Militia; but years of life absorbed in parliamentary wrangling and in sitting at the feet of the philosophers of Holland House were not likely to widen a mind already disposed to narrow views of the world. For Macaulay's immediate success, indeed, the training was undoubtedly valuable. As he carried into Parliament the authority of a great writer, so he wrote books with the authority of the practical politician. He has the true instinct of affairs. He knows what are the immediate motives which move masses of men; and is never misled by fanciful analogies or blindfolded by the pedantry of official language. He has seen flesh-and-blood statesmen--at any rate, English statesmen--and understands the nature of the animal. Nobody can be freer from the dominion of crotchets. All his reasoning is made of the soundest common sense, and represents, if not the ultimate forces, yet forces with which we have to reckon. And he knows, too, how to stir the blood of the average Englishman. He understands most thoroughly the value of concentration, unity, and simplicity. Every speech or essay forms an artistic whole, in which some distinct moral is vigorously driven home by a succession of downright blows. This strong rhetorical instinct is shown conspicuously in the 'Lays of Ancient Rome,' which, whatever we might say of them as poetry, are an admirable specimen of rhymed rhetoric. We know how good they are when we see how incapable are modern ballad-writers in general of putting the same swing and fire into their verses. Compare, for example, Aytoun's 'Lays of the Cavaliers,' as the most obvious parallel:-- Not swifter pours the avalanche Adown the steep incline, That rises o'er the parent springs Of rough and rapid Rhine, than certain Scotch heroes over an entrenchment. Place this mouthing by any parallel passage in Macaulay:-- Now, by our sire Quirinus, It was a goodly sight To see the thirty standards Swept down the tide of flight. So flies the spray in Adria When the black squall doth blow. So corn-sheaves in the flood time Spin down the whirling Po. And so on in verses which innumerable schoolboys of inferior pretensions to Macaulay's know by heart. And in such cases the verdict of the schoolboy is perhaps more valuable than that of the literary connoisseur. There are, of course, many living poets who can do tolerably something of far higher quality which Macaulay could not do at all. But I don't know who, since Scott, could have done this particular thing. Possibly Mr. Kingsley might have approached it, or the poet, if he would have condescended so far, who sang the bearing of the good news from Ghent to Aix. In any case, the feat is significant of Macaulay's true power. It looks easy; it involves no demands upon the higher reasoning or imaginative powers: but nobody will believe it to be easy who observes the extreme rarity of a success in a feat so often attempted.