ciation, occasionally obscure from dealing with vague and unknown quantities, but always refined, while in his lectures it arrests attention in the deep, pure tone of the orator, and is not unfrequently, especially in his later discourses, relieved by turns of practical sagacity and shrewd New England humor. It is a style, too, in which there is a considerable infusion of the poetical vision, bringing to light remote events and illustrations; but its prominent quality is wit, dazzling by brief and acute analysis and the juxtaposition of striking objects. In his poems, apart from their obscurity, Emerson is sometimes bare and didactic; at others, his musical utterance is sweet and powerful.

EVERT A. DUYCKINCK.

[The subject of the preceding sketch died on the 27th of April, 1882.-EDITOR.]

THOMAS HAYNES BAYLY.

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EXT to Moore, Bayly was the most successful song-writer of our age. His most attractive lyrics turned on the distresses of the victims of the affections in elegant life, but his Muse had also her airy and cheerful strain, and he composed a surprising number of light dramas, some of which show a likelihood of maintaining their ground on the stage. He was born in 1797, the son of an eminent and wealthy solicitor, near Bath. Destined for the Church, he studied for some time at Oxford, but could not settle to so sober a profession, and ultimately came to depend chiefly on literature for support. His later years were marked by misfortunes.

This amiable poet died of jaundice in 1839. His songs contain the pathos of a section of our social system, but they are

more calculated to attract attention by their refined and happy diction than to melt us by their feeling. Several of them, as "She Wore a Wreath of Roses," "Oh no, we never Mention her" and "We Met : 'twas in a Crowd," attained to an extraordinary popularity. Of his livelier ditties, "I'd be a Butterfly" was the most felicitous: it expresses the Horatian philosophy in terms exceeding even Horace in gayety.

W. & R. CHAMBERS.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY. ORD MACAULAY was born October

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25, 1800, and died in 1859. He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, an ardent philanthropist and one of the earliest opponents of the slave-trade. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which college he became a fellow, and called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, he suddenly achieved a literary reputation by an article on Milton in the Edinburgh Review in 1825. This was the first of a long series of brilliant literary and historical essays which he contributed to the same periodical. He entered Parliament in 1830, and was almost immediately acknowledged to be one of the first orators in the House. He went to India in 1834 as a member of the council in Calcutta and as president of the law commission. Soon after his return he was elected by the city of Edinburgh as their representative in Parliament (1840), and became successively secretary at war and paymaster of the forces. He lost his election in 1847 in consequence of opposing the religious prejudices of his constituents, and from this time he devoted all his powers to the undivided cultivation of letters. Although he sat in Parliament again from 1852

to 1856, he took little part in the debates of the House. He was raised to the peerage in 1857.

Macaulay is distinguished as a poet, an essayist and an historian. His "Lays of Ancient Rome" are the best known of his poems; but the lines which he wrote upon his defeat at Edinburgh in 1847, and in which he turns for consolation to literature, are, in our judgment, the finest of all his poetical pieces. His essays and his history will, in virtue of their inimitable style, always give Macaulay a high place among English classics. His style has been well characterized by a friendly but discerning critic: "It was eminently his own, but his own not by strange words or strange collocation of words, by phrases of perpetual occurrence or the straining after original and striking terms of expression. Its characteristics were vigor and animation, copiousness, clearness-above all, sound English, now a rare excellence. The vigor and life were unabating; perhaps in that conscious strength which cost no exertion he did not always gauge and measure the force of his own words. Those who studied the progress of his writing might perhaps see that the full stream, though it never stagnated, might at first overflow its banks; in later days it ran with a more direct, undivided torrent. His copiousness had nothing tumid, diffuse, Asiatic, no ornament for the sake of ornament. As to its clearness, one may read a sentence of Macaulay twice to judge of its full force, never to comprehend its meaning. His English was pure both in idiom and in words-pure to fastidiousness. Not that he discarded or did not make free use of the plainest and most homely terms (he had a sovereign contempt for what is

called the dignity of history, which would keep itself above the vulgar tongue), but every word must be genuine English-nothing that approached real vulgarity, nothing that had not the stamp of popular use or the authority of sound English writers, nothing unfamiliar to the common ear.

Macaulay's essays are philosophical and historical disquisitions embracing a vast range of subjects, but the larger number and most important relate to English history. These essays, however, were only preparatory to his great work on the history of England, which he had intended to write from the accession of James II. to the time immediately preceding the French Revolution. But of this subject he lived to complete only a portion. The first two volumes, published in 1849, contain the reign of James II. and the Revolution of 1688; two more, which appeared in 1855, bring down the reign of William III. to the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697; while a fifth, published in 1861, after the author's death, nearly completes the history of that reign. Macaulay, in a review of Sir James Mackintosh's History of the Revolution, observed that "a History of England written throughout in this manner would be the most fascinating book in the language. It would be more in request at the circulating libraries than the last novel." The unexampled popularity of Macaulay's own History verified the prediction. In a still earlier essay he had remarked that we had good historical romances and good historical essays, but no good histories; and it cannot be denied that he has to a great extent attained his ideal of a perfect history, which he defines to be "a compound of poetry and philosophy, impressing general rules on the mind by a vivid rep