when aiming at the most passionate effects, still
succeed in conveying to their readers a thrilling sense of the strong
fires that are glowing underneath. Now when Macaulay advances with his
hectoring sentences and his rough pistolling ways, we feel all the time
that his pulse is as steady as that of the most practised duellist who
ever ate fire. He is too cool to be betrayed into a single phrase of
happy improvisation. His pictures glare, but are seldom warm. Those
strokes of minute circumstantiality which he loved so dearly, show that
even in moments when his imagination might seem to be moving both
spontaneously and ardently, it was really only a literary instrument, a
fashioning tool and not a melting flame. Let us take a single example.
He is describing the trial of Warren Hastings. 'Every step in the
proceedings,' he says, 'carried the mind either backward through many
troubled centuries to the days when the foundations of our constitution
were laid; or far away over boundless seas and deserts, to dusky nations
living under strange stars, worshipping strange gods, and writing
strange characters from right to left. The odd triviality of the last
detail, its unworthiness of the sentiment of the passage, leaves the
reader checked, what sets out as a fine stroke of imagination dwindles
down to a sort of literary conceit. And this puerile twist, by the way,
is all the poorer, when it is considered that the native writing is
really from left to right, and only takes the other direction in a
foreign, that is to say, a Persian alphabet. And so in other places,
even where the writer is most deservedly admired for gorgeous
picturesque effect, we feel that it is only the literary picturesque, a
kind of infinitely glorified newspaper-reporting. Compare, for instance,
the most imaginative piece to be found in any part of Macaulay's
writings with that sudden and lovely apostrophe in Carlyle, after
describing the bloody horrors that followed the fall of the Bastille in
1789:--'O evening sun of July, how, at this hour, thy beams fall slant
on reapers amid peaceful woody fields; on old women spinning in
cottages; on ships far out in the silent main; on balls at the Orangerie
at Versailles, where high-rouged dames of the Palace are even now
dancing with double-jacketed Hussar officers;--and also on this roaring
Hell-porch of a Hotel de Ville!' Who does not feel in this the breath of
poetic inspiration, and how different it is from t