were written, the one in 1859, the other in 1860, the reader must be kind enough to make allowance for expressions which subsequent circumstances have made, not indeed less true, but less pointed; and less applicable, perhaps, to those whom they concern than they were five years ago.

T. E. K.

ESSAYS

ON

HISTORY AND POLITICS.

LORD MACAULAY, FEBRUARY, 1860.

"STANDING too near to a man's grave, all writers who have trained themselves to habits of liberal sympathy and of generous forbearance-all, in short, but the very juvenile and thoughtless, or the very malignant-put a seal upon their lips." We trust our readers will have no just cause for complaining that we have neglected the charitable caution which these words convey. In all that we now propose to say of Lord Macaulay we shall strive to keep in mind the wholesome fable of the dead lion. Be his real dimensions what they may, he seems very large to us; and we shall be guilty of no remark incompatible with the assumption that he is one of the giants of English literature.

* De Quincey.

B

Another generation, indeed, will judge him certainly as an historian, and probably as a writer, with more correctness than our own. But the necessity for immediate criticism arises from the fact that all the mischief to which certain universally-admitted characteristics of his writings may give birth is to be apprehended at once; and that by the time critics have become impartial, they may likewise have become impotent. This is the case, to some extent, in every department of literature, and is the legitimate excuse of the many hasty and unfair opinions which are expressed by literary censors. But errors of history are still less likely to be exploded than errors of literature, as history itself is more frequently taken upon trust. Probably every man who has any well-defined opinions upon poetry has read our standard poets with some critical attention. But of those who at a moment's notice, are ready with a precise definition of the most famous characters, and a prompt decision on the most critical transactions, in the history of their country, how many have, read with care even one historian? Hence a more fertile source of falsehood in the nature of the subject itself, while it is at the same time less amenable to the influence of that extended literary culture which is calculated to extinguish so many other kinds of error. Nay, so far is this progressive refinement from exercising any corrective power upon historical fallacies, that it may be questioned if it have not even the opposite effect. That very appreciation of literary and artistic excellence which delivers us from one set of idols, may create another. The love of form may be cultivated to an unhealthy extent engendering a comparative indifference to the matter which it clothes. And