It is etched into your memory for ever.

  I can remember that when I visited London
at the age of sixteen the first thing I did after
housing my luggage was to make a pilgrimage
to Macaulay's grave, where he lies in Westminster
Abbey, just under the shadow of Addison,
and amid the dust of the poets whom he
had loved so well. It was the one great object
of interest which London held for me. And
so it might well be, when I think of all I owe
him. It is not merely the knowledge and the
stimulation of fresh interests, but it is the
charming gentlemanly tone, the broad, liberal
outlook, the general absence of bigotry and of
prejudice. My judgment now confirms all
that I felt for him then.

  My four-volume edition of the History
stands, as you see, to the right of the Essays. 
Do you recollect the third chapter of that
work---the one which reconstructs the England
of the seventeenth century? It has always
seemed to me the very high-water mark
of Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous
mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing. 
The population of towns, the statistics of
commerce, the prosaic facts of life are all
transmuted into wonder and interest by the
handling of the master. You feel that he
could have cast a glamour over the multiplication
table had he set himself to do so. Take
a single concrete example of what I mean. 
The fact that a Londoner in the country, or
a countryman in London, felt equally out of
place in those days of difficult travel, would
seem to hardly require stating, and to afford
no opportunity of leaving a strong impression
upon the reader's mind. See what Macaulay
makes of it, though it is no more. than a hundred
other paragraphs which discuss a hundred
various points---

  ``A cockney in a rural village was stared
at as much as if he had intruded into a kraal
of Hottentots. On the other hand, when the
lord of a Lincolnshire or Shropshire manor
appeared in Fleet Street, he was as easily
distinguished from the resident population as
a Turk or a Lascar. His dress, his gait, his
accent, the manner in which he gazed at the
shops, stumbled into gutters, ran against the
porters, and stood under the waterspouts,
marked him out as an excellent subject for
the operations of swindlers and banterers.
Bullies jostled him into the kennel, Hackney
coachmen splashed him from head to foot,
thieves explored with perfect security the huge
pockets of his horseman's coat, while he stood
entranced by the splendour of the Lord Mayor's
Show. Money-droppers, sore from the cart's
tail, introduced themselves to him, and appeared
to him the most honest friendly gentlemen
that he had ever seen. Painted women,
the refuse of Lewkner Lane and Whetstone
Park, passed themselves on him for countesses
and maids of honour. If he asked his way to
St. James', his informants sent him to Mile
End. If he went into a shop, he was instantly
discerned to be a fit purchaser of everything
that nobody else would buy, of second-hand
embroidery, copper rings, and watches that
would not go. If he rambled into any fashionable
coffee-house, he became a mark for
the insolent derision of fops, and the grave
waggery of Templars. Enraged and mortified,
he soon returned to his mansion, and
there, in the homage of his tenants and the
conversation of his boon companions, found
consolation for the vexations and humiliations
which he had undergone. There he was once
more a great man, and saw nothing above himself
except when at the assizes he took his seat
on the bench near the Judge, or when at the
muster of the militia he saluted the Lord Lieutenant.''

  On the whole, I should put this detached
chapter of description at the very head of his
Essays, though it happens to occur in another
volume. The History as a whole does not, as
it seems to me, reach the same level as the
shorter articles. One cannot but feel that it
is a brilliant piece of special pleading from a
fervid Whig, and that there must be more to
be said for the other side than is there set forth. 
Some of the Essays are tinged also, no doubt,
by his own political and religious limitations. 
The best are those which get right away into
the broad fields of literature and philosophy.