in
literary practice that a writer raised far by fame and fortune above the
vulgar temptations of the craft should undertake to tell a story already
frequently and recently told by masters of the highest authority and
most extensive information, without having, or even professing to have,
any additional means or special motive to account for the attempt.

[1] It appears from two notes of acknowledgments to M. Guizot and the
keepers of the archives at The Hague, that Mr. Macaulay obtained
some additions to the copies which Mackintosh already had of the
letters of Ronquillo the Spanish and Citters the Dutch minister at
the court of James. We may conjecture that these additions were
insignificant, since Mr. Macaulay has nowhere, that we have
observed, specially noticed them; but except these, whatever they
may be, we find no trace of anything that Fox and Mackintosh had not
already examined and classed.

We suspect, however, that we can trace Mr. Macaulay's design to its true
source--the example and success of the author of Waverley. The
historical novel, if not invented, at least first developed and
illustrated by the happy genius of Scott, took a sudden and extensive
hold of the public taste; he himself, in most of his subsequent novels,
availed himself largely of the historical element which had contributed
so much to the popularity of Waverley. The press has since that time
groaned with his imitators. We have had historical novels of all classes
and grades. We have had served up in this form the Norman Conquest and
the Wars of the Roses, the Gunpowder Plot and the Fire of London,
Darnley and Richelieu--and almost at the same moment with Mr. Macaulay's
appeared a professed romance of Mr. Ainsworth's on the same subject--
James II. Nay, on a novelist of this popular order has been conferred
the office of _Historiographer_ to the Queen.

Mr. Macaulay, too mature not to have well measured his own peculiar
capacities, not rich in invention but ingenious in application, saw the
use that might be made of this principle, and that history itself would
be much more popular with a large embroidery of personal, social, and
even topographical anecdote and illustration, instead of the sober garb
in which we had been in the habit of seeing it. Few histories indeed
ever were or could be written without some admixture of this sort. The
father of the art himself, old Herodotus, vivified his text with a