Green, Macaulay's _Essays_ are a text-book. At home and in the colonies, they are on every shelf between Shakespeare and the Bible. And of all these famous compositions, none are so widely read or so well-known as those on Clive, Hastings, Chatham, Frederick, Johnson, with the gallery of vigorous and animated figures that Macaulay grouped round these great historic luminaries. We are not now saying that Macaulay's view of the actors or the events of the eighteenth century is sound, comprehensive, philosophical, or in any other way meritorious; we are only examining the truth of Mr. Seeley's assumption that the century which the most popular writer of the day has treated in his most glowing, vivid, picturesque, and varied style, is regarded by the majority of us as destitute of interest, as containing neither memorable men nor memorable affairs, and as overspread with an ignoble pall of all that is flat, stagnant, and common. Nor is there any better foundation for Mr. Seeley's somewhat peremptory assertion that previous writers all miss what he considers the true point in our history during the eighteenth century. It is simply contrary to fact to assert that 'they do not perceive that in that century the history of England is not in England, but in America and Asia.' Mr. Green, for instance, was not strong in his grasp of the eighteenth century, and that period is in many respects an extremely unsatisfactory part of his work. Yet if we turn to his _History of the English People_, this is what we find at the very outset of the section that deals with modern England:--