he unfailing accuracy of their
recollections; and yet not in accuracy as to dates or names or
quotations, or other matters of hard fact, when the question was one
simply between ay and no. In these he may have been without a rival. In
a list of kings, or popes, or senior wranglers, or prime ministers, or
battles, or palaces, or as to the houses in Pall Mall or about Leicester
Square, he might be followed with implicit confidence. But a large and
important class of human recollections are not of this order:
recollections for example of characters, of feelings, of opinions; of
the intrinsic nature, details, and bearings of occurrences. And here it
was that Macaulay's wealth "was unto him an occasion of falling." And
that in two ways. First, the possessor of such a vehicle as his memory
could not but have something of an overweening confidence in what it
told him; and quite apart from any tendency to be vain or overbearing,
he could hardly enjoy the benefits of that caution which arises from
self-interest, and the sad experience of frequent falls. But what is
more, the possessor of so powerful a fancy could not but illuminate with
the colors it supplied, the matters which he gathered into his great
magazine, wherever the definiteness of their outline was not so rigid as
to defy or disarm the action of the intruding and falsifying faculty.
Imagination could not alter the date of the battle of Marathon, of the
Council of Nice, or the crowning of Pepin; but it might seriously or
even fundamentally disturb the balance of light and dark in his account
of the opinions of Milton or of Laud, or his estimate of the effects of
the Protectorate or the Restoration, or of the character and even the
adulteries of William III. He could detect justly this want of dry light
in others; he probably suspected it in himself; but it was hardly
possible for him to be enough upon his guard against the distracting
action of a faculty at once so vigorous, so crafty, and so pleasurable
in its intense activity.

Hence arose, it seems reasonable to believe, that charge of partisanship
against Macaulay as a historian, on which much has been and probably
much more will be said. He may not have possessed that scrupulously
tender sense of obligation, that nice tact of exact justice, which is
among the very rarest as well as the most precious of human virtues. But
there never was a writer less capable of intentional unfairness. This
during his lifetime was