ering masque and cosmoramic revel of great books and heroical men.
Hence, though Macaulay was in mental constitution one of the very least
Shakesperean writers that ever lived, yet he has the Shakesperean
quality of taking his reader through an immense gallery of interesting
characters and striking situations. No writer can now expect to attain
the widest popularity as a man of letters unless he gives to the world
_multa_ as well as _multum_. Sainte-Beuve, the most eminent man of
letters in France in our generation, wrote no less than twenty-seven
volumes of his incomparable _Causeries_. Mr. Carlyle, the most eminent
man of letters in England in our generation, has taught us that silence
is golden in thirty volumes. Macaulay was not so exuberantly copious as
these two illustrious writers, but he had the art of being as various
without being so voluminous.

There has been a great deal of deliberate and systematic imitation of
Macaulay's style, often by clever men who might well have trusted to
their own resources. Its most conspicuous vices are very easy to
imitate, but it is impossible for any one who is less familiar with
literature than Macaulay was, to reproduce his style effectively, for
the reason that it is before all else the style of great literary
knowledge. Nor is that all. Macaulay's knowledge was not only very wide;
it was both thoroughly accurate and instantly ready. For this stream of
apt illustrations he was indebted to his extraordinary memory, and his
rapid eye for contrasts and analogies. They come to the end of his pen
as he writes; they are not laboriously hunted out in indexes, and then
added by way of afterthought and extraneous interpolation. Hence
quotations and references that in a writer even of equal knowledge, but
with his wits less promptly about him, would seem mechanical and
awkward, find their place in a page of Macaulay as if by a delightful
process of complete assimilation and spontaneous fusion.

* * * * *

We may be sure that no author could have achieved Macaulay's boundless
popularity among his contemporaries, unless his work had abounded in
what is substantially Commonplace. Addison puts fine writing in
sentiments that are natural without being obvious, and this is a true
account of the 'law' of the exquisite literature of the Queen Anne men.
We may perhaps add to Addison's definition, that the great secret of the
best kind of popularity is always t