counted his years of life by those of this century, may
fairly claim to have had the greatest body of readers, and to be the
most admired prose-writer of the Victorian Age. It is now some seventy
years since his first brilliant essay on "Milton" took the world by
storm. It is half a century since that fascinating series of _Essays_
was closed, and little short of that time since his famous _History_
appeared. The editions of it in England and in America are counted by
thousands; it has six translations into German, and translations into
ten other European languages. It made him rich, famous, and a peer.
Has it given him a foremost place in English literature?

Here is a case where the judgment of the public and the judgment of
experts is in striking contrast. The readers both of the Old and of
the New World continue to give the most practical evidence that they
love his books. Macaulay is a rare example of a writer all of whose
works are almost equally popular, and believed by many to be equally
good. _Essays, Lays, History, Lives_--all are read by millions: as
critic, poet, historian, biographer, Macaulay has achieved world-wide
renown. And yet some of our best critics deny him either fine taste,
or subtlety, or delicate discrimination, catholic sympathies, or serene
judgment. They say he is always more declaimer than thinker--more
advocate than judge. The poets deny that the _Lays_ are poetry at all.
The modern school of scientific historians declare that the _History_
is a splendid failure, and it proves how rotten was the theory on which
it is constructed. The purists in style shake their heads over his
everlasting antitheses, the mannerism of violent phrases and the
perpetual abuse of paradox. His most indulgent friends admit the force
of these defects, which they usually speak of as his "limitations" or
his "methods." Here, indeed, is an opportunity for one of those
long-drawn antitheses of which Macaulay was so great a master. How he
would himself have revelled in the paradox--"that books which were
household words with every cow-boy in Nevada, and every Baboo in
Bengal, were condemned by men of culture as the work of a Philistine
and a mannerist"; "how ballads which were the delight of every child
were ridiculed by critics as rhetorical jingles that would hardly win a
prize in a public school"; "how the most famous of all modern reviewers
scarcely gave us one example of delicate appreciation or subt