the intellect; things of more subtle nature he generally disbelieved in or
dismissed with contempt. In dealing with complex or subtle characters he
cannot reveal the deeper spiritual motives from which their action sprang;
and in his view of history he does not include the underlying and
controlling spiritual forces. Macaulay was the most brilliant of those whom
the Germans have named Philistines, the people for whom life consists of
material things; specifically he was the representative of the great body
of middle-class early-Victorian liberals, enthusiastically convinced that
in the triumphs of the Liberal party, of democracy, and of mechanical
invention, the millennium was being rapidly realized. Macaulay wrote a
fatal indictment of himself when in praising Bacon as the father of modern
science he depreciated Plato, the idealist. Plato's philosophy, said
Macaulay, 'began in words and ended in words,' and he added that 'an acre
in Middlesex is better than a peerage in Utopia.' In his literary and
personal essays, therefore, such as the famous ones on Milton and Bacon,
which belong early in his career, all his immense reading did not suffice
to produce sympathetic and sensitive judgments; there is often more
pretentiousness of style than significance of interpretation. In later life
he himself frankly expressed regret that he had ever written these essays.

Macaulay's 'History of England' shows to some degree the same faults as the
essays, but here they are largely corrected by the enormous labor which he
devoted to the work. His avowed purpose was to combine with scientific
accuracy the vivid picturesqueness of fiction, and to 'supersede the last
fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies.' His method was that of an
unprecedented fulness of details which produces a crowded pageant of events
and characters extremely minute but marvelously lifelike. After three
introductory chapters which sketch the history of England down to the death
of Charles II, more than four large volumes are occupied with the following
seventeen years; and yet Macaulay had intended to continue to the death of