t, Macaulay was concerned to interpret the seventeenth century in
terms of the triumph of the Whigs as champions of public rights; and he
upheld this one-sidedly but not malignantly in a style of rounded and
ringing sentences, which at its best is like steel and at its worst like
tin.

This was the small conscious Macaulay; the great unconscious Macaulay
was very different. His noble enduring quality in our literature is
this: that he truly had an abstract passion for history; a warm, poetic
and sincere enthusiasm for great things as such; an ardour and appetite
for great books, great battles, great cities, great men. He felt and
used names like trumpets. The reader's greatest joy is in the writer's
own joy, when he can let his last phrase fall like a hammer on some
resounding name like Hildebrand or Charlemagne, on the eagles of Rome or
the pillars of Hercules. As with Walter Scott, some of the best things
in his prose and poetry are the surnames that he did not make. And it is
remarkable to notice that this romance of history, so far from making
him more partial or untrustworthy, was the only thing that made him
moderately just. His reason was entirely one-sided and fanatical. It
was his imagination that was well-balanced and broad. He was
monotonously certain that only Whigs were right; but it was necessary
that Tories should at least be great, that his heroes might have foemen
worthy of their steel. If there was one thing in the world he hated it
was a High Church Royalist parson; yet when Jeremy Collier the Jacobite
priest raises a real banner, all Macaulay's blood warms with the mere
prospect of a fight. "It is inspiriting to see how gallantly the
solitary outlaw advances to attack enemies formidable separately, and,
it might have been thought, irresistible when combined; distributes his
swashing blows right and left among Wycherley, Congreve and Vanbrugh,
treads the wretched D'Urfey down in the dirt beneath his feet; and
strikes with all his strength full at the towering crest of Dryden."
That is exactly where Macaulay is great; because he is almost Homeric.
The whole triumph turns upon mere names; but men are commanded by
names. So his poem on the Armada is really a good geography book gone
mad; one sees the map of England come alive and march and mix under the
eye.

The chief tragedy in the trend of later literature may be expressed by
saying that the smaller Macaulay conquered the larger. Later men had
less