his genius; but as it begins to recede from the point of vision its radiance increases. Gradually taking his place among those that dwell in that Pantheon in which the present world places the heroes of the past, he fills a higher position than when envious critics and indignant friends wrangled over his intellectual conquests, and grudged or defended his renown. Now that he is gone we can better appreciate what we have lost, and what in our day we cannot look to have replaced.

With whom shall we rank him? In intellectual power certainly with the greatest. Neither the versatile Bolingbroke, nor the wayward, graceful, inspired, and impracticable Burke, need have disdained the comparison. In pliancy and ease Bolingbroke surpasses him, as Burke does in delicacy of fancy, but in fertility of resource, fire, and power he excels them both. We choose these two names as the greatest of the class to which Macaulay properly belongs,-the literary statesmen of England. It is needless to compare him with historians like Hume or Gibbon, or with political leaders like the great chiefs of the rival parties. He did not belong to either order. His writings were for the most part political, not philosophical; and, like those both of Bolingbroke and Burke, they derived their tendency and colour from his views of public and political life. He was a statesman writing of history. With Burke, indeed, he has a strong affinity: the same impetuous temperament, the same ear for sonorous composition, the same delightful power of abstracting and absorbing the mind, and the same genuine and unaffected warmth. But Burke, with all his refinement, has an element of coarseness about him, of which Macaulay was entirely destitute, and if the touch of the Irish statesman was freer his drawing was not so true. Burke's judgment followed, Macaulay's led, the course of passionate and intense emotion, which frequently lured the first astray, but never beguiled the manly sense of the last.

Bolingbroke, in capacity and power, is, perhaps, a more ambitious standard than Burke. But he must be judged more by what he could have done than by what he did. He seems, so far as we know him, to have had, like Macaulay, a prodigious memory, which served him as a storehouse where he found everything worthy of remembrance in letters or in time whenever he had occasion for it, and he wielded, perhaps, the most brilliant, pure, and sparkling style of any writer in the language. He had also an amount of ability as a man of affairs, with a knowledge of, and power of adaptation to, men and things, to which the two others had no pretensions. But he has left, after all, only nominis umbra-the shadow, ill-de

fined and misty, of a mighty name. Save that he has in a few tracts, intended to be ephemeral, embalmed in the richest words the language could furnish some grand muscular delineations of that constitution which he did his best to upset, nothing tangible remains of his genius. He did nothing, and the fault lay not in his stars which he blamed so freely, but in himself,-in the coldness, selfishness, and insincerity of his nature.

Alongside either, Macaulay holds his place, nor does he suffer by the contrast. Within his own range, and it was large, his power was prodigious. Gifted with a force of memory of the rarest kind, retentive and precise to a degree which rendered pastime to him what to most men is laborious toil; an extent of scholarship both cultivated and varied; a glowing fancy which coloured and tinted with the flush of poetry the inmost recesses of his learning; a fine ear for rhythm; a true pleasure in the roll and music of words, he brought these rare materials to bear on the best and highest interests of his country and mankind. In large and single-hearted views of public policy he far outstrips either of his rivals. As an orator, as a deliverer of great, weighty, powerful rhetorical appeals, we know not any one who can be placed before him. Had he not been so soon removed, and to a certain extent physically disabled from pursuing his parliamentary career, there was no height of eminence to which he might not have attained. It is the fashion to say he was not a debater. We do not at all concur in this estimate of him. Except in practice, he had all the qualities which make up a debater-quickness, ready wit, ever present resources, keen reasoning, powerful, sonorous, although sometimes ponderous declamation. Indeed, if his reputation in other departments had not been so high, and if his tastes had not rather led him to shun the contention of political assemblies and to prefer the retirement of his more studious avocations, there is no height to which Macaulay might not have risen in the arena of debate. His power, perhaps, was somewhat unwieldy for the ordinary gladiatorship of the House of Commons. But he had versatility enough to have overcome that defect. He showed on more than one occasion that aptitude for reply, and, above all, that power of swaying large assemblies, which constitutes the true power and efficiency of Parliamentary oratory. Even as it is, some of his recorded speeches may rank with the greatest ever delivered in the House of Commons. The very last speech he ever made in that House, had the rare result of converting a minority into a majority,—indeed a very small minority into an overwhelming majority. The question was the right of the Master of the Rolls to sit in Parlia

ment. The bill which had for its object to render that judicial functionary ineligible, had passed the second reading without a division. On the motion for the Speaker leaving the chair, Macaulay came down and delivered one of his most weighty and effective orations. The consequence was that the bill was lost by a large majority, and although we regret to say that since that time the privilege has never been taken advantage of, the Master of the Rolls remains eligible for a seat in Parliament.

Thus while alongside even the thunders of Burke, and the vast influence of Bolingbroke, Macaulay holds his place; while he was a debater and an orator, a scholar, and a poet; while he could inspire the fancy either in its graver or lighter moods, impress the judgment and warm the heart; he had beyond them that steady-burning flame of patriotism, that ardent love of liberty, that strong, consistent, impressive sense of the rights of his fellow-countrymen, which from first to last, in the midst of great political excitement, living when great questions were canvassed by strong heads, kept him constant in his course. Liberty was his earliest, and was his latest theme. The scorn of oppression and fraud and falsehood, sympathy with all struggling humanity against injustice and wrong, and above all the honest pride of an Englishman in the former contests of his countrymen, and their triumphs and successes, were the prevailing emotions of his mind. For these he wrote and spoke; to these ends he used all those great stores of learning, all those wondrous powers of memory and reflection, with which he was endowed. He wore his harness to the end. He fell in the battle. It was his ambition to lay the foundations on which future historians should build the structure of English constitutional history. He has not, alas! lived to complete the great book which he contemplated. He has left us, after all, but a mighty fragment; yet his work is to a great extent accomplished. Time-honoured error, prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-minded intolerance have fled before the voice of the enchanter. These mists and clouds he has cleared away for ever; and although the fabric remains an unfinished monument of his genius, he has done more for British liberty, and for healthful political feeling in his time, than we need hope for from any other pen in this generation.

There is something very touching and melancholy in the fragmentary volume before us. Lady Trevelyan has done her part with great good-taste and discretion. She has rightly judged that the public would prefer to receive at her hand the last words of the great historian precisely as he left them;

and the fidelity with which this is done is so complete, the grand, sonorous utterances are so strong and powerful to the last, and break off with so sudden and abrupt a fracture, that we could almost have told, even had we not known, that the fulltoned string had snapped in an instant, and that death had found and claimed his victim in full career. To ourselves there is something inexpressibly affecting in this transition from life to silence-from vigour to the grave, which without a word of comment, or a line of epitaph, this volume suggests.

It begins, as it ends, abruptly. It embraces in its range the period from the rejoicings for the peace of Ryswick in December 1697, to the passing of the Resumption Bill in the summer of 1700; and contains a supplementary passage or chapter of little more than twenty pages, commencing with the death of James in April 1701, and ending with the death of William in March 1702.

It will thus be seen that although the conclusion has been deprived of the rounding and finishing touches of the author, the most essential portion of the work which Macaulay proposed to himself has been accomplished. He has not, indeed, written the History of England from the accession of James II. 'down to a time which is within the memory of men still living,' according to the comprehensive and ambitious design with which he started. It soon must have become obvious to himself that the scheme which he had sketched in his fertile brain, was beyond the physical powers he could command. No life could be long enough, no constitution sufficiently vigorous, to afford the leisure or to sustain the labour which such a task, to be so performed, must have put in requisition. It was, however, within reasonable hope, and formed the limit of his own expectation, that his work might have reached to the end of the reign of Queen Anne. But much as we have lost, by the want of his account of the first twelve years of the eighteenth century, so brilliant both in literature and in arms, and splendid as, beyond doubt, would have been the historical epic which he would have composed out of Blenheim and Ramillies, Swift and Atterbury, Bolingbroke and Addison, the last reign of the House of Stuart and the first adherents of the House of Hanover, the chief part of his design has been achieved. He has written the English history of William of Orange in characters deeply carved on our constitution-never to be obliterated while it remains. To clear away the rust and rubbish which time had accumulated to scatter the mists and vapours of subservience and party rancour, and time-serving philosophy which obscured our great Exodus from arbitrary

power to disclose in their massive grandeur the true foundations of our present liberty, was a task equal to, and not too great for his genius; and this he has performed. As time mellows the judgment, and distance combines more completely the proportions of this history, the vast gift which he has bestowed upon his country will be the more truly appreciated. We have not been slow, as our criticism on his last two volumes evinces, to speak our minds freely on his faults, and defects, and prejudices. But now that all is done, trying to bring back our minds, and associations, and impressions to what they were in 1847, it is impossible not to feel that the real narrative of the Revolution settlement dates from this publication. The bones, indeed, existed previously, scattered up and down in recesses more or less obscure; but the life was wanting until breathed into them by his ardent and courageous spirit and as long as the memory of English liberty survives, we believe these five volumes will be regarded as its noblest vindication.

The characteristics, indeed, of the three publications vary with the characteristics of the three periods to which they are devoted. The first, full of incident, adventure, and romancethe shaking of thrones, and the agitations of society which accompany changes of dynasty, afforded to his brilliant pencil a theme of rare attraction; and no one will ever forget the admiration and wonder with which his opening volumes were perused, and with which in all parts of the world a work was received which united the rarest accuracy of an historian to the charms and witchery of a romance. The rarest accuracy we may well claim for them; for although the world has long since forgotten most of the microscopic cavils with which he was then assailed, and although the more shallow and dull of his readers were slow to believe that truth could be made more interesting than fiction, it should not be forgotten that he came triumphant out of not only the more lofty crucible of opinion, but the meaner meshes and cobwebs of minute censors of dates, and carping critics of small facts. To some of these we adverted in our notice of the two first volumes in 1849, and further investigation has only resulted in placing his industry and fidelity as much above those of his hostile critics, as he soars above all his predecessors in lofty conception and comprehensive grasp.

His object was to lay the foundations of a History of England from the Revolution which should be firm and stable; to fix firmly in the public mind, and to illustrate and perpetuate in the remembrance of his countrymen, the real principles on which our constitution was founded, and the importance as well