If I had to choose the one book out of all that line from which I have had most pleasure and most profit, I should point to yonder stained copy of Macaulay’s “Essays.”  It seems entwined into my whole life as I look backwards.  It was my comrade in my student days, it has been with me on the sweltering Gold Coast, and it formed part of my humble kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic.  Honest Scotch harpooners have addled their brains over it, and you may still see the grease stains where the second engineer grappled with Frederick the Great.  Tattered and dirty and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-bound volume could ever take its place for me.

What a noble gateway this book forms through which one may approach the study either of letters or of history!  Milton, Machiavelli, Hallam, Southey, Bunyan, Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive, Hastings, Chatham—­what nuclei for thought!  With a good grip of each how pleasant and easy to fill in all that lies between!  The short, vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion, the exact detail, they all throw a glamour round the subject and should make the least studious of readers desire to go further.  If Macaulay’s hand cannot lead a man upon those pleasant paths, then, indeed, he may give up all hope of ever finding them.

When I was a senior schoolboy this book—­not this very volume, for it had an even more tattered predecessor—­opened up a new world to me.  History had been a lesson and abhorrent.  Suddenly the task and the drudgery became an incursion into an enchanted land, a land of colour and beauty, with a kind, wise guide to point the path.  In that great style of his I loved even the faults—­indeed, now that I come to think of it, it was the faults which I loved best.  No sentence could be too stiff with rich embroidery, and no antithesis too flowery.  It pleased me to read that “a universal shout of laughter from the Tagus to the Vistula informed the Pope that the days of the crusades were past,” and I was delighted to learn that “Lady Jerningham kept a vase in which people placed foolish verses, and Mr. Dash wrote verses which were fit to be placed in Lady Jerningham’s vase.”  Those were the kind of sentences which used to fill me with a vague but enduring pleasure, like chords which linger in the musician’s ear.  A man likes a plainer literary diet as he grows older, but still as I glance over the Essays I am filled with admiration and wonder at the alternate power of handling a great subject, and of adorning it by delightful detail—­just a bold sweep of the brush, and then the most delicate stippling.  As he leads you down the path, he for ever indicates the alluring side-tracks which branch away from it.  An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned, literary and historical education night be effected by working through every book which is alluded to in the Essays.  I should be curious, however, to know the exact age of the youth when he came to the end of his studies.