n
an express and unmistakable way exactly what it was that happened;
though it is quite true that in many portions of his too elaborated
History of William the Third he describes a large number of events about
which, I think, no sensible man can in the least care either how they
happened, or whether indeed they happened at all or not.

Another reason why people have sought Macaulay is, that he has in one
way or another something to tell them about many of the most striking
personages and interesting events in the history of mankind. And he does
really tell them something. If any one will be at the trouble to count
up the number of those names that belong to the world and time, about
which Macaulay has found not merely something, but something definite
and pointed to say, he will be astonished to see how large a portion of
the wide historic realm is traversed in that ample flight of reference,
allusion, and illustration, and what unsparing copiousness of knowledge
gives substance, meaning, and attraction to that resplendent blaze of
rhetoric.

Macaulay came upon the world of letters just as the middle classes were
expanding into enormous prosperity, were vastly increasing in numbers,
and were becoming more alive than they had ever been before to literary
interests. His Essays are as good as a library: they make an
incomparable manual and vade-mecum for a busy uneducated man, who has
curiosity and enlightenment enough to wish to know a little about the
great lives and great thoughts, the shining words and many-coloured
complexities of action, that have marked the journey of man through the
ages. Macaulay had an intimate acquaintance both with the imaginative
literature and the history of Greece and Rome, with the literature and
the history of modern Italy, of France, and of England. Whatever his
special subject, he contrives to pour into it with singular dexterity a
stream of rich, graphic, and telling illustrations from all these widely
diversified sources. Figures from history, ancient and modern, sacred
and secular; characters from plays and novels from Plautus down to
Walter Scott and Jane Austen; images and similes from poets of every age
and every nation, 'pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral,
tragical-historical;' shrewd thrusts from satirists, wise saws from
sages, pleasantries caustic or pathetic from humorists; all these throng
Macaulay's pages with the bustle and variety and animation of some
glitt