A History of English Literature

for reelection to Parliament gave him time for concentrated labor on the
'History of England' which he had already begun as his crowning work. To it
he thenceforth devoted most of his energies, reading and sifting the whole
mass of available source-material and visiting the scenes of the chief
historical events. The popular success of the five volumes which he
succeeded in preparing and published at intervals was enormous. In 1852 he
was reelected to Parliament at Edinburgh, but ill-health resulting from his
long-continued excessive expenditure of energy warned him that he had not
long to live. He was made a baron in 1857 and died in 1859, deeply mourned
both because of his manly character and because with him perished mostly
unrecorded a knowledge of the facts of English history more minute,
probably, than that of any one else who has ever lived.
Macaulay never married, but, warm-hearted as he was, always lived largely
in his affection for his sisters and for the children of one of them, Lady
Trevelyan. In his public life he displayed as an individual a fearless and
admirable devotion to principle, modified somewhat by the practical
politician's devotion to party. From every point of view, his character was
remarkable, though bounded by his very definite limitations.
Least noteworthy among Macaulay's works are his poems, of which the 'Lays
of Ancient Rome' are chief. Here his purpose is to embody his conception of
the heroic historical ballads which must have been current among the early
Romans as among the medieval English--to recreate these ballads for modern
readers. For this sort of verse Macaulay's temperament was precisely
adapted, and the 'Lays' present the simple characters, scenes, and ideals
of the early Roman republican period with a sympathetic vividness and in
stirring rhythms which give them an unlimited appeal to boys. None the less
the 'Lays' really make nothing else so clear as that in the true sense of
the word Macaulay was not at all a poet. They show absolutely nothing of
the finer feeling which adds so much, for example, to the descriptions in
Scott's somewhat similar romances, and they are separated by all the
breadth of the world from the realm of delicate sensation and imagination
to which Spenser and Keats and all the genuine poets are native-born.
The power of Macaulay's prose works, as no critic has failed to note, rests
on his genius as an orator. For oratory he was rarely endowed. The
composition of a speech was for him a matter of a few hours; with almost
preternatural mental activity he organized and sifted the material,
commonly as he paced up and down his garden or his room; then, the whole
ready, nearly verbatim, in his mind, he would pass to the House of Commons
to hold his colleagues spell-bound during several hours of fervid
eloquence. Gladstone testified that the announcement of Macaulay's
intention to speak was 'like a trumpet call to fill the benches.' The great
qualities, then, of his essays and his 'History' are those which give
success to the best sort of popular oratory--dramatic vividness and
clearness, positiveness, and vigorous, movement and interest. He realizes
characters and situations, on the external side, completely, and conveys
his impression to his readers with scarcely any diminution of force. Of
expository structure he is almost as great a master as Burke, though in his
essays and 'History' the more concrete nature of his material makes him
prevailingly a narrator. He sees and presents his subjects as wholes,
enlivening them with realistic details and pictures, but keeping the
subordinate parts subordinate and disposing of the less important events in
rapid summaries. Of clear and trenchant, though metallic, narrative and
expository style he is a master. His sentences, whether long or short, are
always lucid; he knows the full value of a short sentence suddenly snapped
out after a prolonged period; and no other writer has ever made such'
frequent and striking (though somewhat monotonous) use of deliberate