289

Conclusion 290

MACAULAY.

'After glancing my eye over the design and order of a new book,' says
Gibbon, 'I suspended the perusal till I had finished the task of
self-examination, till I had revolved in a solitary walk all that I knew
or believed or had thought on the subject of the whole work or of some
particular chapter; I was then qualified to discern how much the author
added to my original stock; and if I was sometimes satisfied by the
agreement, I was sometimes warned by the opposition of our ideas.' It is
also told of Strafford that before reading any book for the first time,
he would call for a sheet of paper, and then proceed to write down upon
it some sketch of the ideas that he already had upon the subject of the
book, and of the questions that he expected to find answered. No one who
has been at the pains to try the experiment, will doubt the usefulness
of this practice: it gives to our acquisitions from books clearness and
reality, a right place and an independent shape. At this moment we are
all looking for the biography of an illustrious man of letters, written
by a near kinsman, who is himself naturally endowed with keen literary
interests, and who has invigorated his academic cultivation by
practical engagement in considerable affairs of public business. Before
taking up Mr. Trevelyan's two volumes, it is perhaps worth while, on
Strafford's plan, to ask ourselves shortly what kind of significance or
value belongs to Lord Macaulay's achievements, and to what place he has
a claim among the forces of English literature. It is seventeen years
since he died, and those of us who never knew him nor ever saw him, may
now think about his work with that perfect detachment which is
impossible in the case of actual contemporaries.[1]

[Footnote 1: Since the following piece was written, Mr. Trevelyan's
biography of Lord Macaulay has appeared, and has enjoyed the great
popularity to which its careful execution, its brightness of style, its
good taste, its sound judgment, so richly entitle it. If Mr. Trevelyan's
course in politics were not so useful as it is, one might be tempted to
regret that he had not chosen literature for the main field of his
career. The portrait which he draws of Lord Macaulay is so irresistibly
attractive in many ways, that a critic may be glad to have delivered his
soul before his judgment was sub