the Edinburgh Review, a few early ones in the Quarterly
Magazine, and five, written late in life, in the Encyclopedia
Britannica. Those produced during his Parliamentary life
were usually written in the house between early rising and
breakfast. Macaulay was essentially an historian, a story
teller, and the historical essay he made peculiarly his own.
Fully a score of his essays, more than half the total number,
are of this description, the most and best of them dealing
with English history. Macaulay's essays were meant to
inform. Characters and situations are delineated in them,
but not created. History and criticism are often not litera
ture at all. They become literature only by revealing an
imaginative insight and clothing themselves in artistic form.
Macaulay's essays have clone this; they engage the emotions
as well as the intellect. They were meant for records, for
storehouses of information ; but they are also works of art,
and therefore they live intact while the records of equally
industrious but less gifted historians are revised and
and replaced. Thus by their artistic quality they are
removed from the shelves of history to the shelves of litera
ture.
But Macaulay himself should be remembered for his
real greatness. His greatness lay in the qualities that are
quite beyond imitation, the power of bringing instantly into
our mental focus 11► e accumulations of a prodigious memory,
the range of vision, the grasp of detail, and the insight into
men, measures, and events, that enabled him to reduce to
beautiful order the chaos of human history.