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business has been done to his hand. It wants little critical experience to discover that this massive simplicity is really indicative of an art not, it may be, of the highest order, but truly admirable for its purpose. It indicates not only a gigantic memory, but a glowing mind, which has fused a crude mass of materials into unity. If we do not find the sudden touches which reveal the philosophical sagacity or the imaginative insight of the highest order of intellects, we recognize the true rhetorical instinct. The outlines may be harsh, and the colours too glaring; but the general effect has been carefully studied. The details are wrought in with consummate skill. We indulge in an intercalary pish! here and there; but we are fascinated and we remember. The actual amount of intellectual force which goes to the composition of such written archives is immense, though the quality may have something to be desired. Shrewd common sense may be an inferior substitute for philosophy, and the faculty which brings remote objects close to the eye of an ordinary observer for the loftier faculty which tinges everyday life with the hues of mystic contemplation. But when the common faculties are present in so abnormal a degree, they begin to have a dignity of their own.

It is impossible in such matters to establish any measure of comparison. No analysis will enable us to say how much pedestrian capacity may be fairly regarded as equivalent to a small capacity for soaring above the solid earth, and therefore the question as to the relative value of Macaulay's work and that of some men of loftier aims and less perfect execution must be left to individual taste. We can only say that it is something so to have written the history of many national heroes as to make their faded glories revive to active life in the memory of their countrymen. So long as Englishmen are what they are-and they don't seem to change as rapidly as might be wished-they will turn to Macaulay's pages to gain a vivid impression of our greatest achievements during an important period.

Nor is this all. The fire which glows in Macaulay's history, the intense patriotic feeling, the love of certain moral qualities, is not altogether of the highest kind. His ideal of national and individual greatness might easily be criticised. But the sentiment, as far as it goes, is altogether sound and manly. He is too fond, it has been said, of incessant moralising. From a scientific point of view the moralising is irrelevant. We want to study the causes and the nature of great social movements; and when we are stopped in order to inquire how far the prominent actors in them were hurried beyond ordinary rules, we are transported into a different order of thought. It would be as much to the purpose if we reproved an earthquake for upsetting a fort, and blamed it for moving the foundations of a church. Macaulay can never understand this point of view. With him, history is nothing more than a sum of biographies. And even from a biographical point of view his moralising is often troublesome. He not only insists upon transporting party prejudice into his estimates, and mauls poor James II. as he

mauled the Tories in 1832; but he applies obviously inadequate tests. It is absurd to call upon men engaged in a life-and-death wrestle to pay scrupulous attention to the ordinary rules of politeness. There are times when judgments guided by constitutional precedent become ludicrously out of place, and when the best man is he who aims straightest at the heart of his antagonist. But, in spite of such drawbacks, Macaulay's genuine sympathy for manliness and force of character generally enables him to strike pretty nearly the true note. To learn the true secret of Cromwell's character, we must go to Mr. Carlyle, who can sympathise with deep currents of religious enthusiasm. Macaulay retains too much of the old Whig distrust for all that it calls fanaticism fully to recognize the grandeur beneath the grotesque outside of the Puritan. But Macaulay tells us most distinctly why Englishmen warm at the name of the great Protector. We, like the banished cavaliers, "glow with an emotion of national pride" at his animated picture of the unconquerable Ironsides. One phrase may be sufficiently illustrative. After quoting Clarendon's story of the Scotch nobleman who forced Charles to leave the field of Naseby, by seizing his horse's bridle, "no man," says Macaulay, "who had much value for his life, would have tried to perform the same friendly office on that day for Oliver Cromwell.”

Macaulay, in short, always feels, and, therefore, communicates, a hearty admiration for sheer manliness. And some of his portraits of great men have therefore a genuine power, and show the deeper insight which comes from true sympathy. He estimates the respectable observer of constitutional proprieties too highly; he is unduly repelled by the external oddities of the truly masculine and noble Johnson; but his enthusiasm for his pet hero, William, or for Chatham or Clive, carries us along with him. And at moments when he is narrating their exploits, and can forget his elaborate argumentations and refrain from bits of deliberate bombast, the style becomes graphic in the higher sense of a muchabused word, and we confess that we are listening to genuine eloquence. Putting aside for the moment recollection of foibles, almost too obvious to deserve the careful demonstration which they have sometimes received, we are glad to surrender ourselves to the charm of his straightforward, clearheaded, hard-hitting declamation. There is no writer with whom it is easier to find fault, or the limits of whose power may be more distinctly defined; but within his own sphere he goes forward, as he went through life, with a kind of grand confidence in himself and his cause, which is attractive and at times even provocative of sympathetic enthusiasm.

Macaulay said, in his Diary, that he wrote his "History" with an eye to a remote past and a remote future. He meant to erect a monument more enduring than brass, and the ambition at least stimulated him to admirable thoroughness of workmanship. How far his aim was secured must be left to the decision of a posterity, which will not trouble itself about the susceptibilities of candidates for its favour. In one sense, however, Macaulay must be interesting so long as the type which he so fully repre

sents continues to exist. Whig has become an old-fashioned phrase, and is repudiated by modern Liberals and Radicals, who think themselves wiser than their fathers. The decay of the old name implies a remarkable political change; but I doubt whether it implies more than a very superficial change in the national character. New classes and new ideas have come upon the stage; but they have a curious family likeness to the old. The Whiggism, whose peculiarities Macaulay reflected so faithfully, represents some of the most deeply-seated tendencies of the national character. It has, therefore, both its ugly and its honourable side. Its disregard, or rather its hatred, for pure. reason, its exaltation of expediency above truth and precedent above principle, its instinctive dread of strong religious or political faiths, are of course questionable qualities. Yet even they have their nobler side. There is something almost sublime about the grand unreasonableness of the average Englishman. His dogged contempt for all foreigners and philosophers, his intense resolution to have his own way and use his own eyes, to see nothing that does not come within his narrow sphere of vision, and to see it quite clearly before he acts upon it, are of course abhorrent to thinkers of a different order. But they are great qualities in the struggle for existence, which must determine the future of the world. The Englishman, armed in his panoply of self-content, and grasping facts with unequalled tenacity, goes on trampling upon acuter sensibilities, but somehow shouldering his way successfully through the troubles of the universe. Strength may be combined with stupidity, but even then it is not to be trifled with. Macaulay's sympathy with these qualities led to some annoying peculiarities, to a certain brutal insularity, and to a commonness, sometimes a vulgarity of style which is easily criticised. But, at least, we must confess that, to use an epithet which always comes up in speaking of him, he is a thoroughly manly writer. There is nothing silly or finical about him. He sticks to his colours resolutely and honourably. If he flatters his countrymen, it is the unconscious and spontaneous effect of his participation in their weaknesses. He never knowingly calls black white, or panders to an ungenerous sentiment. He is combative to a fault, but his combativeness is allied to a genuine love of fair play. When he hates a man, he calls him knave or fool with unflinching frankness, but he never uses a base weapon. The wounds which he inflicts may hurt, but they do not fester. His patriotism may be narrow, but it implies faith in the really good qualities, the manliness, the spirit of justice, and the strong moral sense of his countrymen. He is proud of the healthy vigorous stock from which he springs, and the fervour of his enthusiasm, though it may shock a delicate taste, has embodied itself in writings which will long continue to be the typical illustration of qualities of which we are all proud at bottom-indeed, be it said in passing, a good deal too proud.

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Spelling.

IN one of the early numbers of this Magazine-in Hogarth's Biography, if the writer be not mistaken-some severe remarks were made touching the orthography of the conqueror. at Ramillies and Oudenarde, nor indeed was that of his Duchess allowed to escape uncensured. Very derogatory were these remarks to the brave warrior and his generous wife, but unfortunately also very true. It must not, however, be supposed that these sinners were sinners above all those of their own time, or before and after them, that they suffered such things from the able writer of that article. The tower of Siloam which fell on them might also have fallen on many more that once upon a time dwelt in merry England. In the reign of Henry V. good spelling and clean shirts were equally rare luxuries. Leicester, says Disraeli, spelt his own name in eight different methods, while the family appellation of Villers, in deeds and documents relating to the house, is spelt in at least a dozen. Mainwaring passed through 131 orthographical permutations, and is even now, if spelling have aught to do with pronunciation, spelt incorrectly at last. The immortal bard himself, not to speak of what others did for him, changed his own mind some thirty times, according to Halliwell, as to the letters and the sequence of the letters composing his illustrious patronymic. Elizabeth wrote sovereign in as many ways as she knew languages-that is, seven. The young Pretender, following his own sweet will, and entirely free from any servile bondage to the letter, writes of his father as a certain Jems or Gems. In those palmy days, when every man was his own speller, when military examinations were not, little astonishment would have been raised by such arbitrary orthography as lately adorned the paper of a candidate for one of her Majesty's appointments in the line. That candidate spelt elegy leg, and ingeniously evolved pashshinger out of passenger. Much ingenuity, nay imagination, inspired another, who framed Indian ears out of engineers. But what are such trifling irregularities as these to the caprice of say, her Grace the Duchess of Norfolk? The Duchess of Norfolk was one of the most accomplished ladies of the sixteenth century, the friend of scholars, the patron of literature. She wrote to Cromwell, Earl of Essex, thus :-" My ffary gode lord-her I sand you in tokyn hoff the neweyer a glasse hoff Setyl set in Sellfer gyld. I pra you tak hit An hy wer habel het showlde be bater," &c. The patron of literature has ingeniously contrived to spell I and it each in two different ways in as many lines. What this friend of scholars intended the Earl to understand by Setyl is very obscure. There is a Scotch word something like it signifying "a disease affecting

sheep in the side," but this the most accomplished lady can scarcely have meant. Nor was French spelling much better than English in the olden time. Royal letters of the last century are distinguished by such heterodox combinations as J'avoient and j'étè. Indeed good spelling seems to have formerly been considered a vulgarity, mere yeoman's service. "Base," might many a Louis have said, parodying the ancient Pistol"base is the soul that spells." So in effect said Will Honeycomb, when some errors were detected in the letters which he writ in his youth to a coquette lady. He never liked pedantry in spelling, and spelt like a gentleman and not like a scholar. So probably did all the ladies, the Picts, Idols, and Blanks of the society of his time. Sunday superfine spelling was left to servants and scholars and such low folk, or consigned by power of attorney to the compositor's care. The whole of the ancient world seems to have suffered from heresy and schism, and heterography was universal. Spelling primers were not, or their occupation was gone. A dive into old books and papers, but especially papers, is a dive into a chaos as dark and full of confusion as that which, if Milton be believed, was disagreeable to the devil (which, says Johnson, were more properly written divil) himself.

The wide tract of literary common in which early writers generally expatiated was considerably closed in by the composing stick. But even the press seems sometimes to have added errors rather than taken them away. Chaucer, as well as the poet of the "Ormolum," has left on record his solicitude about the correct spelling of his works, yet we find the same word printed in half a dozen different ways on the same page. Notoriously too the printers adjusted their orthography only too often by no higher or more scientific consideration than the length of their lines. The Orientals are wont to lengthen a final letter, to avoid an unseemly hiatus at the end of a line, and our early printers were licentious enough to add or take away letters for the same purpose. Printed English literature became a garden of lopped and grafted growths; exogens and endogens flourished there in abundance. The printer's galley was a Procrustean bed for most of the unhappy words that were fated to fall therein. So in the New Testament translated by the talented Tyndale we have it-one poor little word tortured in seven ways-spelt itt, yt, ytt, hit, hitt, hyt, and hytt. This, indeed, may be owing to the love of change in Tyndale himself; but it seems evident that in the edition of our holy Bible, published in 1611, hot is also printed whot, hote, ye yee, hadst haddest, with a thousand similar variations, for no other reason than that which induced a compositor to set up master-piece as Mr. Piece-convenience of spacing. Poetry is found to be usually more correct, as there was less need for this device. The press played with words as the antiquated devices of poetic altars, eggs, wings, and axes, those combinations of caprice and industry, played with good sense.

The confusion of J and I in the edition of 1611, as Iesus for Jesus, and of u and v as euery (every) and vnto (unto), together with a capri

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