days, it has been with me on the sweltering
Gold Coast, and it formed part of my humble
kit when I went a-whaling in the Arctic. 
Honest Scotch harpooners have addled their
brains over it, and you may still see the grease
stains where the second engineer grappled
with Frederick the Great. Tattered and dirty
and worn, no gilt-edged morocco-bound volume
could ever take its place for me.

  What a noble gateway this book forms
through which one may approach the study
either of letters or of history! Milton,
Machiavelli, Hallam, Southey, Bunyan,
Byron, Johnson, Pitt, Hampden, Clive, Hastings,
Chatham---what nuclei for thought!
With a good grip of each how pleasant and
easy to fill in all that lies between! The short,
vivid sentences, the broad sweep of allusion,
the exact detail, they all throw a glamour
round the subject and should make the least
studious of readers desire to go further. If
Macaulay's hand cannot lead a man upon those
pleasant paths, then, indeed, he may give up
all hope of ever finding them.

  When I was a senior schoolboy this book
---not this very volume, for it had an even
more tattered predecessor---opened up a new
world to me. History had been a lesson
and abhorrent. Suddenly the task and the
drudgery became an incursion into an enchanted
land, a land of colour and beauty,
with a kind, wise guide to point the path. 
In that great style of his I loved even the
faults---indeed, now that I come to think of
it, it was the faults which I loved best. No
sentence could be too stiff with rich embroidery,
and no antithesis too flowery. It
pleased me to read that ``a universal shout
of laughter from the Tagus to the Vistula informed
the Pope that the days of the crusades
were past,'' and I was delighted to learn that
``Lady Jerningham kept a vase in which
people placed foolish verses, and Mr. Dash
wrote verses which were fit to be placed in
Lady Jerningham's vase.'' Those were the
kind of sentences which used to fill me with
a vague but enduring pleasure, like chords
which linger in the musician's ear. A man
likes a plainer literary diet as he grows older,
but still as I glance over the Essays I am filled
with admiration and wonder at the alternate
power of handling a great subject, and of adorning
it by delightful detail---just a bold sweep of
the brush, and then the most delicate stippling. 
As he leads you down the path, he for ever
indicates the alluring side-tracks which branch
away from it. An admirable, if somewhat old-fashioned,
literary and historical education
night be effected by working through every
book which is alluded to in the Essays. I should
be curious, however, to know the exact age of
the youth when he came to the end of his
studies.

  I wish Macaulay had written a historical
novel. I am convinced that it would have
been a great one. I do not know if he had
the power of drawing an imaginary character,
but he certainly had the gift of reconstructing
a dead celebrity to a remarkable degree. Look
at the simple half-paragraph in which he gives
us Johnson and his atmosphere. Was ever a
more definite picture given in a shorter space---

  ``As we close it, the club-room is before
us, and the table on which stand the omelet
for Nugent, and the lemons for Johnson. 
There are assembled those heads which live
for ever on the canvas of Reynolds. There
are the spectacles of Burke, and the tall thin
form of Langton, the courtly sneer of Beauclerk
and the beaming smile of Garrick, Gibbon
tapping his snuff-box, and Sir Joshua with
his trumpet in his ear. In the foreground is
that strange figure which is as familiar to us
as the figures of those among whom we have
been brought up---the gigantic body, the huge
massy face, seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings,
the grey wig with the scorched foretop, the
dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the
quick. We see the eyes and mouth moving
with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy
form rolling; we hear it puffing, and then
comes the `Why, sir!' and the `What then,
sir?' and the `No, sir!' and the `You
don't see your way through the question,
sir! ' ''