y enriches the tongue with infusion from any Doric dialect. For
such raciness he had little taste. What we find in him is that quality
which the French call brutal. The description, for instance, in the
essay on Hallam, of the licence of the Restoration, seems to us a coarse
and vulgar picture, whose painter took the most garish colours he could
find on his palette, and then laid them on in untempered crudity. And
who is not sensible of the vulgarity and coarseness of the account of
Boswell? 'If he had not been a great fool he would not have been a great
writer ... he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,' and so forth, in
which the shallowness of the analysis of Boswell's character matches the
puerile rudeness of the terms. Here again, is a sentence about
Montesquieu. 'The English at that time,' Macaulay says of the middle of
the eighteenth century, 'considered a Frenchman who talked about
constitutional checks and fundamental laws as a prodigy not less
astonishing than the learned pig or musical infant.' And he then goes on
to describe the author of one of the most important books that ever were
written, as 'specious but shallow, studious of effect, indifferent to
truth--the lively President,' and so forth, stirring in any reader who
happens to know Montesquieu's influence, a singular amazement. We are
not concerned with the judgment upon Montesquieu, nor with the truth as
to contemporary English opinion about him, but a writer who devises an
antithesis to such a man as Montesquieu in learned pigs and musical
infants, deliberately condescends not merely to triviality or levity,
but to flat vulgarity of thought, to something of mean and ignoble
association. Though one of the most common, this is not Macaulay's only
sin in the same unfortunate direction. He too frequently resorts to
vulgar gaudiness. For example, there is in one place a certain
description of an alleged practice of Addison's. Swift had said of
Esther Johnson that 'whether from easiness in general, or from her
indifference to persons, or from her despair of mending them, or from
the same practice which she most liked in Mr. Addison, I cannot
determine; but when she saw any of the company very warm in a wrong
opinion, she was more inclined to confirm them in it than to oppose
them. It prevented noise, she said, and saved time.'[2] Let us behold
what a picture Macaulay draws on the strength of this passage. 'If his
first attempts to set a presuming dunce r