Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/538

530 :" and he went off at score, drawing breath only once in order to remark on the oddity of there having been an Archbishop Sancroft and an Archbishop Bancroft, until Sir David stopped him at Cranmer.

Macaulay was proud of his good memory, and had little sympathy with people who affected to have a bad one. In a note on the margin of one of his books he reflects upon this not uncommon form of self-depreciation: "They appear to reason thus: The more memory, the less invention."

Yet he had himself remarked on another occasion that it was dangerous for a man of strong memory to read too much, because in acquiring an amazing command over the thoughts of others, he might dilute the power of original thought in himself. That was undoubtedly to some extent the case with Macaulay. Every incident he heard of, every page he read, assumed in his mind a concrete, objective, spectral form. He saw them before him: but his genius was less conversant with abstract truths or their relations. These qualities made his writings and conversation eminently graphic, clear, and attractive, rather than profound studies of human nature or of the causes, of events. To this distinction between the most brilliant modern writer of history and the great models of antiquity, especially Thucydides and Tacitus, Macaulay was by no means insensible: it originates in a different order of mind and in far other powers of original thought. The historian of antiquity to whom his writings bear the nearest resemblance is Livy.

Macaulay never worked at anything so hard as he laboured at his "History." His method of composition was slow and toilsome; his care and correctness, both as to matter and style, endless. His researches to ascertain facts, even of trilling importance, were extraordinary. Yet the bulk of the materials he used were derived from printed sources—memoirs, pamphlets, sermons, ballads, broadsheets, Parliamentary journals and the statute-book. He seldom attempted to dive into that ocean of manuscript records, which threatens to bury the sources of history under strata of rubbish; but he made considerable use of the Dutch and Spanish despatches, and of Narcissus Luttrell's diary, then unpublished. He was also aided by the previous researches of Mackintosh. The work of preparing the materials of history, and that of writing actual history, must be performed by two distinct classes of men. All experience shows how impossible it is to attain to complete and indisputable accuracy even in the narrative of an ordinary contemporary event. With every fresh witness, with every fresh piece of evidence, the difficulty increases. We speak with confidence of the history of the ancients, because the witnesses are few in number: but the more we know, the more we doubt. Macaulay laboured with an honest and intense desire to be truthful and just, though he wrote under the influence of strong predilections; and his slips of memory are exceedingly rare. One of these is curious. We had occasion in reviewing the first volumes of his "History" to point out that he was mistaken in conferring on Schomberg, who was killed at the battle of the Boyne, a grave in Westminster Abbey. It now turns out from a journal of a tour in Ireland, made for the express purpose of visiting the scenes memorable in the history of those times, that Macaulay actually saw the tomb of Schomberg in St Patrick's, Dublin, and noted Swift's savage inscription on it. This must have escaped his recollection.

Early in 1849, in the midst of events which convulsed Europe with new revolutions, this great history of an old and triumphant revolution was given to the world. It is needless to say how it was received—the sale of edition after edition was rapid and enormous. It was read with enthusiasm by all classes; for if it contained some of the noblest passages of historical composition to instruct the statesman and delight the scholar, it was amusing enough to divert the frivolous, and clear enough to give pleasure and knowledge to the uneducated. Whatever Macaulay's hopes of success or consciousness of desert may have been, the results exceeded all expectation. In one instance alone was a serious attempt made to depreciate the merit and detract from the influence of the greatest historical work of our time. A contemporary reviewer, writing with the deliberation and judgment required on such an occasion, declared that—

Mr. Macaulay was a grand proficient in the picturesque, but a very poor professor of the historic. These volumes have been, and the future volumes as they may appear will be, devoured with the same eagerness that "Oliver Twist," or "Vanity Fair" excite, with the same quality of zest, though perhaps with a higher degree of it: but his pages will seldom, we think, receive a second perusal; and the work, we apprehend, will hardly find a