In estimating our indebtedness to Macaulay as a historian--where his fame and execution were largest--we must remember that his method of close detail forbade wide outlook or grasp of long periods of time. If he had extended the same microscopic examination and dramatic exhibit of important personages to those succeeding reigns, which he originally intended to cover--coming down to the days of William IV.--he would have required fifty volumes; and if he had attempted, in the same spirit, a reach like that of Green or Hume, his rhetorical periods must have overflowed more than two hundred bulky quartos! No ordinary man could read such; and--thank Heaven!--no extraordinary man could write so many. _Some Tory Critics._ Among those who sought with a delightsome pertinacity for flaws in the historic work of Macaulay, in his own time, was John Wilson Croker, to whom I have already alluded.[86] He was an older man than the historian; Irish by birth, handsome, well-allied by marriage, plausible, fawning on the great (who were of _his_ party) wearing easily and boastfully his familiarity with Wellington, Lansdowne and Cumberland, airing daintily his literary qualities at the tables of Holland or Peel; proud of his place in Parliament, where he loved to show a satiric grace of speech, and the curled lips of one used to more elegant encounters. In short, he was the very man to light up the blazing contempt of such another as Macaulay; more than all since Croker was identified with the worst form of Toryism, and the other always his political antagonist. Such being the _animus_ of the parties, one can imagine the delight of Croker in detecting a blunder of Macaulay, and the delight of Macaulay when he was able to pounce upon the blunders in Croker’s edition of _Boswell’s Johnson_. This was on many counts an excellent work and--with its emendations--holds its ground now; but I think the slaps, and the scourgings, and the derisive mockery which the critic dealt out to the self-poised and elegant Croker have made a highly appetizing _sauce piquante_ for the book these many a year. For my own part, I never enjoy it half so much as when I think of Macaulay’s rod of discipline “starting the dust out of the varlet’s [editor’s] jacket.” It is not a question if Croker deserved this excoriation; we are so taken up with the dexterity and effectiveness with which the critical professor uses the surgeon’s knife, that we watch the operation, and the exceeding grace and ease with which he lays bare nerve after nerve, without once inquiring if the patient is really in need of such heroic treatment.