the New World continue to give the most practical evidence that they
love his books. Macaulay is a rare example of a writer all of whose
works are almost equally popular, and believed by many to be equally
good. _Essays, Lays, History, Lives_--all are read by millions: as
critic, poet, historian, biographer, Macaulay has achieved world-wide
renown. And yet some of our best critics deny him either fine taste,
or subtlety, or delicate discrimination, catholic sympathies, or serene
judgment. They say he is always more declaimer than thinker--more
advocate than judge. The poets deny that the _Lays_ are poetry at all.
The modern school of scientific historians declare that the _History_
is a splendid failure, and it proves how rotten was the theory on which
it is constructed. The purists in style shake their heads over his
everlasting antitheses, the mannerism of violent phrases and the
perpetual abuse of paradox. His most indulgent friends admit the force
of these defects, which they usually speak of as his "limitations" or
his "methods." Here, indeed, is an opportunity for one of those
long-drawn antitheses of which Macaulay was so great a master. How he
would himself have revelled in the paradox--"that books which were
household words with every cow-boy in Nevada, and every Baboo in
Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine
and a mannerist"; "how ballads which were the delight of every child
were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a
prize in a public school"; "how the most famous of all modern reviewers
scarcely gave us one example of delicate appreciation or subtle
analysis"; how it comes about "that the most elaborate of modern
histories does not contain an idea above the commonplaces of a
crammer's textbook"--and so forth, in the true Black-and-White style
which is so clear and so familiar. But let us beware of applying to
Macaulay himself that tone of exaggeration and laborious antithesis
which he so often applied to others. Boswell, he says, was immortal,
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