ians, and particularly the later ones, could complain that they
had been too sparing of imputation, or even vituperation, to the
opposite party. But not so Mr. Macaulay. The most distinctive feature on
the face of his pages is personal virulence--if he has at all succeeded
in throwing an air of fresh life into his characters, it is mainly due,
as any impartial and collected reader will soon discover, to the simple
circumstance of his hating the individuals of the opposite party as
bitterly, as passionately, as if they were his own personal enemies--
more so, indeed, we hope than he would a mere political antagonist of
his own day. When some one suggested to the angry O'Neil that one of the
Anglo-Irish families whom he was reviling as strangers had been four
hundred years settled in Ireland, the Milesian replied, "_I hate the
churls as if they had come but yesterday_." Mr. Macaulay seems largely
endowed with this (as with a more enviable) species of memory, and he
hates, for example, King Charles I as if he had been murdered only
yesterday. Let us not be understood as wishing to abridge an historian's
full liberty of censure--but he should not be a satirist, still less a
libeller. We do not say nor think that Mr. Macaulay's censures were
always unmerited--far from it--but they are always, we think without
exception, immoderate. Nay, it would scarcely be too much to say that
this massacre of character is the point on which Mr. Macaulay must
chiefly rest any claims he can advance to the praise of impartiality,
for while he paints everything that looks like a Tory in the blackest
colours, he does not altogether spare any of the Whigs against whom he
takes a spite, though he always visits them with a gentler correction.
In fact, except Oliver Cromwell, King William, a few gentlemen who had
the misfortune to be executed or exiled for high treason, and every
dissenting minister that he has or can find occasion to notice, there
are hardly any persons mentioned who are not stigmatized as knaves or
fools, differing only in degrees of "turpitude" and "imbecility". Mr.
Macaulay has almost realized the work that Alexander Chalmers's playful
imagination had fancied, a _Biographia Flagitiosa_, or _The Lives of
Eminent Scoundrels_. This is also an imitation of the Historical Novel,
though rather in the track of Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard than of
Waverley or Woodstock; but what would you have? To attain the
picturesque--the chief objec