r James Mackintosh, which would
naturally lead an uninformed reader to conclude that Sir James
Mackintosh, though he had _meditated_ such a work, had never even begun
writing it. On the 391st page of Mr. Macaulay's first volume, at the
mention of the old news-letters which preceded our modern newspapers,
Mr. Macaulay says, that "they form a valuable part of the literary
treasures collected by the late Sir James Mackintosh"; and to this he
adds the following foot-note:

I take this opportunity of expressing my warm gratitude to the family
of my dear and honoured friend Sir James Mackintosh, for confiding to
me the materials collected by him _at a time when he meditated a work
similar to that which I have undertaken._ I have never seen, and I do
not believe that there anywhere exists, within the same compass, so
noble a _collection of extracts_ from public and private archives. The
judgment with which Sir James, in great masses of the rudest ore of
history, selected what was valuable and rejected what was worthless,
can be fully appreciated only by one who has toiled after him in the
same mine.--i. 391.

Could any one imagine from this that Mackintosh had not only _meditated_
a work, but actually written, and that his friends had published, a
large closely printed quarto volume, on the same subject, from the same
materials, and sometimes in the very same words as Mr. Macaulay's?

The coincidence--the identity, we might almost say--of the two works is
so great, that, while we have been comparing them, we have often been
hardly able to distinguish which was which. We rest little on the
similiarity of facts, for the facts were ready made for both; and Mr.
Macaulay tells us that he worked from Mackintosh's materials; there
would, therefore, even if he had never seen Mackintosh's work, be a
community of topics and authorities; but, seeing as we do in every page
that he was writing with Mackintosh's volume before his eyes, we cannot
account for his utter silence about it....

Having thus shown Mr. Macaulay's mode of dealing with what forms the
chief and most characteristic feature of his book--its anecdotical
gossip--we shall now endeavour to exhibit the deceptive style in which
he treats the larger historical facts: in truth the style is the same--a
general and unhesitating sacrifice of accuracy and reality to
picturesque effect and party prejudices. He treats historical personages
as the painter does h