Sir James Stephen is the writer of a number of essays in the Edinburgh Review, which, at the time they appeared, were mistaken by some readers as the productions of Macaulay. There were no real grounds for such a supposition, as Stephen’s mind has hardly a single quality in common with Macaulay’s, and the resemblance of his style to that of the historian of the Revolution is of a very superficial kind. Stephen, like Macaulay, is a writer of clear, clean, short, compact sentences, and deals largely in historical allusions, parallels and generalizations, but his diction has none of Macaulay’s rapid movement, and his knowledge betrays little of Macaulay’s “joyous memory.” Stephen’s mind is large and rich in acquired information, but it is deficient in passion, and its ordinary movement is languid, without any of Macaulay’s intellectual fierceness, eagerness and swift sweep of illustration and generalization, and without any of Macaulay’s bitterness, partizanship and scorn of amiable emotions. Stephen, indeed, if he be a mimic, mimics Mackintosh rather than Macaulay, and in charity, in intellectual conscientiousness, in courtesy to opponents, in all the benignities and amenities of scholarship, and also in a certain faint hold upon large acquisitions, he sometimes resembles without at all equaling him. The reader is continually impressed with his honesty and benevolence, with his continual clearness and occasional reach of view, and with his graceful mastery of the resources of expression; but to continuous vigor and vividness of conception and language he has no claim.