The style, with all its defects, has had a solid success and has done great things.  By clothing his historical judgments and his critical reflections in these cutting and sonorous periods, he has forced them on the attention of a vast body of readers wherever English is read at all, and on millions who have neither time nor attainments for any regular studies of their own.  How many men has Macaulay succeeded in reaching, to whom all other history and criticism is a closed book, or a book in an unknown tongue!  If he were a sciolist or a wrong-headed fanatic, this would be a serious evil.  But, as he is substantially right in his judgments, brimful of saving common-sense and generous feeling, and profoundly well read in his own periods and his favourite literature, Macaulay has conferred most memorable services on the readers of English throughout the world.  He stands between philosophic historians and the public very much as journals and periodicals stand between the masses and great libraries.  Macaulay is a glorified journalist and reviewer, who brings the matured results of scholars to the man in the street in a form that he can remember and enjoy, when he could not make use of a merely learned book.  He performs the office of the ballad-maker or story-teller in an age before books were known or were common.  And it is largely due to his influence that the best journals and periodicals of our day are written in a style so clear, so direct, so resonant.  We need not imitate his mannerism; we may all learn to be outspoken, lucid, and brisk.

It is the very perfection of his qualities in rousing the interest of the great public which has drawn down on Macaulay the grave rebukes of so many fine judges of the higher historical literature.  Cotter Morison, Mark Pattison, Leslie Stephen, and John Morley all agree that his style has none of the subtler charms of the noblest prose, that his conception of history is radically unsound, that, in fact, it broke down by its own unwieldy proportions.  Mr. Morison has very justly remarked that if the History of England had ever been completed on the same scale for the whole of the period as originally designed, it would have run to fifty volumes, and would have occupied in composition one hundred and fifty years.  As it is, the eight duodecimo volumes give us the events of sixteen years, from 1685 to 1701; so that the history of England from Alfred would require five hundred similar volumes.  Now, Gibbon’s eight octavo volumes give us the history of the world for thirteen centuries; that is to say, Gibbon has recounted the history of a century in nearly the same space that Macaulay records the history of a year.  There cannot be a doubt that Gibbon’s Decline and Fall is immeasurably superior to Macaulay’s fragment, in thought, in imagination, in form, in all the qualities of permanent history; it stands on a far higher plane; it will long outlast and overshadow it.  Compared with this, Macaulay’s delightful and brilliant pictures are mere glorified journalism.