This is vigorous invective, in the style of Cicero against Catiline, or Junius attacking a duke; it is brilliant rhetoric and scathing satire.  At bottom it has substantial truth, if the attention is fixed on Whitehall and the scandalous chronicle of its frequenters.  It differs also from much in Macaulay’s invectives in being the genuine hot-headed passion of an ardent reformer only twenty-five years old.  It is substantially true as a picture of the Court at the Restoration:  but in form how extravagant, even of that!  Charles II. is Belial; James is Moloch; and Charles is propitiated by the blood of Englishmen!—­Charles, easy, courteous, good-natured, profligate Charles.  And all this of the age of the Paradise Lost and the Morning Hymn, of Jeremy Taylor, Izaak Walton, Locke, Newton, and Wren!  Watch Macaulay banging on his antithetic drum—­“servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love”—­“dwarfish talents and gigantic vices”—­“ability enough to deceive”—­“religion enough to persecute.”  Every phrase is a superlative; every word has its contrast; every sentence has its climax.  And withal let us admit that it is tremendously powerful, that no one who ever read it can forget it, and few even who have read it fail to be tinged with its fury and contempt.  And, though a tissue of superlatives, it bears a solid truth, and has turned to just thoughts many a young spirit prone to be fascinated by Charles’s good-nature, and impressed with the halo of the divine consecration of kings.

But the savage sarcasms which are tolerable in a passionate young reformer smarting under the follies of George IV., are a serious defect in a grave historian, when used indiscriminately of men and women in every age and under every condition.  In his Machiavelli, Macaulay hints that the best histories are perhaps “those in which a little of fictitious narrative is judiciously employed.”  “Much,” he says, “is gained in effect.”  It is to be feared that this youthful indiscretion was never wholly purged out of him.  Boswell, we know, was “a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb”—­and therefore immortal.  He was one of “the smallest men that ever lived,” of “the meanest and feeblest intellect,” “servile,” “shallow,” “a bigot and a sot,” and so forth—­and yet, “a great writer, because he was a great fool.”  We all know what is meant; and there is a substratum of truth in this; but it is tearing a paradox to tatters.  How differently has Carlyle dealt with poor dear Bozzy!  Croker’s Boswell’s Johnson “is as bad as bad can be,” full of “monstrous blunders”—­(he had put 1761 for 1766) “gross mistakes”—­“for which a schoolboy would be flogged.”  Southey is “utterly destitute of the power of discerning truth from falsehood.”  He prints a joke which “is enough to make us ashamed of our species.”  Robert Montgomery pours out “a roaring cataract of nonsense.”  One of his tropes is “the worst similitude in the world.”  And yet Macaulay can rebuke Johnson for “big words wasted on little things”!