Yet Mackintosh was always plotting great literary designs; but his fastidious taste, and his critical hunger for all certainties, kept him forever in the search of new material and appliances. He was dilatory to the last degree; his caution always multiplied delays; no general was ever so watchful of his commissariat--none ever so unready for a “Forward, march!” Among his forecasts was that of a great history of England. Madame de Staël urged her friend to take possession of her villa on Lake Geneva and, like Gibbon, write his way there to a great fame. He did for awhile set himself resolutely to a beginning at the country home of Weedon Lodge in Buckinghamshire--accumulated piles of fortifying MSS. and private records; but for outcome we have only that clumsy torso which outlines the Revolution of 1688.[37] His plans wanted a hundred working years, instead of the thirty which are only allotted to men. What Jeffrey left behind him marks, I think, the full limit of his powers; the same is true of Brougham, and true probably of Macaulay; and I think no tension and no incentive would have wrought upon Sydney Smith to work greater and brighter things than he did accomplish. A bishopric would only have set his gibes into coruscation at greater tables, and perhaps given larger system to his charities. But Mackintosh never worked up to the full level of his best power and large learning, except in moments of conversational exaltation. _Rest at Cannes._ Before closing our chapter we take one more swift glimpse at that arch-plotter for Whiggism--in the early days of the _Edinburgh Review_--whom we left fidgetting in the House of Lords, on a May evening of 1845. He had a longer life by far than most of those who conspired for the maintenance of the great blue and buff forerunner of British critical journals. He was only twenty-three when he put his shoulder to the quarterly revolutions of the _Edinburgh_--youngest of all the immediate founders;[38] and he outlived them all and outvoiced them all in the hurly-burly of the world.