th of state to the den of the outlaw, from the
throne of the legate to the chimney-corner where the begging friar
regaled himself. Palmers, minstrels, crusaders, the stately monastery
with the good cheer in its refectory, and the tournament with the heralds
and ladies, the trumpets and the cloth of gold, would give truth and life
to the representation.' It is difficult to see what abstract truth
interpenetrates the cheer of the refectory, or what just calculations
with respect to the future even an upholsterer could draw from a cloth,
either of state or of gold; whilst most people will admit that, when the
brilliant essayist a few years later set himself to compose his own
magnificent history, so far as he interpenetrated it with the abstract
truths of Whiggism, and calculated that the future would be satisfied
with the first Reform Bill, he did ill and guessed wrong.

To reconcile Macaulay's utterances on this subject is beyond my powers,
but of two things I am satisfied: the first is that, were he to come to
life again, a good many of us would be more careful than we are how we
write about him; and the second is that, on the happening of the same
event, he would be found protesting against the threatened domination of
all things by scientific theory. A Western American, who was once
compelled to spend some days in Boston, was accustomed in after-life to
describe that seat of polite learning to his horrified companions in
California as a city in whose streets Respectability stalked unchecked.
This is just what philosophical theories are doing amongst us, and a
decent person can hardly venture abroad without one, though it does not
much matter which one. Everybody is expected to have 'a system of
philosophy with principles coherent, interdependent, subordinate, and
derivative,' and to be able to account for everything, even for things it
used not to be thought sensible to believe in, like ghosts and haunted
houses. Keats remarks in one of his letters with great admiration upon
what he christens Shakspeare's 'negative capability,' meaning thereby
Shakspeare's habit of complaisant observation from outside of theory, and
his keen enjoyment of the unexplained facts of life. He did not pour
himself out in every strife. We have but little of this negative
capability. The ruddy qualities of delightfulness, of pleasantness, are
all 'sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.' The varied elements
of life--the

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