ing the Socratic elenchus, or any
other engine of criticism, scepticism, or verification, to those
sentiments or current precepts of morals, which may in truth be very
equivocal and may be much neglected in practice, but which the public
opinion of his time requires to be treated in theory and in literature
as if they had been cherished and held sacred _semper, ubique, et ab
omnibus_.

This is just what Macaulay does, and it is commonly supposed to be no
heavy fault in him or any other writer for the common public. Man cannot
live by analysis alone, nor nourish himself on the secret delights of
irony. And if Macaulay had only reflected the more generous of the
prejudices of mankind, it would have been well enough. Burke, for
instance, was a writer who revered the prejudices of a modern society as
deeply as Macaulay did; he believed society to be founded on prejudices
and held compact by them. Yet what size there is in Burke, what fine
perspective, what momentum, what edification! It may be pleaded that
there is the literature of edification, and there is the literature of
knowledge, and that the qualities proper to the one cannot lawfully be
expected from the other, and would only be very much out of place if
they should happen to be found there. But there are two answers to this.
First, Macaulay in the course of his varied writings discusses all sorts
of ethical and other matters, and is not simply a chronicler of party
and intrigue, of dynasties and campaigns. Second, and more than this,
even if he had never travelled beyond the composition of historical
record, he could still have sown his pages, as does every truly great
writer, no matter what his subject may be, with those significant images
or far-reaching suggestions, which suddenly light up a whole range of
distant thoughts and sympathies within us; which in an instant affect
the sensibilities of men with a something new and unforeseen; and which
awaken, if only for a passing moment, the faculty and response of the
diviner mind. Tacitus does all this, and Burke does it, and that is why
men who care nothing for Roman despots or for Jacobin despots, will
still perpetually turn to those writers almost as if they were on the
level of great poets or very excellent spiritual teachers.

One secret is that they, and all such men as they were, had that of
which Macaulay can hardly have had the rudimentary germ, the faculty of
deep abstract meditation and surrender to th