his tendency to force the various considerations attending a complicated case into conformity with his own too complete and too vivid ideal of that case. There is no better way towards appreciating the intensity of this peculiar faculty in Macaulay, than to study the various controversies into which his essays and his history led him: both the few in which he vouchsafed a reply, and the many more in which he rested contented with his first statement—his issues with Dixon, Paget, the High Churchmen, the Scotch, the Quakers, and the like—and to contrast his method with that of his antagonists. They all beat the bush, more or less, and flounder in every variety of historical fallacy. They beg the question, frame “vicious processes” from their premisses, “pole” themselves on self-created dilemmas, commit, in short, every error which logicians denounce in their fantastic terminology—in Macaulay’s reasoning, simply as such, you will never detect a flaw. His conclusion follows his premisses as surely and safely as “the night the day.” You may agree with his antagonist, and not with him; but you will find that what you consider to be his error lies quite in another direction, and consists, not in misusing his own facts, but in ignoring or neglecting true and material facts adduced by his opponents. And beware, O young and ardent Reader, too readily pleased with seeing a hole picked in a great man’s coat, lest the triumphant crow, with which these opponents invariably trumpet their supposed victory, seduce you into premature acquiescence. By-and-by, when cooler and steadier, you may be inclined to conjecture that Macaulay’s piercing instinct was right after all, and that the facts evoked against him are in reality either doubtful or immaterial to the argument. It was, as I have said, this fondness and aptitude for following up with accuracy converging lines of evidence, which gave Macaulay so great an interest in the Junian controversy, and made him so ready to allude to it incidentally both in writing and conversation. He contributed, himself, two, at least, of the most remarkable collateral proofs which tend to fix the authorship on Francis—the curious error of the English War-office clerk about the rules of Irish pensions, in the correspondence with Sir William Draper—the personal hostility of the Francis family towards the Luttrells, which accounts for the savage treatment by Junius of such obscure offenders. And now, having used the great historian’s name, somewhat unfairly, by way of shoeing-horn, to draw on a fresh chapter on the old controversy, let me place before you another singular instance of this class of collateral proofs, which, I believe, has not been made public before, but which greatly excited the curiosity of Macaulay, and which he would have followed out—if ever he had taken up the question again—with all the force of his inductive mind.