put the question to the "cabala"-Who seized with a feeling of horror, he laid his was its author? Contrary to what usually face on the table, called his housekeeper, happened, no intelligible answer was re- and when he raised his head again, there turned he repeated his calculations, and was nothing unusual to be seen. the result was a kind of admonition, not to make any inquiry on this subject; but, on his persisting, and a third time tempting the oracle with this too curious question, the answer was given--" Look behind you." At this our experimenter was

We do not know whether Mademoiselle Lenormand is still living. She ought not to be dead, for she told Countess N. N., in 1812, that she was sure of completing her hundred-and-eighth year.

From Tait's Magazine.

THOMAS MACAULAY.

BY GEORGE GILFILLAN.

[This critique upon one of the most brilliant and suc

happiest style, and will be perused with interest.

ED.]

To attempt a new appraisement of the intellectual character of Thomas Macaulay, we are impelled by various motives. Our former notice of him* was short, hurried, and imperfect. Since it was written, too, we have had an opportunity of seeing and hearing the man, which, as often happens in such cases, has given a more distinct and tangible shape to our views, as well as considerably modified them. Above all, the public attention has of late, owing to circumstances, been so strongly turned upon him, that we are tolerably sure of carrying it along with us in our present discussion.

ity, his boundless bonhomie, his fantastic cessful of modern essayists, is conceived in Mr Gilfillan's humor, his sympathy with every day life, For and his absolute and unique dominion over what reason the writer persists in excluding that portion every region of the odd, he has obtained a of his Christian name by which he has been best known, popularity which Shakspeare nor hardly we do not understand. The full name of the subject of Scott in their lifetime enjoyed. He is the paper is, or has been, Thomas Babington Macaulay. - ruling over us like a Fairy King, or Prince Prettyman-strong men as well as weak Louis XIV. walked so erect, and was so yielding to the glamor of his tiny rod. perfect in the management of his person, that people mistook his very size, and it was not discovered till after his death that he was a little and not a large man. So many of the admirers of Dickens have been so dazzled by the elegance of his proportions, the fairy beauty of his features, the minute grace of his motions, and the small sweet smile which plays about his mouth, that they have imagined him to be a Scott, or even a Shakspeare. To do him justice, he himself has never fallen into such an egregious mistake. He has seldom, if ever, sought to alter, by one octave, the note Nature gave him, and which is not that of an eagle nor of a nightingale, nor of a lark, but of a happy, homely, gleesome "Cricket on the Hearth." Small almost as his own Tiny Tim, dressed in as dandified a style as his own Lord Frederick Verisoft, he is as full of the milk of human kindness as his own Brother Cheeryble; and we cannot but love the man who has first loved all human beings, who can own Newman Noggs as a brother, and can find something to respect in a Bob Sawyer, and something to pity in a Ralph Nickleby. Never was a monarch of popular literature less envied or more loved; and while rather

are,

The two most popular of British authors at present, Charles Dickens and Thomas Macaulay. The supremacy of the former is verily one of the signs of the times. He has no massive or profound intellect―no lore superior to a school-boy's --no vast or creative imagination-little philosophic insight, little power of serious writing, and little sympathy with either the subtler and profounder parts of man, or with the grander features of Nature; (witness his description of Niagara-he would have painted the next pump better!) And yet, through his simplicity and sincer* In a "Gallery of Portraits."

wondering at the length of his reign over himself, and of his idols, seems, after all, such a capricious domain as that of Letters, to have been the main object of his ambiand while fearlessly expressing our doubts tion, and has already been nearly satisfied. as to his greatness or permanent dominion, He has played the finite game of talent, we own that his sway has been that of gen- and not the infinite game of genius. His tleness of a good, wide-minded, and goal has been the top of the mountain, and kindly man; and take this opportunity not the blue profound beyond; and on the of wishing long life and prosperity to point he has sought he may speedily be "Bonnie Prince Charlie." seen, relieved against the heights which he

In a different region, and on a higher cannot reach--a marble fixture, exalted and haughtier seat, is Thomas Macaulay and motionless. Talent stretching itself exalted. In general literature, as Dickens out to attain the attitudes and exaltation in fiction, is he held to be facile princeps. of genius is a pitiable and painful position, He is, besides, esteemed a rhetorician of a but it is not that of Macaulay. With high class a statesman of no ordinary piercing sagacity he has, from the first, calibre-a lyrical poet of much mark and discerned his proper intellectual powers, likelihood---a scholar ripe and good---and, and sought, with his whole heart, and soul, mounted on this high pedestal, he "has and mind, and strength, to cultivate them. purposed in his heart to take another step," "Macaulay the Lucky" he has been and to snatch from the hand of the His- called; he ought rather to have been called toric Muse one of her richest laurels. To Macaulay the Wise. one so gifted in the prodigality of Heaven, can we approach in any other attitude but that of prostration? or dare we hope for sympathy, while we proceed to make him the subject of free and fearless criticism?

man.

an orator.

With a rare combination of the arts of age and the fire of youth, the sagacity of the worldling and the enthusiasm of the scholar, he has sought self-development as his principal, if not only end.

Before proceeding to consider his separate He is a gifted but not, in a high sense, claims upon public admiration, we will a great man. He possesses all those sum up, in a few sentences, our impres- ornaments, accomplishments, and even sions of his general character. He is a natural endowments, which the great man gifted but not, in a high sense, a great requires for the full emphasis and effect of He is a rhetorician without being his power (and which the greatest alone He is endowed with great can entirely dispense with); but the power powers of perception and acquisition, but does not fill, possess, and shake the drapery. with no power of origination. He has The lamps are lit in gorgeous effulgence; deep sympathics with genius, without pos- the shrine is modestly, yet magnificently, sessing genius of the highest order itself. adorned; there is everything to tempt a He is strong and broad, but not subtle or god to descend; but the god descends not profound. He is not more destitute of -or if he does, it is only Maia's son, the original genius than he is of high principle Eloquent, and not Jupiter, the Thunderer. and purpose. He has all common faculties The distinction between the merely gifted developed in a large measure, and cultivat- and the great is, we think, this-the gifted ed to an intense degree. What he wants adore greatness and the great; the great is the gift that cannot be given---the worship the infinite, the eternal, and the power that cannot be counterfeited---the god-like. The gifted gaze at the moon like wind that bloweth where it listeth---the reflections of the Divine-the great, with vision, the joy, and the sorrow with which open face, look at its naked sun, and each no stranger intermeddleth--the "light look is the principle and prophecy of an which never was on sea or shore---the con- action. secration and the poet's dream."

He has profound sympathies with genius, To such gifts, indeed, he does not pre- without possessing genius of the highest tend, and never has pretended. To roll order itself. Genius, indeed, is his intelthe raptures of poetry, without emulating lectual god. It is (contrary to a common its speciosa miracula-to write worthily of opinion) not genius that Thomas Carlyle heroes, without aspiring to the heroic-to worships. The word genius he seldom write history without enacting it-to furnish uses, in writing or in conversation, except in to the utmost degree his own mind, derision. We can conceive a without leading the minds of others one cachinnation at the question, if he thought point further than to the admiration of Cromwell or Danton a great genlus. It is

savage

energy in a certain state of powerful a personification of art, standing on tip-toe precipitation that he so much admires. in contemplation of mightier Nature, and With genius, as existing almost undiluted drawing from her features with trembling in the person of such men as Keats, he pencil and a joyful awe. Macaulay has not cannot away. It seems to him only a long this direct and personal communication swoon or St. Vitus' dance. It is otherwise with the truth and the glory of things. He with Macaulay. If we trace him throughout sees the universe not in its own rich and diall his writings, we will find him watching vine radiance, but in the reflected light for genius with as much care and fondness which poets have shed upon it. There are as a lover uses in following the footsteps of in his writings no oracular deliverances, no his mistress. This, like a golden ray, has pregnant hints, no bits of intense meaning conducted him across all the wastes and broken, but broken off from some superwildernesses of history. It has brightened to his eye each musty page and worm-eaten volume. Each morning has he risen exulting to renew the search; and he is never half so eloquent as when dwelling on the achievements of genius, as sincerely and rapturously as if he were reciting his His sympathies are as wide as they are seen. Genius, whether thundering with Chatham in the House of Lords, or mending kettles and dreaming dreams with Bunyan in Elstowe-whether reclining in the saloons of Holland House with De Stael and Byron, or driven from men as on a new Nebuchadnezzar whirlwind, in the person of poor wandering Shelley-whether in Coleridge,

own.

"With soul as strong as a mountain river,

Pouring out praise to the Almighty giver;"

or in Voltaire shedding its withering smile across the universe, like the grin of deathwhether singing in Milton's verse, or glittering upon Cromwell's sword-is the only magnet which can draw forth all the riches of his mind, and the presence of inspiration alone makes him inspired.

nal circle of thought-no momentary splendors, like flashes of midnight lightning, revealing how much-no thoughts beckoning us away with silent finger, like ghosts, into dim and viewless regions--and he never even nears that divine darkness which ever edges the widest and loftiest excursions of imagination and of reason. His style and manner may be compared to crystal, but not to the "terrible crystal" of the prophets and apostles of literature. There is the sea of glass, but it is not mingled with fire, or at least the fire has not been heated seven times, nor has it descended from the seventh heaven.

Consequently he has no power of origination. We despise the charge of plagiarism, in its low and base sense, which has sometimes been advanced against him. He never commits conscious theft, though sometimes he gives all a father's welcome to thoughts to which he has not a father's claim. But the rose which he appropriates is seldom more than worthy of the breast which it is to adorn; thus, in borrowing from Hall the antithesis applied by the one to the men of the French Revolution and by the other to But this sympathy with genius does not the restored Royalists in the time of Charles amount to genius itself; it is too catholic the Second, "dwarfish virtues and gigantic and too prostrate. The man of the highest crimes," he has taken what he might have order of genius, after the enthusiasm of lent, and, in its application, has changed youth is spent, is rarely its worshipper, it from a party calumny into a striking even as it exists in himself. He worships truth. The men of the Revolution were rather the object which genius contemplates, not inen of dwarfish virtues and gigantic and the ideal at which it aims. He is rapt vices; both were stupendous when either up to a higher region, and hears a mightier were possessed: it was otherwise with the voice. Listening to the melodies of Nature, minions of Charles. When our hero lights to the march of the eternal hours, to the his torch it is not at the chariot of the sun; severe music of continuous thought, to the he ascends seldom higher than Hazlitt or rush of his own advancing soul, he cannot Hall-Coleridge, Schiller, and Goethe are so complacently bend an ear to the minstrel- untouched. But without re-arguing the sies, however sweet, of men, however gifted question of originality, that quality is maniHe passes, like the true painter, from the festly not his. It were as true that he admiration of copies, which he may admire originated Milton, Dryden, Bacon, or to error and extravagance, to that great Byron, as that he originated the views original which, without blame, excites an which his articles develope of their lives or infinite and endless devotion. He becomes genius. He becomes genius. A search after originality is never

on such themes, but it requires no more a wizard to determine from your writings whether you have adequately thought on them, than to tell from a man's eye whether he is or is not looking at the sun.

successful. Novelty is even shyer than | vor, distinguish all your allusions to them? truth, for if you search after the true, you It was not, indeed, your business to write will often, if not always, find the new; but if you search after the new, you will, in all probability, find neither the new nor the true. In seeking for paradoxes, Macaulay sometimes stumbles on, but more frequently stumbles over truth. His essays are masterly treatises, written learnedly, carefully conned, and pronounced in a tone of perfect assurance; the Pythian pantings, the abrupt and stammering utterances of the seer are awanting.

We charge Macaulay, as well as Dickens, with a systematic shrinking from meeting in a manful style those dread topics and relations at which we have hinted, and this, whether it springs, as Humboldt says in his own case, from a want of subjective underIn connexion with this defect, we find in standing, or whether it springs from a rehim little metaphysical gift or tendency. gard for, or fear of popular opinion, or There is no "speculation in his eye." If whether it springs from moral indifference, the mysterious regions of thought, which argues, on the first supposition, a deep are at present attracting so many thinkers, mental deficiency, on the second, a cowardhave ever possessed any charm for him, ice unworthy of their position, or on the that charm has long since passed away. If third, a state of spirit which the age, in its the "weight, the burden, and the mystery, professed teachers, will not much longer enof all this unintelligible world," have ever dure. An earnest period, bent on basing pressed him to anguish, that anguish seems its future progress upon fixed principles, now forgotten as a nightmare of his youth. fairly and irrevocably set down, to solve The serpents which strangle other Lao- the problem of its happiness and destiny, coons, or else keep them battling all their will not long refrain from bestowing the life before high heaven, have long ago left, name of brilliant trifler on the man however if indeed they had ever approached him. gifted and favored, who so slenderly symHis joys and sorrows, sympathies and inqui-pathizes with it, in this high though late ries, are entirely of the "earth earthy," and difficult calling. though it is an earth beautified by the smile of genius, and by the midnight Sun of the Past. It may appear presumptuous to criticise his creed, where not an article has been by himself indicated, except perhaps the poetical first principle that, "Beauty is truth and truth beauty;" but we see about him neither the firm grasp of one who holds a dogmatic certainty, nor the vast and vacant stretch of one who has failed after much effort to find the object, and who says, "I clasp what is it that I clasp ?" Towards the silent and twilight lands of thought, where reside, half in glimmer and half in gloom, the dread questions of the origin of evil, the destiny of man, our relation to the lower animals, and to the spirit world, he never seems to have been powerfully or for any length of time impelled. We might ask with much more propriety at him the question which a reviewer asked at Carlyle, Can you tell us, quite in confidence, your private opinion as to the place where wicked people go" And, besides, what think you of God? or of that most profound and awful Mystery of Godliness? Have you ever thought deeply on such subjects at all? Or if so, why does the language of a cold conventionalism, or of an unmeaning fer

It follows almost as a necessity from these remarks, that Macaulay exhibits no high purpose. Seldom so much energy and eloquence have been more entirely divorced from a great uniting and consecrating object; and in his forthcoming history we fear that this deficiency will be glaringly manifest. History without the presence of high purpose, is but a series of dissolving views--as brilliant it may be, but as disconnected, and not so impressive. It is this, on the contrary, that gives so profound an interest to the writings of Arnold, and invests his very fragments with a certain air of greatness; cach sentence seems given in on oath. It is this which glorifies even D'Aubigné's Romance of the Reformation, for he seeks at least to show God in history, like a golden thread, pervading, uniting, explaining, and purifying it all. No such passion for truth as Arnold's, no such steady vision of those great outshining laws of justice, mercy, and retribution, which pervade all human story, as D'Aubigné's, and in a far higher degree as Carlyle's, do we expect realized in Macaulay. His history, in all likelihood, will be the splendid cenotaph of his party. It will be brilliant in parts, tedious as a whole-curiously and minutely learned

-written now with elaborate pomp, anders? Much information, doubtless---many now with elaborate negligence-heated by ingenious views are given and developed, party spirit whenever the fires of enthusi- but the main effect is pleasure---either a asm begin to pale-it will abound in strik- lulling, soothing opiatic, or a rousing and ing literary and personal sketches, and stimulating gratification. But what is their will easily rise to and above the level of the mental or moral influence ? What new and scenes it describes, just because few of those great truths do they throw like bomb-shells scenes, from the character of the period, into nascent spirits, disturbing for ever their are of the highest moral interest or gran- repose ? What sense of the moral sublime deur. But a history forming a transcript, as have they ever infused into the imagination, if in the short-hand of a superior being, of or what thrilling and strange joy "beyond the leading events of the age, solemn in the name of pleasure" have they ever cirspirit, subdued in tone, grave and testa-culated through the heart? What long, mentary in language, profound in insight, judicial in impartiality, and final as a Median law in effect, we might have perhaps expected from Mackintosh, but not from Macaulay.

deep trains of thought have his thoughts ever started, and to what melodies in other minds have his words struck the key-note? Some authors mentally "beget children-they travail in birth with children;" thus "Broader and deeper," says Emerson, from Coleridge sprang Hazlitt, but who is must we write our annals." The true Macaulay's eldest born? Who dates any idea of history is only as yet dawning on great era in his history from the reading of the world; the old almanac form of history his works, or has received from him even has been generally renounced, but much of the bright edge of any Apocalyptic revelathe old almanac spirit remains. The tion? Pleasure, we repeat, is the principal avowed partisan still presumes to write his boon he has conferred on the age; and special pleading, and to call it a history. without under-estimating this (which, inThe romance writer still decorates his fancy-deed, were ungrateful, for none have derived piece, and, for fear of mistake, writes more pleasure from him than ourselves), under it, "This is a history." The bald we must say that it is comparatively a triretailer of the dry bones of history is not vial gift-a fruiterer's or a confectioner's yet entirely banished from our literature-office-and, moreover, that the pleasure he nor is the hardy, but one-sided Iconoclast, gives, like that arising from the use of wine, who has a quarrel with all established reputation, and would spring a mine against the sun if he could---nor is the sagacious philosophiste, who has access to the inner thoughts and motives of men who have been dead for centuries, and often imputes to deep deliberate purpose what was the result of momentary impulse, fresh and sudden as the breeze, whe accurately sums up and ably reasons on all calculable principles, but omits the incalculable, such as inspiration and phrensy. We are waiting for the full avatar of the ideal historian, who to the intellectual qualities of clear sight, sagacity, picturesque power, and learning, shall add the far rarer qualities of a love for truth only equalled by a love for man---a belief in and sympathy with progress, thorough independence and impartiality, and an all-embracing charity---and after Macaulay's History of England has seen the light, may still be found waiting.

The real purpose of a writer is perhaps best concluded from the effect he produces on the minds of his readers. And what is the boon which Macaulay's writings do actually confer upon their millions of read

or from the practice of novel-reading, requires to be imbibed in great moderation, and needs a robust constitution to bear it. Reading his papers is employment but too delicious-the mind is too seldom irritated and provoked-the higher faculties are too seldom appealed to-the sense of the infinite is never given-there is perpetual excitement, but it is that of a game of tennis-ball, and not the Titanic play of rocks and mountains-there is constant exercise, but it is rather the swing of an easy chair than the grasp and tug of a strong rower striving to keep time with one stronger than himself. Ought we ask a grave and solid reputation, as extensive as that of Shakspeare or Milton, to be entirely founded on what is essentially a course of light reading?

We do not venture on his merits as a politician or statesman But, as a speaker, we humbly think he has been over-rated. He is not a sublime orator, who fulminates, and fiercely, and almost contemptuously, sways his audience; he is not a subtle declaimer, who winds around and within the sympathies of his hearers, till, like the damsel in the "Castle of Indolence," they