomp, and illustration; but the effect is somewhat artificial, and the whole scene smells of the court upholsterer.  The “just sentence of Bacon” pairs off with “the just absolution of Somers”; the “greatest painter” sits beside the “greatest scholar of the age”; ladies have “lips more persuasive than those of Fox”; there, too, is “the beautiful mother of a beautiful race.”  And in the midst of these long-drawn superlatives and glittering contrasts come in short martial phrases, as brief and sharp as a drill-sergeant’s word of command.  “Neither military nor civil pomp was wanting”—­“The avenues were lined with grenadiers”—­“The streets were kept clear by cavalry.”  No man can forget these short, hard decisive sentences.

The artificial structure of his paragraphs grew upon Macaulay with age.  His History of England opens with a paragraph of four sentences.  Each of these begins with “I purpose,” “I shall”; and the last sentence of the four has ten clauses each beginning with “how.”  The next paragraph has four successive sentences beginning “It will be seen”—­and the last sentence has again three clauses each beginning with “how.”  The fourth paragraph contains the word “I” four times in as many lines.  This method of composition has its own merits.  The repetition of words and phrases helps the perception and prevents the possibility of misunderstanding.  Where effects are simply enumerated, the monotony of form is logically correct.  Every successive sentence heralded by a repeated “how,” or “there,” or “I,” adjusts itself into its proper line without an effort of thought on the reader’s part.  It is not graceful; it is pompous, and distinctly rhetorical.  But it is eminently clear, emphatic, orderly, and easy to follow or to remember.  Hence it is unpleasing to the finely-attuned ear, and is counted somewhat vulgar by the trained lover of style, whilst it is immensely popular with those who read but little, and is able to give them as much pleasure as it gives instruction.