primary design. For to create and maintain a brave and high-spirited party, there must be a brave and high-spirited leader—a man generous, honest, incapable of meanness, compelling respect and confidence. Such are the functions of party; and no politician has done more than the statesman who now leads the party which Pitt, and Canning, and Peel have led, to preserve it in force and effectiveness among us, and to give to political life—what has been rightly considered the best guarantee for its purity-" vigour of hostility and sharpness of opposition." Mr. Tennyson has drawn a vivid picture of the man, Who breaks his birth's invidious bar, And grasps the skirts of happy chance, And grapples with his evil star : Who makes by force his merit known, and the position occupied by the leader of the opposition-the merited reward of an intrepid intellect and a lofty ambition-is a striking testimony to the liberal traditions and the generous instincts of the high-born and high-bred gentlemen, who, for generations, have taken their leaders from among the sons of the people. IT That sober freedom, out of which there springs, ALFRED TENNYSON. is too late, and too early, to speak further of Lord Macaulay. The verdict of his contemporaries has been recorded; the verdict of posterity cannot be anticipated. Before the grave in the Abbey had been closed, a hundred rapid and brilliant pens had said almost all that could be said of the great man who had ceased from his labours. The brilliancy of our periodical literature is as marvellous as its rapidity. Leading articles, which would have brought fortune and permanent fame to Addison or Steele, appear each morning in the columns of the Times, and are forgotten before the second edition is published. That the sentence pronounced upon our great men by these organs of public opinion should be more brilliant than accurate, more antethetical than sound, is of course to be looked for. A man penning an article at midnight, which is to be read in Paris on the following afternoon, has no time for subtle discrimination or nice analysis. He selects the striking peculiarities of a character, the salient points of a career, and on these he bases an estimate which, though impressive and picturesque, is necessarily exaggerated. In spite of the conviction I have expressed, a few "last words" may, without impropriety, be now added. Two bulky volumes of Miscellaneous Writings have been recently published, and some of the contents-one piece in particular -place Lord Macaulay's character in, what the public may justly consider, a new light. It can hardly be said that Macaulay belonged to the very highest order of minds. I do not think that he did. In no department except the historical did he shew pre-eminent capacity, and even his History is open to the charge of being only a splendid and ornate panorama. His was not a creative intellect. It could not have fashioned A Midsummer Night's Dream, a Faust, or The Cenci. He wrote spirited lyrics in which the traditions and associations of a historic people are handled with consummate judgment; but we miss the spontaneous and unsystematic music, the inartificial and childlike grace, of the true ballad.* The *There is a very graceful little song written by Lord Macaulay in 1827, and included in his Miscellaneous Writings (ii. 417). But comparing it with any of the Laureate's, we detect at a glance the great gulf between true poetry and the most effective and finished copy. O stay, Madonna! stay; 'Tis not the dawn of day That marks the skies with yonder opal streak; Then press thy lips to mine, And rest upon my neck thy fervid cheek. lyrist is the creature of impulse, and Macaulay was never impulsive. Lofty, unimpassioned, self-restrained, he never confesses to any of the frailties of genius. He had great natural powers, no doubt; his memory was prodigious and exact; his understanding just and masculine; still, it seems to me that he was in everything indebted O sleep, Madonna! sleep; O'er fancy's vanished dream, O'er all that nature gives and man destroys. O wake, Madonna! wake; Even now the purple lake Is dappled o'er with amber flakes of light; A glow is on the hill; And every trickling rill In golden threads leaps down from yonder height. O fly, Madonna! fly; Lest day and envy spy What only love and night may safely know; Fly and tread softly, dear! Lest those who hate us hear The sound of thy light footsteps as they go. Then take at a venture any stanza of the Laureate's : Ask me no more; what answer should I give? Ask me no more; thy fate and mine are sealed; more to art than to nature. He is the highest product of a profound and exquisite culture. This of course detracts from the quality of his handiwork. Only the work of authentic genius is imperishable. The work of the artificer, however elaborate, however curiously finished, does not survive. But Macaulay unquestionably had genius of a kind: the genius which moulds the results of immense industry into a coherent and consistent whole. This is a fine and a most rare gift; and we are not wrong when we assert that its owner must always be, even when not of the highest order, a man of genius. Associated with the somewhat artificial constitution of his powers, is the want of flexibility which he shews. There is little virtue in the agility of the jester, or the suppleness of the mimic; but Macaulay wanted that natural lightness or airiness of touch, which characterises the working of a thoroughly creative mind. He assailed pigmies with eighty pounders. His heavy metal did its work well; but it struck right and left, the small as well as the great, without comparison, or a nice discrimination. He is one of the greatest masters of the English tongue. The ordered march of his lordly prose, to use once more a used-up simile, is stately as a Roman legion's. Still it is ponderous, compared at least with the unaffected freedom, and the flexible life, of Shakspeare's, or Fielding's, or Charles Lamb's. But the art with which this defect is concealed is, like every other detail of Lord Macaulay's art, perfect in its way. The style is ponderous, but there is no monotony. Short sentences, which, like the fire of sharp |