English essays -- 19th century; Great Britain -- Social life and customs; London (England) -- Description and travel
Of the notices which have appeared regarding Lord Macaulay, up to the
day when the present lines are written (the 9th of January), the reader
should not deny himself the pleasure of looking especially at two. It
is a good sign of the times when such articles as these (I mean the
articles in The times and Saturday Review) appear in our public prints
about our public men. They educate us, as it were, to admire rightly.
An uninstructed person in a museum or at a concert may pass by without
recognizing a picture or a passage of music, which the connoisseur
by his side may show him is a masterpiece of harmony, or a wonder of
artistic skill. After reading these papers you like and respect more
the person you have admired so much already. And so with regard to
Macaulay's style there may be faults of course--what critic can't point
them out? But for the nonce we are not talking about faults: we want to
say nil nisi bonum. Well--take at hazard any three pages of the “Essays”
or “History;”--and, glimmering below the stream of the narrative, as
it were, you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half-score of
allusions to other historic facts, characters, literature, poetry,
with which you are acquainted. Why is this epithet used? Whence is that
simile drawn? How does he manage, in two or three words, to paint an
individual, or to indicate a landscape? Your neighbor, who has HIS
reading, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind,
shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not
only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the
wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this great
scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence; he travels a hundred
miles to make a line of description.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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