After the appearance of the works of Hume and Robertson, History became, as we have heard Gibbon say, the most popular theme with the reading public. His own monumental work gave new impetus to historical study. Sharon Turner (1768-1847) devoted himself mainly to Anglo-Saxon researches. Sir Francis Palgrave (1788-1861) distinguished himself by research into the institutions and events of England and of English history from the Conquest to the days of the Plantagenets. Dr. Lingard, a Catholic priest (1771-1851), produced a general history of the country up to 1688, which perhaps has not yet been superseded by any book of similar scope, and which is the more valuable as indicating the aspect of events in the eyes of a Catholic. Necessarily the works of these authors lack much information, contained in manuscripts not then accessible to them, but now opened to students by the better arrangement and cataloguing of State Papers. The historians of the end of the eighteenth and the first thirty or forty years of the nineteenth century, were not so heavily laden with documents as historical writers of to-day, and they had leisure enough to assimilate their less ponderous materials and to arrange them with more of reflection and of art than is now common.

The historian who wears best is decidedly Henry Hallam (1777-1859). The son of a Canon of Windsor, he was educated at Eton and Christ Church. He entered the Middle Temple, but obtained a fairly lucrative post in the Civil Service, had property of his own, and devoted himself, in his leisure, to literary and historical study. His "View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages" holds its ground, despite the absence of materials[Pg 644] now made common coin by Stubbs, Maitland, and others. Considering the immensity of the ground which Hallam surveys, his accuracy is remarkable (for example he corrects, all in vain, an important if minute error of detail which still infests the latest works on Jeanne d\'Arc), and, though he is compelled to be concise, we see in his pages, for instance on Charlemagne, that he can combine spirit and interest with brevity. The same praise must be given to his "Constitutional History of England" (Henry VII.—George II.). It is commonly said that an impartial historian cannot be interesting. On the other hand, Hallam\'s conscientious efforts to be impartial lend much interest to his books. He has no flights of impetuous rhetoric; he is the last man to let his imagination transfigure prosaic facts into glittering fancies. We see an honourable, learned, and sober-minded man, who sums up life like a judge and does not plead like an advocate. "Eulogy and invective may be had for the asking. But for cold rigid justice, the one weight and the one measure, we know not where else to look," says Macaulay in his review of Hallam\'s book, a review even unusually rich in the unmeasured invective of the more popular historian. If we think Hallam "dull," the dullness is in ourselves. Hallam has not the current delusion that the Protestant reformers, from 1550 to 1688, were friends of freedom of conscience.

His last important book "An Introduction to the Literature of Europe" (fifteenth to seventeenth centuries) is very deficient in taste for the early works of les primitifs: "we cannot place the \'Iliad\' on a level with the Jerusalem of Tasso," in some essential respects. On the other hand, Hallam speaks thus of Christopher North (Professor Wilson): "A living writer of the most ardent and enthusiastic genius, whose eloquence is as the rush of mighty waters," with more to the same effect. Spenser\'s stanza "is particularly inconvenient and languid in narration". Hallam has, in fact, very little space for inspiriting literary criticism, on account of the vast scope of his theme. He has to treat of Scioppius, his "Infamia Famiani," and of Ubbo Emmius, of Gr?vius and Spanheim, Camerarius and Grew. The encyclop?dic nature of Hallam\'s task made it impossible for him to avoid[Pg 645] aridity, and to mingle much pleasure with instruction. He is otherwise associated with poetry, as his son Arthur was the friend of Tennyson, and dying early, inspired the long elegy of "In Memoriam," and the beautiful lines on "The Valley of Cauteretz".

Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Thomas Babington Macaulay, born at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, on 25 October, 1800, is an ideal representative of one mood of the English mind and character during the first half of the nineteenth century. Though the Mac in his patronymic be Gaelic, he and his forefathers had little in them of the typical Celt. The name Macaulay means MacOlaf (Olafson) and the Norseman rather than the Celt predominated in Macaulay. His great grandfather, the Rev. Aulay, and his grandfather the Rev. John, are reported by Bishop Forbes (in "The Lyon in Mourning") to have been personally and peculiarly active in attempting to gain the prize of ￡30,000 offered by the English Government for Prince Charles. Their enterprise did not suit the Celtic character. Macaulay\'s father, Zachary, was a deeply religious man, a member of the so-called "Clapham Sect" of Evangelicals. Though he was at one time prosperous in business, so much of his time and energy were given to negro emancipation that misfortunes came, and Macaulay had to work hard for his livelihood.

There are no more delightful chapters in Biography than those in which Sir George Trevelyan describes Macaulay\'s childhood. His intelligence was precocious; his memory was a marvel. At the age of 9 he read once through "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and was able to repeat the whole of the poem. This exceeds even Scott\'s feat of repeating the whole of a ballad of eighty verses which he had heard read once by the author. Macaulay\'s memory lasted throughout his life, and gave him, naturally, that amazing readiness and richness in literary and historical allusions which have made his Essays and History popular beyond rivalry. No doubt like Scott he relied on memory too confidently; styling Claverhouse, for example, "James Graham". He read with a rapidity inconceivable; and he read everything, from Plato, Herodotus, and ?schylus to the worst novels, forgetting nothing in them[Pg 646] that was accidentally good or exquisitely absurd. Even in childhood he was a copious and accomplished writer, his "Family Epic on Olaf, King and Saint," presents a remarkably successful imitation of Scott\'s style in "The Lady of the Lake". With these intellectual gifts he combined intense affection, good humour, and a turn for loud and vehement argument. Going from a private school to Trinity College, Cambridge, Macaulay regretted that he had not chosen Oxford; for mathematics were his abomination. He twice gained, as Tennyson did once, the Chancellor\'s medal for a prize poem, but in the Tripos of 1822 "Macaulay of Trinity was gulfed," by "the cross-grained Muses of the cube and square". They did not prevent him from obtaining a Fellowship at Trinity. He won a prize essay on William III., which is written in the very cadences of style that mark his History; and, at intervals, in the same short sentences. "He knew where to pause. He outraged no national prejudice. He abolished no ancient form. He altered no venerable name." Possibly it is a pity that these sentences do not describe William\'s conduct in Scottish affairs.

His early pieces, Macaulay contributed to "Knight\'s Quarterly Magazine". At the age of 25 he wrote in "The Edinburgh Review," that essay on poetry in general and on Milton as poet, man, and politician in particular, which took the world as suddenly and as completely as Byron\'s "Childe Harold" had done. "The family breakfast-table was covered with cards of invitation to dinner from every quarter of London." To readers who in our day read the essay this enthusiasm seems creditable to the world, but rather surprising. Of ?schylus, Macaulay wrote: "considered as plays, his works are absurd; considered as choruses, they are above all praise". Milton\'s admiration of Euripides reminds him of "Titania kissing the long ears of Bottom".

Grateful as every reader is to Macaulay for the vivid and lucid expression of his knowledge and thought in his essays, we must admit that, like Charles Lamb, he was a man of "imperfect sympathies". Miss Edgeworth, delighted to find her own name in a footnote to his "History of England," expressed to him her regret that Scott, who had written with entire impartiality about[Pg 647] Macaulay\'s period, was not once mentioned. In truth, after reading Lockhart\'s "Life of Scott," with its magnificent and melancholy close in the "Journal" of a man working himself to death for honour\'s sake, Macaulay wrote thus of Sir Walter: "In politics a bitter and unscrupulous partisan; profuse and ostentatious in expense; agitated by the hopes and fears of a gambler,... sacrificing the perfection of his compositions to his eagerness for money... in order to satisfy wants which were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious speculations; this is the way in which he appears to me". Scott was a Tory: and from Macaulay\'s remarks we understand the justice of his studies of historical characters.

The rapacious speculator, in fact, had shown "extravagant waste" in publishing books (not his own) of disinterested research; when he was ruined he gave away his work, because he had not money to give; the "bitter and unscrupulous partisan" as a historian of his country was more than scrupulously fair. Of Brougham\'s essays Macaulay wrote: "All the characters are either too black or too fair. The passions of the writer do not suffer him even to maintain the decent appearance of impartiality." These are the very charges brought against Macaulay\'s own "characters" of William Penn the Quaker, and Claverhouse the Cavalier; while no historian, perhaps, can defend his account of Sir Elijah Impey. Had a Stuart King behaved as William III. did in the matter of the Darien enterprise, we can easily imagine the style in which Macaulay would have "dusted the varlet\'s jacket". But with lapse of time his bias, his prejudices, can be discounted. As early as 1828 he wrote "a perfect historian must possess an imagination sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting and picturesque". That power of imagination he possessed and exercised so delightfully that his History was at once purchased more eagerly than a poem or romance. Both as a collector of materials and as a traveller to the scenes of which he was to write, Macaulay toiled with his own unexampled energy and rapidity. It is well worth while to read his account of his own methods both in study and in composition.[1]

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It is not the good fortune of most historians to possess even Macaulay\'s private means, the savings of five years passed in India as legal member of the Indian Council. Nor can his practical knowledge of politics and of the world be often found among students, while his natural gifts of imagination and of expression are almost unexampled. His intellect had the limits of his class, his age, and his robust and hasty temperament.

His poems, "The Lays of Ancient Rome," have been as popular as his prose. He tried at 40 to write such ballads as he conceived the folk-songs of republican Rome to have been, and nobody can deny that the "Lays" have abundance of spirit and "go". The ballad of the Armada, and of "The Last Buccaneer" possess the same virtues and will always be dear to young people of spirit. Arrived at the age of 50, Macaulay wrote, in the very words of the dying Hazlitt, "Well, I have had a happy life!" It was extended to 1859, he died on 28 December, leaving a name justly honourable and a cherished memory.

Thomas Carlyle.

Carlyle (1795-1881), with Burns, Knox, and Scott, is the chief representative in letters of "the good and the not so good" (in his own words applied to Sir Walter) of the Scottish character. Unlike the other three, Carlyle was "thrawn," a word not easily translated, but implying a certain twist, or perversion, towards the whole nature of things. The apostle of silence was the most voluble of mortals; the peasant stoic felt the pain of the pea beneath a heap of mattresses as keenly as the delicate princess of the fairy tale.

Carlyle was first of all a Scottish humorist; that peculiar humour of which Southrons deny the existence underlay the fateful gloom of the philosopher and historian who beheld his country "shooting Niagara," who saw that society was rotten and doomed, and who found no remedy except in the arrival of a Cromwell or a Frederick. He "praised the keen unscrupulous force" of such heroes: though he did not use the term "superman," he believed in the idea. It is quite certain that he had great tenderness and friendliness; his affection for Lockhart, so unlike him superficially[Pg 649] (though Lockhart, too, was tender, melancholy, and "thrawn") is really touching. Carlyle had "our Scottish kindness," in Knox\'s phrase, that is attachment to kin and clan. Even in his dourest moods of personal invective his bark was worse than his bite, but there was a great deal of bark. The conclusion of the whole matter in the long dispute as to the relations of Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle is that, with a deep mutual affection, theirs was a life of cat and dog.

Born in 1795 at Ecclefechan in Dumfriesshire, Carlyle was the son of a stone mason, though his genealogy traces him back behind the Conquest to the Carlyle Lords of Torthorwald. Educated at the Grammar School of Annan, and the University of Edinburgh, Carlyle was for some years a dominie, much at odds with himself and the universe. He found guidance in Goethe and other Germans; wrote in "Fraser\'s Magazine," and elsewhere, essays often historical; in London met Coleridge and Lamb, who was in one of his wildest moods; wrote a "Life of Schiller" in the style of a man of this world; married in 1826, and for six years was brooding, grumbling, studying, writing, and "making himself," in the bitter solitude of his wife\'s little lairdship, Craigenputtock. Here he produced, in his own characteristic manner, "Sartor Resartus," a disguised autobiography, a humorous and mournful version of his own struggles to find bottom in a universe apparently bottomless. That most things are shams, and that shams are doomed, was Carlyle\'s message. The fate of shams was illustrated in the fiery pages of his "French Revolution," written after he went to his life-long home in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where it could not be said that, as in Kilmeny\'s fairy-land, "the cock never crew". When, despite cocks and other disturbances, Carlyle, with heroic efforts of study, had finished the first volume, John Stuart Mill lent it to a lady, and it was never seen again. Her cook may have been a Betty Barnes. Carlyle returned to his task, and in 1837 the book astonished the world. It had all the colour of romance, and despite the discoveries of recent research, it seems substantially accurate in detail.

"Heroes and Hero-Worship," and the "Past (mediaeval) and Present," preluded to his very laborious "Letters and[Pg 650] Speeches of Oliver Cromwell" (1845). With many a groan over the confusion of his materials, and with many a shout of applause to the orator of the speeches, Carlyle set Oliver in the light of day, interpreting the studied ambiguities of such speeches of the hero as he makes to the puzzled Wildrake in "Woodstock". Sir Walter\'s Cromwell is probably as correct a portrait of the Protector as Carlyle\'s, and Carlyle\'s must be compared with the less enthusiastic study by Mr. S. R. Gardiner. Carlyle took conscientious pains with the military part of his history, visiting the battlefields, and becoming epic in the fiery spirit of his description of the defeat of his countrymen at Dunbar. A chart-picture of the battle evaded his research, and his account is not absolutely correct. After another prophetic cry of doom in "Latter Day Pamphlets" (1850) Carlyle plunged for many years into the labour of studying "Frederick the Great". The toil outwore his force, and it may be complained that he did not focus his subject. Yet none of his books is of greater interest, and he is the prophet of the modern greatness of Germany. We see how fortis Etruria crevit; through discipline, patriotism, self-sacrifice, "enduring hardness," and obedient to her greatest men. No other than Carlyle could have told the story with so much alluring animation; his military history, too, is most conscientiously studied. His native gift of observing and divining, and describing (in his own words on a singularly private scene, witnessed by him) "with perhaps some humorous exaggeration," found ample scope in his work on Frederick, as well as in his "French Revolution". No doubt he overdid the trick of reiterating traits in Dickens\'s manner;—for a truly candid censure of his style an essay by his obliged friend, Leigh Hunt, may be consulted (see remarks on Leigh Hunt).

Occasionally, as in his essays on "Cagliostro" and "The Diamond Necklace," Carlyle\'s freedom of style, and his attacks on his authorities, are somewhat infuriating; the reader wants to be told a plain tale without these excursions, exclamations, and imaginations. Carlyle regarded imagination as one of the wings of history, and perhaps encouraged the too freely imaginative narrations of his friend Froude.

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To him, unhappily, he bequeathed the autobiographical papers of himself and his wife, which Froude handled, to the best of his power, as he understood that Carlyle had desired that they should be treated. There followed outcries from the more ferocious admirers of Carlyle, though Froude had done his best to obey his master! That he could not be absolutely accurate is certain; but disloyal he never was. There is no doubt that Carlyle, irritable, absorbed in his work, and taking his wife\'s exemplary care of him for granted, was "gey ill to live wi\'," while "she had a tongue with a tang". These facts have produced a jungle of deplorable writings; but of Carlyle\'s genuine goodness and kindness no one who saw him could reasonably doubt.

The style of Carlyle was unique, unimaginable except by himself, the worst of models for others, and exquisitely fitted to embody his own idiosyncrasies—in short, it is, in prose, not wholly unlike that of Browning in many of his poems. To address the world in this voice, when he was almost unknown, demanded a courage and confidence in which Carlyle was not deficient. One is occasionally reminded of the methods, illegitimate but effective, of the author of "Tristram Shandy," and, again, of Rabelais.

James Anthony Froude.

In one way, as a historian, Froude (1818-1894) may be called the pupil, as he was the devoted friend, of Carlyle. That sage worshipped force in men, and Froude, failing a Cromwell or a Frederick, made a hero of Henry VIII., "that blot of blood and grease on the pages of English history," as Dickens called the king who found "the gospel light in Boleyn\'s eyes". It is not from Carlyle that a young historian can learn the unpopular grace of impartiality. To read Froude you would suppose that the Protestant party in the sixteenth century were innocent of the blood shed by political assassins; whereas the godly slayers of Beaton, Riccio, and the Duc de Guise, like Elizabeth when she bade Paulet murder Mary Stuart, were precisely on a level with the would-be murderers of Elizabeth; and Henry VIII. was burning martyrs of all shades in England, while the Beatons were doing the same thing to heretics in Scotland. Henry was perhaps even more[Pg 652] treacherous than he was lustful and cruel, but it is in the original sources, not in Froude\'s History, that you discover the fact.

However, impartial history is notoriously dull, whereas that of Froude is so entertaining that to take up a volume is to go on reading, fascinated by his charm, and delighted by a style remote as the poles from Carlyle\'s. It is as simple as Swift\'s, admirably lucid, excelling in the gift of narrative, without imitable peculiarities, and as entirely spontaneous as if the author were writing an ordinary letter.

Froude, with his brother Richard, was at Oxford when Newman was the great influence among the junior Fellows (Exeter was Froude\'s College), and Froude went so far with the Movement as to work at the Lives of some early English Saints. But the innocent legends of their miracles were too much for his belief, despite the excellent evidence for some of those of St. Thomas of Canterbury. His scepticism extended, and his short anti-religious novel, "The Nemesis of Faith" (1849), is said to have been thrown into the fire by a don of his own college.

He turned to History—that of England from the reign of Henry VIII. to the defeat of the Armada, and he resolutely attacked the great masses of Spanish contemporary manuscripts at Simancas. It was a knightly deed, when we think of the handwriting of the period, and the sometimes inextricably bad grammar of the writers. Different modern historians, in one case, give diverse translations of one crucial passage, and it seems that all of them are wrong. But Froude committed many errors which were not perceived by his furious assailant, Freeman (who did not know where to have him), but are conspicuous when we compare his work with his authorities. He is quite untrustworthy; he has taken fragments from three letters of three different dates, and printed them, with marks of quotation, as if they occurred in a single letter. He accuses Mary Stuart of a certain action, on the authority of the English ambassador, and when we read his letter we find him saying that rumour charges Mary with the fact, but that he does not believe it.

Froude describes a dramatic scene in which Elizabeth triumphs over the Scottish envoys sent to plead for Mary\'s life; and when we examine the authorities, to which an erroneous reference is[Pg 653] given, we find in them no such matter, no such scene. The impression given is that Froude read his authorities, let what he read simmer in his mind, let his fancy play freely over it, and then wrote in picturesque and alluring fashion, on the dictates of romance, without ever comparing what he wrote with what his authorities recorded. They are uninteresting, Froude is extremely interesting: as a maker of literature he is in the first rank; as a chronicler of the truth he is not always trustworthy. He did not know his subject "all round"; of Scotland he knew little, and was wedded to the belief that James I. was the first of the Stuart line. He gravely repeats and embellishes Knox\'s mythical account of the disaster of Solway Moss, but probably the English despatches of the day were not accessible to him. How much of the interest of his book would survive if it were reduced to the sober verities one cannot estimate, but his wonderful power of giving a kind of bird\'s-eye views of most complicated European situations in politics must remain unmatched.

Froude, against his bias, made it seem almost certain that Elizabeth had guilty foreknowledge of the death of Amy Robsart. He leaned on a letter of the Spanish ambassador, and reading the Spanish for "last month" as "the present month," he left an erroneous impression. At the moment (1856-1869) there seems to have been no English reviewer who had the necessary knowledge; for Freeman merely picked holes in the fringes of Froude\'s work. Froude wrote "The English in Ireland," wrote books of political observations made in our colonies, and, succeeding Freeman ............