es at Bath "the hearth-slabs" were "freestone, not
marble"--that "the best apartments were hung with coarse woollen stuff,
and furnished with rush-bottomed chairs"?--nay, that he should have the
personal good taste to lament that in those Boeotian days "_not a
wainscot was painted_" (348); and yet this twaddle of the reign of
George II, patched into the times of Charles II, is the appropriate
occasion which he takes to panegyrise this new mode of elucidating
history?--...

It is a curious and, to persons of our opinions, not unsatisfactory
circumstance, that, though Mr. Macaulay almost invariably applies the
term _Tory_ in an opprobrious or contemptuous sense, yet so great is the
power of truth in surmounting the fantastical forms and colours laid
over it by this brilliant _badigeonneur_, that on the whole no one, we
believe, can rise from the work without a conviction that the Tories
(whatever may be said of their prejudices) were the honestest and most
conscientious of the whole _dramatis personae_; and it is this fact that
in several instances and circumstances imprints, as it were by force,
upon Mr. Macaulay's pages an air of impartiality and candour very
discordant from their general spirit.

We are now arrived at the fourth chapter--really the first, strictly
speaking, of Mr. Macaulay's history--the accession of James II, where
also Sir James Mackintosh's history commences. And here we have to open
to our readers the most extraordinary instance of _parallelism_ between
two writers, unacknowledged by the later one, which we have ever seen.
Sir James Mackintosh left behind him a history of the Revolution, which
was published in 1834, three years after his death, in quarto: it comes
down to the Orange invasion, and, though it apparently had not received
the author's last corrections, and was clumsily edited, and tagged with
a continuation by a less able hand, the work is altogether (bating not a
little ultra-Whiggery) very creditable to Mackintosh's diligence, taste,
and power of writing; it is indeed, we think, his best and most
important work, and that by which he will be most favourably known to
posterity. From that work Mr. Macaulay has borrowed largely--prodigally--
helped himself with both hands--not merely without acknowledging his
obligation, but without so much as alluding to the existence of any such
work. Nay--though this we are sure was never designed--he inserts a note
full of kindness and respect to Si