y of England from The
Accession of James II._, honors and appointments of all kinds were
showered upon him. In 1857 he was raised to the peerage as Baron
Macaulay of Rothley.

Macaulay's equipment, as a writer on historical and biographical
subjects, was, in some points, unique. His reading was prodigious, and
his memory so tenacious, that it was said, with but little
exaggeration, that he never forgot any thing that he had read. He
could repeat the whole of _Paradise Lost_ by heart, and thought it
probable that he could rewrite _Sir Charles Grandison_ from memory. In
his books, in his speeches in the House of Commons, and in private
conversation--for he was an eager and fluent talker, running on often
for hours at a stretch--he was never at a loss to fortify and
illustrate his positions by citation after citation of dates, names,
facts of all kinds, and passages quoted _verbatim_ from his
multifarious reading. The first of Macaulay's writings to attract
general notice was his article on _Milton_, printed in the August
number of the _Edinburgh Review_, for 1825. The editor, Lord Jeffrey,
in {282} acknowledging the receipt of the MS., wrote to his new
contributor, "The more I think, the less I can conceive where you
picked up that style." That celebrated style--about which so much has
since been written--was an index to the mental character of its owner.
Macaulay was of a confident, sanguine, impetuous nature. He had great
common sense, and he saw what he saw quickly and clearly, but he did
not see very far below the surface. He wrote with the conviction of an
advocate, and the easy omniscience of a man whose learning is really
nothing more than "general information," raised to a very high power,
rather than with the subtle penetration of an original or truly
philosophic intellect, like Coleridge's or De Quincey's. He always had
at hand explanations of events or of characters, which were admirably
easy and simple--too simple, indeed, for the complicated phenomena
which they professed to explain. His style was clear, animated, showy,
and even its faults were of an exciting kind. It was his habit to give
piquancy to his writing by putting things concretely. Thus, instead of
saying, in general terms--as Hume or Gibbon might have done--that the
Normans and Saxons began to mingle about 1200, he says: "The great
grandsons of those who had fought under William and the great grandsons
of those who had fought under