It has been felt and pointed out in many quarters that Macaulay as a writer was the child, and became the type, of his country and his age. As fifty years ago the inscription "Bath" used to be carried on our letter-paper, so the word "English" is, as it were, in the water-mark of every leaf of Macaulay's writing. His country was not the Empire, nor was it the United Kingdom. It was not even Great Britain. Though he was descended in the higher, that is the paternal, half from Scottish ancestry, and was linked specially with that country through the signal virtues, the victorious labors, and the considerable reputation of his father Zachary,—his country was England. On this little spot he concentrated a force of admiration and of worship which might have covered all the world. But as in space, so in time, it was limited. It was the England of his own age. The higher energies of his life were as completely summed up in the present as those of Walter Scott were projected upon the past. He would not have filled an Abbotsford with armor and relics of the Middle Ages. He judges the men and institutions and events of other times by the instruments and measures of the present. The characters whom he admires are those who would have conformed to the type that was before his eyes: who would have moved with effect in the court, the camp, [Pg 6367] the senate, the drawing-room of to-day. He contemplates the past with no desiderium, no regretful longing, no sense of things admirable which are also lost and irrecoverable. Upon this limitation of his retrospects it follows in natural sequence that of the future he has no glowing anticipations, and even the present he is not apt to contemplate on its mysterious and ideal side. As in respect to his personal capacity of loving, so in regard to the corresponding literary power. The faculty was singularly intense, and yet it was spent within a narrow circle. There is a marked sign of this narrowness, in his disinclination even to look at the works of contemporaries whose tone or manner he disliked.