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