ight were ill-received,'
Macaulay says of Addison, 'he changed his tone, "assented with civil
leer," and lured the flattered coxcomb deeper and deeper into
absurdity.' To compare this transformation of the simplicity of the
original into the grotesque heat and overcharged violence of the copy,
is to see the homely maiden of a country village transformed into the
painted flaunter of the city.

One more instance. We should be sorry to violate any sentiment of
[Greek: to semnon] about a man of Macaulay's genius, but what is a
decorous term for a description of the doctrine of Lucretius's great
poem, thrown in parenthetically, as the 'silliest and meanest system of
natural and moral philosophy!' Even disagreeable artifices of
composition may be forgiven, when they serve to vivify truth, to
quicken or to widen the moral judgment, but Macaulay's hardy and
habitual recourse to strenuous superlatives is fundamentally
unscientific and untrue. There is no more instructive example in our
literature than he, of the saying that the adjective is the enemy of the
substantive.

[Footnote 2: Forster's _Swift_, i. 265.]

* * * * *

In 1837 Jeffrey saw a letter written by Macaulay to a common friend, and
stating the reasons for preferring a literary to a political life.
Jeffrey thought that his illustrious ally was wrong in the conclusion to
which he came. 'As to the tranquillity of an author's life,' he said, 'I
have no sort of faith in it. And as to fame, if an author's is now and
then more lasting, it is generally longer withheld, and except in a few
rare cases it is of a less pervading or elevating description. A great
poet or a great _original_ writer is above all other glory. But who
would give much for such a glory as Gibbon's? Besides, I believe it is
in the inward glow and pride of consciously influencing the destinies of
mankind, much more than in the sense of personal reputation, that the
delight of either poet or statesman chiefly consists.' And Gibbon had at
least the advantage of throwing himself into a religious controversy
that is destined to endure for centuries. He, moreover, was specifically
a historian, while Macaulay has been prized less as a historian proper
than as a master of literary art. Now a man of letters, in an age of
battle and transition like our own, fades into an ever-deepening
distance, unless he has while he writes that touching and impressive
quality,--the presentime