The great public, wherever English books penetrate, from the White Sea to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not decide the matter; and it does not follow that either public or critic has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect, and with the apocalyptic spirit of _Sartor_, it is certain that millions would cease to read books, and could gain little from books if they did. And if the only books were such "purple patches" of history as Macaulay left us, with their hard and fast divisions of men into sheep and goats, and minute biographies of fops, pedants, and grandees, narrated in the same resonant, rhetorical, unsympathetic, and falsely emphatic style--this generation would have a very patchwork idea of past ages and a narrow sense of the resources of our English language. There is room for both literary schools, and we need teachers of many kinds. We must not ask of any kind more than they can give. Macaulay has led millions who read no one else, or who never read before, to know something of the past, and to enjoy reading. He will have done them serious harm if he has persuaded them that this is the best that can be done in historical literature, or that this is the way in which the English language can be most fitly used. Let us be thankful for his energy, learning, brilliance. He is no priest, philosopher, or master. Let us delight in him as a fireside companion.