This, however, is all by the way, and I must crave pardon for the digression. I lost myself, and wandered off, it seems, just when I was reminding the reader that the subsidiary features of the Junian controversy have now become much more interesting than the old question of authorship itself, and that it is an admirable exercise for the intellectual faculties to trace the way in which different lines of reasoning, wholly distinct and yet severally complete, converge towards the “Franciscan” conclusion. It was in this light, especially, that the subject appeared to captivate the mind of that great historical genius whom we have lost: whom we have just seen in the ample enjoyment of most rare faculties, the fulness of fame, and the height of fortune, committed to the soft arms of an euthanasia such as has rarely waited on man. The “Junian controversy” was with Macaulay an endless subject of ingenious talk. It suited certain peculiarities of his mind. As he was the very clearest of writers, so he was also, in a special sense and manner, the most acute of reasoners. In limited, close historical argument—in the power to infer a third proposition from a second, a second from a first—the power to expand a fact, either proved or assumed as a trifling postulate, into a series of facts, with undeniable cogency—I think we must go far to find his equal. If you gave Cuvier a tarsal bone, he constructed you, with unerring certainty, a humming-bird or an elephant. If you gave Macaulay a casual passage from a letter, he would divine, with strange precision, the circumstances of that letter: the occasion of its writing, the reason of its publication or non-publication, the way in which the writer was connected with some great event of the time, and in which the letter bore on that event. But his judgment of the character of the man, or character of the event, was another matter altogether, and tasked a different order of faculties, with which we are not now concerned. If we were to seek a rival to Macaulay in this peculiar province of clear and cogent reasoning from fact A to fact X, imparting to conjecture the force of truth, we should probably find him rather among lawyers than writers. In truth, the historian always retained, and to his great advantage, many of the mental habits, as well as many of the tastes and joyous recollections of the bar. He was at once the most Paleyan and the most forensic of historical inquirers. When he entered the arena of controversy, you might doubt whether he had donned his armour in the Senate House of Cambridge or the Assize Court of Lancaster. We may assume (as Coke assumed, lamentingly, of Bacon) that had he only stuck to the law he would have made a great lawyer. But it is open to doubt whether, as a judge, he would have done more of service by the marvellous lucidity with which he would have drawn out a series of circumstantial evidence before a jury, or more of harm by