The style of Macaulay is at its best in the _History_, where it is more chastened, more varied and sonorous than in the _Essays_. The same tricks and mannerisms reappear, but they are softened and restrained. The trick of a rapid succession of curt sentences, at times so effective, but also at times monotonous and jarring, is kept within bounds. Short and simple are mingled with comparatively long and complex sentences; for Macaulay, scornful of 'the dignity of history' when it is merely cramping and obstructive, is scrupulously mindful of it when the phrase has a legitimate application. He rejects as meretricious ornament and illustration which, as he himself declared, he would have considered not only admissible but desirable in a review. The just censure that his style is hard and metallic applies with far more force against the _Essays_ than against the _History_. Greater care and higher finish deepen and enrich the tone. Macaulay's verse must be dismissed with few words. He is best known by his _Lays of Ancient Rome_, compositions which, like his prose writings, are historical in principle. They neither are nor pretend to be great, but they rank high among the modern imitations of popular poetry. At the same time, they display no such sympathetic genius as, for example, Scott's ballad of Harlaw, no such loftiness of mind as his _Cadyow Castle_. They are clear, rapid and vigorous, like their author's prose. The generous judgment of Elizabeth Barrett, quoted in Ward's _English Poets_, is essentially just: 'He has a noble, clear, metallic note in his soul, and makes us ready by it for battle.' That he makes us ready by it for battle is eminently true of the splendidly martial _Battle of Naseby_, the most stirring piece of verse Macaulay ever wrote. It is interesting to note that the historian of England thus, at the age of twenty-four, reached his highest point in ballad verse in a subject taken from the country and the century which all his life long attracted his most serious study.