Neither Cicero, Milton, Swift, nor Junius ever dealt in more furious words than Macaulay, who had not the excuse of controversy or passion.  Frederick William of Prussia was “the most execrable of fiends, a cross between Moloch and Puck”; “his palace was hell”; compared with the Prince, afterwards Frederick the Great, “Oliver Twist in the workhouse, and Smike at Dotheboys Hall were petted children.”  It would be difficult for Mark Twain to beat that.  “The follies and vices of King John were the salvation of England.”  Cranmer was peculiarly fitted to organise the Church of England by being “unscrupulous, indifferent, a coward, and a time-server.”  James I. was given to “stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears,” alternating between the buffoon and the pedagogue.  James II. “amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek”; he was “a libertine, singularly slow and narrow in understanding, obstinate, harsh, and unforgiving.”  The country gentleman of that age talked like “the most ignorant clown”; his wife and daughter were in taste “below a stillroom maid of the present day.”  The chaplain was a mere servant, and was expected to marry a servant girl whose character had been blown upon.

But it ought to be remembered that all of these descriptions are substantially true.  Macaulay’s pictures of the Stuarts, of Cromwell, of the Restoration and its courtiers, of Milton, of William III., are all faithful and just; Boswell was often absurd; Southey was shallow; Montgomery was an impostor; Frederick William did treat his son brutally; the country squire and the parson two centuries ago were much rougher people than they are to-day.  And if Macaulay had simply told us this in measured language of this kind, he would have failed in beating his lesson into the mind.  Not only was “a little of fictitious narrative judiciously employed,” but not a little of picturesque exaggeration and redundant superlatives.  Carlyle is an even worse offender in this line.  Did he not call Macaulay himself “squat, low-browed, commonplace”—­“a poor creature, with his dictionary literature and his saloon arrogance”—­“no vision in him”—­“will neither see nor do any great thing"?[1] Ruskin, Freeman, Froude, and others have been tempted to deal in gross superlatives.  But with all these it has been under the stimulus of violent indignation.  With Macaulay the superlatives pour out as his native vernacular without heat or wrath, as a mere rhetorician’s trick, as the favourite tones of a great colourist.  And though the trick, like all literary tricks, grows upon the artist, and becomes singularly offensive to the man of taste, it must always be remembered that, with Macaulay, the praise or blame is usually just and true; he is very rarely grossly unfair and wrong, as Carlyle so often is; and if Macaulay resorts too often to the superlative degree, he is usually entitled to use the comparative degree of the same adjective.