cially in London (_e.g._, Sam Weller, Mrs.
Todgers, Jo, etc.), and Dickens unearthed them for the first
time. How his heart warms for the poor and the wretched! He is
the great poet of London life.

Macaulay is not a philosophic writer; but then the English genius
is certainly non-philosophic.

Froude in his essay on Homer says: "The authors of the Iliad and
the Odyssey stand alone with Shakespeare far away above mankind."
Paul's marginal note: "Add to them Milton, Goethe, the author of
the Nibelungen-lied, Browning."

Froude, I think, has misunderstood the Nibelungen-lied entirely.
There is really much savagery and much glory in both the German
and the Greek epic.

How strange that men like Rabelais and Swift, Goldsmith and
Dickens, who have done so much to make the world laugh,
experienced in their own lives great unhappiness.

Browning is always an optimist. His manliness and vigour are
unfailing:

I find earth not grey but rosy,
Heaven not grim but fair of hue.
Do I stoop? I pluck a posy.
Do I stand and stare? All's blue.

Paul considered that Macaulay lacked ideas and vision. He liked the
lilt and swing of the Lays and Ballads, and enjoyed the Essays with
their superb colouring. Disputing Macaulay's dictum that neither
painters nor poets are helped by the advances in civilisation, science
and refinement, he wrote: "This argument disproved by the examples of
men like Shakespeare and Goethe, like Browning and Kipling. And did
not Leonardo da Vinci become a student of anatomy in order to learn
how to depict the human body properly on his canvas?"

Macaulay in his Essay on Mackintosh's "History of The Revolution"
describes the condition of England in 1678, after eighteen years of
Charles the Second's reign, in graphic words, beginning "Such was the
nation which, awaking from its rapturous trance, found itself sold to
a foreign, a despotic, a Popish court, defeated on its own seas and
rivers by a State of far inferior resources, and placed under the rule
of pandars and buffoons."

Paul's comment reads: "This superb passage is one of the most inspired
of Macaulay's utterances. Contrast with it in the same Essay the vivid
sentence beginning 'In the course of seven centuries,' in which he
pronounces a magnificent panegyric on the greatness of Britain."

He thought the music of Macaulay's prose