the work of so imposing a writer
should have passed through the hands of every man and woman of his time
who has even the humblest pretensions to cultivation, without leaving a
very decided mark on their habits both of thought and expression. As a
plain matter of observation, it is impossible to take up a newspaper or
a review, for instance, without perceiving Macaulay's influence both in
the style and the temper of modern journalism, and journalism in its
turn acts upon the style and temper of its enormous uncounted public.
The man who now succeeds in catching the ear of the writers of leading
articles, is in the position that used to be held by the head of some
great theological school, whence disciples swarmed forth to reproduce in
ten thousand pulpits the arguments, the opinions, the images, the
tricks, the postures, and the mannerisms of a single master.

Two men of very different kinds have thoroughly impressed the
journalists of our time, Macaulay and Mr. Mill. Mr. Carlyle we do not
add to them; he is, as the Germans call Jean Paul, _der Einzige_. And he
is a poet, while the other two are in their degrees serious and
argumentative writers, dealing in different ways with the great topics
that constitute the matter and business of daily discussion. They are
both of them practical enough to interest men handling real affairs, and
yet they are general or theoretical enough to supply such men with the
large and ready commonplaces which are so useful to a profession that
has to produce literary graces and philosophical decorations at an
hour's notice. It might perhaps be said of these two distinguished men
that our public writers owe most of their virtues to the one, and most
of their vices to the other. If Mill taught some of them to reason,
Macaulay tempted more of them to declaim: if Mill set an example of
patience, tolerance, and fair examination of hostile opinions, Macaulay
did much to encourage oracular arrogance, and a rather too thrasonical
complacency; if Mill sowed ideas of the great economic, political, and
moral bearings of the forces of society, Macaulay trained a taste for
superficial particularities, trivial circumstantialities of local
colour, and all the paraphernalia of the pseudo-picturesque.

Of course nothing so obviously untrue is meant as that this is an
account of Macaulay's own quality. What is empty pretension in the
leading article, was often a warranted self-assertion in Macaulay; what
in