truth, when, after reading a page or two of this book, we have occasion to turn to the same transaction in Burnet, Dalrymple, or Hume, we feel as if we were exchanging the glittering agility of a rope-dancer for gentlemen in the attire and attitude of society. And we must say that there is not one of those writers that does not give a clearer and more trustworthy account of all that is really historical in the period than can be collected from Mr. Macaulay's more decorated pages. We invite our readers to try Mr. Macaulay's merits as an historian by the test of comparison with his predecessors. * * * * * Every great painter is supposed to make a larger use of one particular colour. What a monstrous bladderful of _infamy_ Mr. Macaulay must have squeezed on his palette when he took to portrait-painting! We have no concern, except as friends to historical justice, for the characters of any of the parties thus stigmatized, nor have we room or time to discuss these, or the hundred other somewhat similar cases which the volumes present; but we have looked at the authorities cited by Mr. Macaulay, and we do not hesitate to say that, "as is his wont," he has, with the exception of Jeffries, outrageously exaggerated them. We must next notice the way in which Mr. Macaulay refers to and uses his authorities--no trivial points in the execution of a historical work-- though we shall begin with comparatively small matters. In his chapter on manners, which we may call the most remarkable in his book, one of his most frequent references is to "Chamberlayne's State of England, 1684." It is referred to at least a dozen or fourteen times in that chapter alone; but we really have some doubt whether Mr. Macaulay knew the nature of the book he so frequently quoted. Chamberlayne's work, of which the real title is "_Angliae_ [or, after the Scotch Union, _Magnae Britanniae_] _Notitia, or the Present State of England_" [or _Great Britain_], was a kind of periodical publication, half history and half court-calendar. It was first published in 1669, and new editions or reprints, with new dates, were issued, not annually, we believe, but so frequently that there are between thirty and forty of them in the Museum, ending with 1755. From the way and for the purposes for which Mr. Macaulay quotes Chamberlayne, we should almost suspect that he had lighted on the volume for 1684, and, knowing of no other, considered it as a substantive work published in that year. _Once_ indeed he cites the date of 1686, but there was, it seems, no edition of that year, and this may be an accidental error; but however that may be, our readers will smile when they hear that the two first and several following passages which Mr. Macaulay cites from Chamberlayne (i. 290 and 291), as _characteristic_ of the _days of Charles II_, distinctively from more modern times, are to be found _literatim_ in every succeeding