books, and meekly condensing their weak contents for the edification of lazy heads; but when they deigned to read and analyze the work they judged, they sought rather for opportunities to display their own wit and knowledge than to flatter the vanity of the author, or to increase his readers. Many of their most splendid articles were essays rather than reviews. The writer, whose work afforded the name of the subject, was summarily disposed of in a quiet sneer, a terse sarcasm, or a faint panegyric, and the remainder of the article hardly recognized his existence. It is to these purely original contributions, written by men of the first order of talent, that the Review owes most of its reputation; and their frequent appearance has exalted it above all the other periodicals of the age, and has atoned for its frequent injustice to authors, its numerous inconsistencies, and its many supposed heresies in taste, philosophy and religion.

Among the many noted critics and essayists, who have made the great quarterly their medium of communication with the public, there is none who has obtained a wider celebrity, or justified his popularity by compositions of more intrinsic excellence, than Thomas Babington Macaulay. He began to contribute to the Review when it appeared to be passing from the green into the yellow leaf of public favor, and his articles commanded immediate attention, and breathed into it new life and brilliancy. The estimation in which he was early held is evinced by the remark of Mackintosh, that he was master of every species of composition,- -a saying which obtained for both a clumsy sneer from Wilson in Blackwood's Magazine. From the year 1825 to the present period, Macaulay has continued his connection with the Review, and the reputation of his writings has increased with each new addition to them. There probably never was a series of articles communicated to a periodical, which can challenge comparison with those of Macaulay, for artistic merit. They are characterized by many of the qualities of heart and mind which stamp the productions of an Edinburgh reviewer; but in the combination of various excellences, they far excel the finest efforts of the class. As nimble and concise in wit as Sidney Smith; an eye quick to seize all those delicate refinements of language and happy turns of expression, which charm us in Jeffrey; displaying much of the imperious scorn, passionate strength and swelling diction of Brougham; as brilliant and as acute in critical dissection as Hazlitt, without the unsoundness of mind which disfigures the finest compositions of that remarkable man; at times evincing a critical judgment which would not disgrace the stern gravity of Hallam, and a range of thought and knowledge which remind us of Mackin

tosh,-Macaulay seems to be the abstract and epitome of the whole journal,-seems the utmost that an Edinburgh reviewer "can come to." He delights every one-high or low, intelligent or ignorant. His spice is of so keen a flavor, that it tickles the coarsest palate. He has the hesitating suffrages of men of taste, and the plaudits of the million. The man who has a common knowledge of the English language, and the scholar who has mastered its refinements, seem equally sensible to the charm of his diction. No matter how unpromising the subject on which he writes may appear to the common eye, in his hands it is made pleasing. Statistics, history, biography, political economy, all suffer a transformation into "something rich and strange." Prosaists are made to love poetry, tory politicians to sympathize with Hampden and Milton, and novel-readers to obtain some idea of Bacon and his philosophy. The wonderful clearness, point and vigor of his style, sends his thoughts right into every brain. Indeed, a person who is utterly insensible to the witchery of Macaulay's diction, must be either a Yahoo or a beatified intelligence.

Some of the causes of this wide and general popularity may be discerned in a very superficial survey of Macaulay's writings. The brilliancy which is diffused through them all, the felicity of their style, and the strong mental qualities which are displayed in their conception and composition, strike us at a glance. Every page is brightened with wit, ennobled by sentiment, freighted with knowledge, or decorated with imagery. Thought is conveyed with a directness and clearness which can hardly be surpassed. Knowledge, and important principles generalized from knowledge, are scattered with careless ease and prodigality, as if they would hardly be missed in the fulness of mind from which they proceed. History is made a picture, flushed with the most brilliant hues of the imagination, and illuminated with the constant flashes of a never-failing wit. Compression, arrangement, proportion-all the arts of which an accomplished rhetorician avails himself to give effect to his composition are used with a tact and taste which conceal from us the appearance of labor and reflection. The most intricate questions of criticism and philosophy, the characters and actions of distinguished men,-poetry, history, political economy, king-craft, metaphysics, are all discussed with the same unhesitating confidence and ability, and without the slightest admixture of the pedantry of scholarship. Minute researches into disputed points of history and biography, large speculations on the most important subjects of human thought, seem equally to be the element in which the mind of the author moves. In convicting Mr. Croker of igno

rance in unimportant dates, in giving a philosophical view of the progress of society, in analyzing with exquisite nicety the mental constitution of the greatest poets, in spreading before the mind a comprehensive view of systems in metaphysics, politics and religion, he appears equally at home. His eye is both microscopic and telescopic; conversant at once with the animalcula of society and letters, and the larger objects of human attention. Every felicity of expression which can add grace to his style, is studiously sought after, and happily introduced. Illustrations, drawn from nature, and from a vast mass of well-digested reading, are poured forth with a lavish hand, and always with effect. The attention of the reader is continually provoked by the pungent stimulants which are mixed in the composition of almost every sentence; and the most careless and listless person who ever slept over a treatise on philosophy, cannot fail to find matter, or manner, which rouses him from mental torpidity, and pleases him into pupilage.

If Macaulay thus obtains popularity in quarters where it is generally denied to thinkers, and monopolized by the last new novel, he is not the less calculated to win golden opinions from readers of judgment and reflection. Behind the external show and glittering vesture of his thoughts,-beneath all his pomp of diction, aptness of illustration, splendor of imagery and epigrammatic point and glare, a careful eye can easily discern the movement of a powerful and cultivated intellect, as it successively appears in the welltrained logician, the acute and discriminating critic, the comprehensive philosopher, the practical and far-sighted statesman, and the student of universal knowledge. Perhaps the extent of Macaulay's range over the field of literature and science, and the boldness of his generalizations, are the most striking qualities he displays. The amount of his knowledge surprises even book-worms, memorymongers, and other literary cormorants. comprises all literatures, and all departments of learning and literature. It touches Scarron on one side, and Plato on the other. He seems master of every subject of human interest, and of many more subjects which only he can make interesting. He can battle theologians with weapons drawn from antique armories unknown to themselves; sting pedants with his wit, and then overthrow them with a profusion of trivial and recondite learning; oppose statesmen on the practical and theoretical questions of political science; browbeat political economists on their own vantageground; be victorious in matters of pure reason in an argument with reasoning machines; follow historians, step by step, in their most minute researches, and adduce facts and principles which they have overlooked, though their life may have been spent in quest of

It

them; silence metaphysicians by a glib condensation of all theories of the mind, and convict them of ignorance out of Plato, Aristotle, Locke, or any other philosopher they may happen to deify; and perform the whole with a French lightness and ease of expression which never before was used to convey so much vigor, depth and reach of thought, and so large and heavy a load of information.His brilliancy and lightness of manner, at periods falling to flippancy and pertness, as well as rising to vivid and impassioned eloquence, is calculated to deceive many into the belief that he is shallow; but no conclusion could be more incorrect; though, from the time-honored connexion between learning and dulness, no conclusion is more natural. Macaulay's morbidly keen sense of the ludicrous prevents him from manifesting any of the pompous pedantry and foolish vanities of the lore-proud student, but rather sends him to the opposite extreme. His mind re-acts on all that passes into it. He possesses his knowledge, not his knowledge him. It does not oppress his intellect in the least, but is stored away in compact parcels, ready at any time for use. It is no weltering chaos of undigested learning, stumbling into expression in wildering and confused language, as is much which passes for great erudition; but it goes through the alembic of a strong understanding, it is subjected to the scrutiny of a discriminating and weighty judgment, unshackled by authority,-it is made to glow and glitter in the rays of a vivid imagination and a brilliant fancy. He tears away all the cumbrous phraseology which encases and obscures common truths, and which scares many good people into the belief that stale truisms are abstruse mysteries. He is not deluded by great names and "standard" books; his judgment is untrammelled by accredited opinions on taste, morals, government and religion; the heavy panoply of learning encumbers not the free play of his mind; he has none of the silly pride of intellect and erudition, but he seems rather to consider authors as men who are determined to make a fool of him if they can; he haughtily disputes their opinions and treats their unfounded pretensions with mocking scorn; and he delights to cram tomes of diluted facts into one short, sharp, antithetical sentence, and condense general principles into epigrams. Few scholars have ever lived, who have manifested so much independence and affluence of thought, in connexion with so rich and varied an amount of knowledge.

As a critic of poetry and general literature, Macaulay manifests considerable depth of feeling; a fine sense of the beautiful; a quick sensibility; an amazing acuteness in discerning the recondite as well as predominating qualities of an author's mind, and setting them forth in clear, direct and pointed ex

pression; and a comprehensive and penetrating judgment, unfettered by any rules unfounded in the nature of things. Intellectual and moral sympathy, the prominent quality of a good poetical critic, he possesses to as great a degree as could be expected, or perhaps tolerated, in an Edinburgh reviewer. He overrules or reverses, with the most philosophical_coolness, many of the decisions made by Jeffrey and other hanging judges among his predecessors; and awards justice to many whom they petulantly or basely condemned. For great authors, for the crowned kings of thought, for many poets who labor under the appellation of irregular geniuses, for statesmen of broad views and powerful energies, he can expend a large amount of sympathy, and in praise of their merits indulge in an almost unbroken strain of panegyric; but for small writers he has little sympathy, toleration or charity. The articles on Milton, Machiavelli, Bacon, Dryden, Byron, the incidental references to Dante, Wordsworth, Shelley, Alfieri, Burke, Coleridge, all display a discriminating love of intellectual excellence, and a liberal and catholic taste. In other essays, as those on Sir William Temple, Clive, Hastings, Hampden, Mirabeau, Frederick the Great, Macaulay shows an equal power of judging of men of action, and summing up impartially the merits and defects of their characters and lives. Before all that is great in intellect and conduct, he bends the knee in willing homage, and praises with unforced and vivid eloquence. The articles on Milton and Hampden are noble monuments to the genius and virtue of the first, and the virtue and talents of the last. Throughout both, we see a strong, hearty, earnest, sympathizing spirit, in unchecked action. The keenness of judgment, likewise, displayed in separating the bad from the good, in the intellectual and moral constitution of many of his favorites among men of action and speculation, and tracing their errors of taste and faults of conduct to their true outward or inward source,-is worthy of all admiration. The sharp analysis which stops only at the truth, is used with unsparing rigor, in cases where enthusiastic apology would, in a scholar, be merely an amiable weakness. What Macauley sees, is not "distorted and refracted through a false medium of passions and prejudices," but is discerned with clearness and in " dry light." He sacrifices the whole body of ancient philosophers at the shrine of Bacon; but he discriminates with unerring accuracy between Bacon the philosopher and Bacon the politician : "Bacon seeking truth, and Bacon seeking for the seals." He blushes for the "disingenuousness of the most devoted worshipper of speculative truth, and the servility of the boldest champion of intellectual free" and remembers that if Bacon was the

dom;

first "who treated legislation as a science, he was among the last Englishmen who used the rack; that he who first summoned philosophers to the great work of interpreting nature, was among the last Englishmen who sold justice." "The transparent splendor of Cicero's incomparable diction," does not blind Macaulay to the fact, that the great orator's whole life" was under the dominion of a girlish vanity and a craven fear." His respect for Frederick's military character extends not to his rhymes, but he treats them with as much disrespect as if they had proceeded from the merest hack that ever butchered language into bathos, or diluted it into sentimentality. This absence of idol-worship in Macaulay adds much to the value of his opinions and investigations, but at times it gives a kind of heartlessness to his manner which grates upon the sensibility. In proportion as his praise is eloquent and hearty, for what is noble and great in character, his scorn is severe for what is little and mean. In the dissection he makes of Bacon's moral character, and the cool unconcern with which he lays open to view his manifold frailties, we are often led to ask with Hamlet, "Has this fellow no feeling of his business?" considering the lives of men of lofty endowments, we are often better pleased with the charity that covers a multitude of sins, than the stern justice which parades them in the light, and holds them up to abhorrence.

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In

But if great men receive more justice than mercy from Macaulay, men of low intellectual stature fare worse. He here manifests a spirit akin to Faulconbridge and Hotspur. There is no critic who is less tolerant of mediocrity. For half-bred reasoners, for wellmeaning and bad-writing theologians, for undeveloped geniuses, for pompous pedantry, for respectable stupidity, for every variety of the tame, the frigid, and the low, he has an imperious and crushing contempt. There are many writers, also, who have a good reputation among what are termed men of taste, and whose works are, or should be on the shelves of every gentleman's library," whom he treats with a cool arrogance and dogmatism which shock the nerves not a little. His critical severity seems to actualize the ideal of critical damnation. is no show of mercy in him. He carries his austerity beyond the bounds of humanity. His harshness to the captive of his criticism is a transgression of the law against cruelty to animals. Among a squad of bad writers-if the simile be allowable-he seems to exclaim with the large-boned quadruped that danced among the chickens, "Let every one take care of himself!" He is both judge and executioner; condemns the prisoner,-puts on the black cap with a stinging sneer,-hangs, quarters and scatters his limbs to the four winds -without any appearance of pity or remorse.

There

He subjects the common-place, the stupid, the narrow-minded, to every variety of critical torture; he riddles them with epigrams, he racks them with analysis, he scorches them with sarcasm; he probes their most delicate and sensitive nerves with the glittering edge of his wit; he breathes upon them the hot breath of his scorn; he crushes and grinds them in the whirling mill of his logic; over the burning marl of his critical Pandemonium he makes them walk with unsandalled feet, and views their ludicrous agonies with mocking glee. All other reviewers are babes to him. A heretic in the grasp of a holy father of the Inquisition,-a pauper who has incurred the displeasure of the parish beadle, a butterfly in the hands of a man of science, all have reason to be thankful that destiny has saved them from the torment which awaits the dunce, who has fallen into the clutch of Macaulay.

If murdered books could burst their cerements, and revisit the earth to haunt their destroyers, the sleep of Thomas Babington Macaulay would be peopled with more phantoms than the slumbers of Richard the Third. A collection of the authors from the middle and lower classes of literature, which this Nimrod of criticism,-this death-angel, Azrael, of letters-has sent to their long account, would somewhat resemble the "circle in a parlor," mentioned in Peter Bell

"Crammed just as they on earth were crammed : Some sipping punch, some sipping tea, But, as you by their faces see,

All silent-and all damned!"

It is to be feared that other motives than those which spring from an offended taste, sometimes influence Macaulay's critical decisions. Political hostility, and the bitterness of feeling it naturally engenders, may be supposed to have edged much of the cutting sarcasm, which is used so pitilessly, in the wholesale condemnation of John Wilson Croker's edition of Boswell's Johnson. The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.

There is one quality of Macaulay's nature, and that, perhaps, the best, which is deserving of lavish eulogium,—his intense and earnest love of liberty, and his honest and hearty hatred of intellectual and political despotism. Few authors have written more eloquently of freedom, or paid truer and nobler homage to its advocates and martyrs; and few have opened hotter vials of wrath upon bigotry, tyranny, and all forms of legislative fraud. Tyranny is associated in his mind with all that is mean and hateful. In sweeping its pretensions from his path, in tasking every faculty of his intellect to search and shame the narrow hearts of its apologists, "his rhetoric becomes a whirlwind, and his

logic, fire." His denunciation is frequently awful in its depth and earnestness and crushing force. He holds no quarter with his opponents, and wars to the knife. His consummate dialectical skill, his unbounded sway over language, his wide grasp of thought and knowledge, the full strength of his passions and the utmost splendor of his imagination, are ever ready at the call of free principles to perform any needed service,-to unmask the specious forms of disguised despotism, to overthrow and trample under foot the injustice which has lied itself into axioms. He then becomes enthusiastic and wholly in earnest, and his eloquence, in its torrent-like rush and fierce sweep, resembles that which he has so happily described as characterizing the forensic efforts of Fox-reason penetrated, and, as it were, made red-hot with passion. In numerous passages of his articles on Milton, Church and State, Constitutional History, and Hampden; and, especially, in that best of all papers purely critical, the review of Southey's foolish Colloquies on Society; he reasons with all the force and fire of declamation. Imagination, fancy, sensibility, seem all fused into his understanding. His illustrations are analogies; his images are pictorial arguments; the most gorgeous trappings of his rhetoric are radiant with thought. His intellectual eye pierces instantly beneath the shows of things to the things themselves, and seems almost to behold truth in clear vision. In boldness of thought, in intellectual hardihood and daring, in vehement strength of soul, he excels most of the liberal statesmen of Europe. His essays are full of propositions which not a few honorable members of Congress would shrink from supporting, and yet there is in his writings an entire absence of all the cant and maudlin affectation of mouth-worshippers of freedom. Many passages might be selected, as indicating the liberality and clearness of his views respecting the just powers of government, and the rights of the governed. His opinions on the union of Church and State show great comprehensiveness of thought, and extent of information. The advocates of the necessary connexion between a good government and an established church, are opposed with the full strength of his intellect and imagination. The whole history of the Christian religion shows, he says, that "she is in far greater danger of being corrupted by the alliance of power than of being crushed by its opposition. Those who thrust temporal sovereignty upon her, treat her as their prototypes treated her Author. They bow the knee and spit upon her; they cry Hail! and smite her on the cheek; they put a sceptre into her hand, but it is a fragil reed; they crown her, but it is with thorns; they cover with purple the wounds which their own hands have inflicted upon

her, and inscribe magnificent titles over the cross on which they have fixed her to perish in ignominy and pain.'

The imperious scorn, the bitter hatred, the unalloyed detestation he feels for the meanness and manifold infamies which followed in the train of the "glorious restoration" of Charles II., inspire many a passage of vigorous argument, and glow and burn beneath many a sentence of splendid rhetoric. After paying an eloquent, just and discriminating tribute to the virtue, the valor, the religious fervor of the puritans, who wrought the first English revolution, he bursts out in a strain of indignant rebuke of the succeeding social and political enormities which paved the way to the second. "Then came those days never to be mentioned without a blush-the days of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love; of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices; the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds; the golden age of the coward, the bigot and the slave. The king, cringing to his rival that he might trample on his people, sank into a viceroy of France, and pocketed, with complacent infamy, her degrading insults and more degrading gold. The caresses of harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the measures of a government which had just ability enough to deceive, and just religion enough to persecute. The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grinning courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In every high place, worship was paid to Charles and James-Belial and Moloch; and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of her best and bravest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the race accursed of God and man was a second time driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and to be a byword and a shaking of the head to the nations." Not less severe is he upon the literature of that period. "A deep and general taint infected the morals of the most influential classes, and spread itself through every province of letters. Poetry inflamed the passions; philosophy undermined the principles; divinity itself, inculcating an abject reverence for the court, gave additional effect to its licentious example. The excesses of the age remind us of the humors of a gang of footpads, revelling with their favorite beauties at a flash-house. In the fashionable libertinism there is a hard, cold ferocity, an impudence, a lowness, a dirtiness, which can be paralleled only among the heroes and heroines of that filthy and heartless literature which encouraged it." Macaulay, likewise, is honest beyond most English writers in his view of the revolution which dethroned Charles I.; and points out the inconsistencies of that class of religionists and politicians who, on the fifth of November, thank God

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for wonderfully conducting his servant King William, and for making all opposition fall before him until he became our king and governor!-and on the thirtieth of January contrive to be afraid that the blood of the royal martyr may be visited on themselves and children." Indeed, he always brings to the task of commenting on the history of his own country, a comprehensiveness of view, a freedom from prejudice, a love for free principles, and a graphic force, picturesqueness and energy of diction, which make his historical essays the most fascinating of compositions.

Yet, with all his fondness for speculative truth, with all his deep sense and detestation of injustice and corruption, with all his fine perception of the harmonious and true in literature and laws, there is hardly any statesman more thoroughly practical than Macaulay. He can sympathize with the great works of imagination, and his rhetoric revels in their praise and illustration; but he sympathizes with them merely as works of imagination, and he carries but few of his idealities into his view of actual life and established government. He tolerates no writer whose sensibility and imagination are predominant in discussing questions of national policy, of finance, manufactures, commerce or laws; he allows the introduction of no Utopias in the living, breathing, sinning world of fact. No mercy is shown to those who treat government as a fine art, and "judge of it as they would of a statue or picture;" and the mental constitution of political philosophers, who erect theories out of materials furnished from other sources than reason and observation, is analyzed with unrivalled dexterity and discrimination. All rant about the rights of man, all whining and whimpering about the clashing interests of body and soul, are treated with haughty scorn or made the butt of contemptuous ridicule. Society is viewed as it is, and principles accommodated to the existing state of things. No man is denounced for acting or thinking in the sixteenth century what the sixteenth century acted and thought, or attacked because he did not accommodate his conduct to the principles of the nineteenth. To the discussion of all practical questions, he brings a practical logic, and an experience grounded on observation of the actual world. He would belong to that party which is just enough in advance of the age to be useful to it. But if he has little respect for impracticable theories of freedom, neither will he hold any terms with theoretical advocates or apologists of oppression. After scattering all arguments for a political institution, he often opposes its demolition, from expediency. He never allows the majesty of reason to be insulted with the thin sophisms used in palliation or defence of political and social abuses; but he is too little of an idealist in politics to suppose that, because those abuses are un