to a really marvellous degree with bad taste, bad
feeling, and, we are under the painful necessity of adding--bad faith.

These are grave charges: but we make them in sincerity, and we think
that we shall be able to prove them; and if, here or hereafter, we
should seem to our readers to use harsher terms than good taste might
approve, we beg in excuse to plead that it is impossible to fix one's
attention on, and to transcribe large portions of a work, without being
in some degree infected with its spirit; and Mr. Macaulay's pages,
whatever may be their other characteristics, are as copious a
repertorium of vituperative eloquence as, we believe, our language can
produce, and especially against everything in which he chooses (whether
right or wrong) to recognise the shibboleth of Toryism. We shall
endeavour, however, in the expression of our opinions, to remember the
respect we owe to our readers and to Mr. Macaulay's general character
and standing in the world of letters, rather than the provocations and
examples of the volumes immediately before us.

Mr. Macaulay announces his intention of bringing down the history of
England almost to our own times; but these two volumes are complete in
themselves, and we may fairly consider them as a history of the
Revolution; and in that light the first question that presents itself to
us is why Mr. Macaulay has been induced to re-write what had already
been so often and even so recently written--among others, by Dalrymple,
a strenuous but honest Whig, and by Mr. Macaulay's own oracles, Fox and
Mackintosh? It may be answered that both Fox and Mackintosh left their
works imperfect. Fox got no farther than Monmouth's death; but
Mackintosh came down to the Orange invasion, and covered full nine-tenths
of the period as yet occupied by Mr. Macaulay. Why then did Mr.
Macaulay not content himself with beginning where Mackintosh left off--
that is, with the Revolution? and it would have been the more natural,
because, as our readers know, it is there that Hume's history
terminates.

What reason does he give for this work of supererogation? None. He does
not (as we shall see more fully by and by) take the slightest notice of
Mackintosh's history, no more than if it had never existed. Has he
produced a new fact? Not one. Has he discovered any new materials? None,
as far as we can judge, but the collections of Fox and Mackintosh,
confided to him by their families.[1] It seems to us a novelty