In the second division, that of essay writing, Macaulay occupies a position both absolutely and relatively higher. That the best verse ranks above even the best prose is not easily disputable; that prose which is among the very best of its own particular kind ranks above verse which though good is not the best, may be asserted without any fear. And in their own kind of essay, Macaulay's are quite supreme. Jeffrey, a master of writing and a still greater master of editing, with more than twenty years' practice in criticism, asked him "where he got that style?" The question was not entirely unanswerable. Macaulay had taken not a little from Gibbon; he had taken something from a then still living contributor of Jeffrey's own, Hazlitt. But his private and personal note was after all uppermost in the compound. It had appeared early (it can be seen in things of his written when he was an undergraduate). It owed much to the general atmosphere of the century, to the habit of drawing phrase, illustration, idea, not merely from the vernacular or from classical authorities, but from the great writers of earlier European literature. And it would probably have been impossible without the considerable body of forerunners which the _Edinburgh_, the _Quarterly_, and other things of which some notice has been given in a former chapter, had supplied. But still the individual character reigns supreme. Macaulay's Essays are in something more than the ordinary loose acceptation of the term a household word; and it cannot be necessary to single out individual instances where almost all are famous, and where all deserve their fame. The "Milton" and the "Southey," the "Pitt" and the "Chatham," the "Addison" and the "Horace Walpole," the "Clive" and the "Hastings," the "Frederick the Great" and the "Madame D'Arblay," the "Restoration Dramatists" and the "Boswell," the "Hallam" and the "Ranke," present with a marvellous consistency the same merits and the same defects. The defects are serious enough. In the first place the system, which Macaulay did not invent, but which he carried to perfection, of regarding the particular book in hand less as a subject of elaborate and minute criticism and exposition than as a mere starting-point from which to pursue the critic's own views of the subject, inevitably leads to unfairness, especially in matters of pure literature. Macaulay's most famous performance in this latter kind, the crushing review of the unlucky Robert Montgomery, though well enough deserved in the particular case, escapes this condemnation only to fall under another, that of looking at the parts rather than at the whole. It is quite certain that, given their plan, the two famous critiques of Tennyson and Keats, in the _Quarterly_ and in _Blackwood_, are well enough justified. The critic looks only at the weak parts, and he judges the weak parts only by the stop-watch. But, on his own wide and more