and America. In his own country three thousand copies went in ten days, a record surpassing anything since Waverley, nearly forty years before; and four months later a New York publisher informed Macaulay that there were six editions on the market, with probably sixty thousand copies sold, adding, "No work, of any kind, has ever so completely taken our whole country by storm.” The next two volumes, published in 1855, were still more popular. Within three months his publishers paid him £20,000 in a single check. With pecuniary reward came also the honors that belonged to the first English historian of his day. In 1849 he had declined the professorship of modern history at Cambridge. In 1853 he was elected a foreign member of the Institute of France, and the king of Prussia named him a knight of the Order of Merit. Learned societies all over Europe made him of their number; he held high offices at the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge; and in 1857 he was elevated to the peerage, as Baron Macaulay of Rothley,

Not content with making himself the most popular and influential essayist and historian of his time, Lord Macaulay had aspired also to the poet's laurels. In 1842 he had published his well-known Lays of Ancient Rome. Full of fire and spirit, of rapid movement, vigor, and stateliness, they are as characteristic of their author as are his speeches or his History. Macaulay was not a poet of the kind of the greatest poets of our century. His imagination was rather historic than poetic; one of the tenderest-hearted of men, his feeling was social and sympathetic rather than lyric and impassioned; his delight was in objective activity, not in the companionship of his own moods; he loved the life of men better than the life of nature; he was not an instinctive master of the secrets of the human heart. But he had the power of making the past seem present to him. He moved in other days or lands as easily as his own; London became

at will the London of Queen Anne or the capital of the Cæsars. He could reconstruct, from the material which his great reading supplied, all the life and color and movement of generations dead and gone. The Lays of Ancient Rome are not mere rhetoric in verse; they move us like martial music and the tread of marching men; they are genuine poetry, though not of the kind which our age values

most.

Lord Macaulay's life had always been intense. "When I do sit down to work," he said of himself, "I work harder and faster than any person that I ever knew"; and he played as hard as he worked. His tremendous intellectual energy, always active, and always applying itself in powerfully concentrated effort, had begun to wear out his body. In 1852 had developed serious trouble with his heart, and he never regained perfect health. As the History progressed, he applied himself to his task with increasing difficulty; after the publication of the second instalment his waning strength compelled him to resign his seat in Parliament; the fifth volume he did not live to see in print. Toward the close of the year 1859 his weakness grew upon him, and on December 28th death came, suddenly but painlessly, as he sat in his easy chair with open book beside him. He was buried in Westminster Abbey, near to Johnson and Addison, the great representative prose writer of the first half of the nineteenth century beside the two great essayists of the eighteenth.

The most conspicuous trait in Macaulay's character, the trait which appears in all that he did, is his vigor, his energy of intellect. He is a kind of nineteenth-century Dr. Johnson, made fit for the drawing-room. But where Johnson was lazy, he was active; where Johnson was melancholy, he was cheerful; where Johnson was weak, he was strong. His exhaustless capacity for work, his incessant intellectual

activity, he read with impartial avidity everything from the hardest Greek tragedy to the last bad novel, his wonderful powers of memory, his brilliant conversation, his diversified interests and varied literary production, all attest the same trait. He wasted on trifles the intellectual force of half a dozen ordinary brains.

It is not strange that such a man should have been one of the most forcible writers that ever held a pen. Every sentence is crisp, clear, and strong. The boy or girl who studies Macaulay's style is taking a composition tonic. It is the best remedy that can be prescribed for the diffuseness and inaccuracy of thought, loose and ineffective sentencestructure, and feeble use of words, that beset the average untrained writer. Clearness and force in thinking, speaking, and writing are the qualities best worth cultivating. "The first rule of all writing," said Macaulay, "that rule to which every other is subordinate, is that the words used by the writer shall be such as most fully and precisely convey his meaning to the great body of his readers." It is a rule which we may well make our motto. The teacher who makes the best use of Macaulay will not fail to direct continual attention to the style.

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ADDISON.

(EDINBURGH REVIEW, JULY, 1843.)

SOME reviewers are of opinion that a lady who dares to publish a book renounces by that act the franchises appertaining to her sex, and can claim no exemption from the utmost rigor of critical procedure. From that opinion we dissent. We admit, indeed, that in a country which 5 boasts of many female writers, eminently qualified by their talents and acquirements to influence the public mind, it would be of most pernicious consequence that inaccurate history or unsound philosophy should be suffered to pass uncensured, merely because the offender chanced to be a 10 lady. But we conceive that, on such occasions, a critic would do well to imitate the courteous knight who found himself compelled by duty to keep the lists against Bradamante. He, we are told, defended successfully the cause of which he was the champion; but before the fight began, 15 exchanged Balisarda for a less deadly sword, of which he carefully blunted the point and edge.

Nor are the immunities of sex the only immunities which Miss Aikin may rightfully plead. Several of her works, and especially the very pleasing 'Memoirs of the 20 Reign of James the First,' have fully entitled her to the privileges enjoyed by good writers. One of those privileges we hold to be this, that such writers, when, either from the unlucky choice of a subject or from the indolence too often produced by success, they happen to fail, 25

shall not be subjected to the severe discipline which it is sometimes necessary to inflict upon dunces and impostors, but shall merely be reminded by a gentle touch, like that with which the Laputan flapper roused his dreaming lord, 5 that it is high time to wake.

Our readers will probably infer from what we have said that Miss Aikin's book has disappointed us. The truth is, that she is not well acquainted with her subject. No person who is not familiar with the political and literary 10 history of England during the reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First can possibly write a good life of Addison. Now, we mean no reproach to Miss Aikin, and many will think that we pay her a compliment, when we say that her studies have taken a different direc15 tion.

She is better acquainted with Shakespeare and Raleigh than with Congreve and Prior; and is far more at home among the ruffs and peaked beards of Theobald's than among the Steenkirks and flowing periwigs which surrounded Queen Anne's tea-table at Hampton. She 20 seems to have written about the Elizabethan age because she had read much about it; she seems, on the other hand, to have read a little about the age of Addison because she had determined to write about it. The consequence is, that she has had to describe men and things without 25 having either a correct or a vivid idea of them, and that she has often fallen into errors of a very serious kind. The reputation which Miss Aikin has justly earned stands so high, and the charm of Addison's letters is so great, that a second edition of this work may probably be 30 required. If so, we hope that every paragraph will be revised, and that every date and fact about which there can be the smallest doubt will be carefully verified.

To Addison himself we are bound by a sentiment as much like affection as any sentiment can be which is