The famous passage about Westminster Hall, written in 1841, may be compared with the equally known passage on the Chapel in the Tower which occurs in the fifth chapter of the History, written in 1848.  It begins as all lovers of English remember—­“In truth there is no sadder spot on the earth than this little cemetery.”  The passage continues with “there” and “thither” repeated eight times; it bristles with contrasts, graces and horrors, antithesis, climax, and sonorous heraldries.  “Such was the dust with which the dust of Monmouth mingled.”  It is a fine paragraph, which has impressed and delighted millions.  But it is, after all, rather facile moralising; its rhetorical artifice has been imitated with success in many a prize essay and not a few tall-talking journals.  How much more pathos is there in a stanza from Gray’s Elegy, or a sentence from Carlyle’s Bastille, or Burke’s French Revolution!

The habit of false emphasis and the love of superlatives is a far worse defect, and no one has attempted to clear Macaulay of the charge.  It runs through every page he wrote, from his essay on Milton, with which he astonished the town at the age of twenty-five, down to the close of his History wherein we read that James II. valued Lord Perth as “author of the last improvements on the thumb-screw.”  Indeed no more glaring example of Macaulay’s megalomania or taste for exaggeration can be found than the famous piece in the Milton on the Restoration of Charles II.

Then came those days, never to be recalled without a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave.  The king cringed to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her degrading insults, and her more degrading gold.  The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy of the State.  The government had just ability enough to deceive and just religion enough to persecute.  The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean.  In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch; and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest children.  Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the nations.