d Correspondence of General
Schuyler_, and Professor Moore's paper on Charles Lee.]

With the imposing array of professed histories and historians in view,
it is curious to revert to the actual sources of our own historic
ideas,--those which are definite and pervasive. The vast number of
intelligent readers, who have made no special study of this kind
of literature, probably derive their most distinct and attractive
impressions of the past from poetry, travel, and the choicest works of
the novelist; local association and imaginative sympathy, rather than
formal chronicles, have enlightened and inspired them in regard to
Antiquity and the great events and characters of modern Europe. This
fact alone suggests how inadequate for popular effect have been the
average labors of historians; and so fixed is the opinion among scholars
that it is impossible for the annalist to be profound and interesting,
authentic and animated, at the same time, that a large class of the
learned repudiate as spurious the renown of Macaulay,--although his
research and his minuteness cannot be questioned, and only in a few
instances has his accuracy been successfully impugned. They distrust him
chiefly because he is agreeable, doubt his correctness for the reason
that his style fascinates, and deem admiration for him inconsistent with
their own self-respect, because he is such a favorite as no historian
ever was before, and his account of a parliament, a coinage, or a feud
as winsome as a portraiture of a woman. In one of his critical essays,
Macaulay himself gives a partial explanation of this protest of the
minority in his own case. "People," he remarks, "are very loath to admit
that the same man can unite very different kinds of excellence. It is
soothing to envy to believe that what is splendid cannot be solid and
what is clear cannot be profound." And it has been most justly said of
his own method of writing history, "He must make _everything_ clear and
bright, and bring it into the range of his analysis; his exaggeration
chiefly applies to individual characters, not to general facts"; and the
reason given for the decided preference manifested for his vivid record
is not less true than philosophical,--"We learn so much from him
_enjoyably_." It is precisely the lack of this pleasurable trait which
makes the greater part of the annals of the past a dead letter to the
world, and wins to romance, ballad, epic, fiction, relic, and poetry the
keen