dental service, but as used by Macaulay
becomes highly organic. For his illustrations are not farfetched or
laboriously worked out. They seem to be of one piece with his story or his
argument. His mind was quick to detect resemblances and analogies. He was
ready with a comparison for everything, sometimes with half a dozen. For
example, Addison's essays, he has occasion to say, were different every
day of the week, and yet, to his mind, each day like something--like
Horace, like Lucian, like the "Tales of Scheherezade." He draws long
comparisons between Walpole and Townshend, between Congreve and Wycherley,
between Essex and Villiers, between the fall of the Carlovingians and the
fall of the Moguls. He follows up a general statement with swarms of
instances. Have historians been given to exaggerating the villainy of
Machiavelli? Macaulay can name you half a dozen who did so. Did the
writers of Charles's faction delight in making their opponents appear
contemptible? "They have told us that Pym broke down in a speech, that
Ireton had his nose pulled by Hollis, that the Earl of Northumberland
cudgeled Henry Marten, that St. John's manners were sullen, that Vane had
an ugly face, that Cromwell had a red nose." Do men fail when they quit
their own province for another? Newton failed thus; Bentley failed; Inigo
Jones failed; Wilkie failed. In the same way he was ready with quotations.
He writes in one of his letters: "It is a dangerous thing for a man with a
very strong memory to read very much. I could give you three or four
quotations this moment in support of that proposition; but I will bring
the vicious propensity under subjection, if I can." Thus we see his mind
doing instantly and involuntarily what other minds do with infinite pains,
bringing together all things that have a likeness or a common bearing.

It is precisely these talents that set Macaulay among the simplest and
clearest of writers, and that accounts for much of his popularity. People
found that in taking up one of his articles they simply read on and on,
never puzzling over the meaning of a sentence, getting the exact force of
every statement, and following the trend of thought with scarcely a mental
effort. And his natural gift of making things plain he took pains to
support by various devices. He constructed his sentences after the
simplest normal fashion, subject and verb and object, sometimes inverting
for emphasis, but rarely complicating, and always r