These initial and final sentences--
often in themselves both aphoristic and memorable--serve to mark with the
utmost clearness the different stages in the progress of the essay.
Illustration is of more incidental service, but as used by Macaulay
becomes highly organic. For his illustrations are not farfetched or
laboriously worked out. They seem to be of one piece with his story or his
argument. His mind was quick to detect resemblances and analogies. He was
ready with a comparison for everything, sometimes with half a dozen. For
example, Addison's essays, he has occasion to say, were different every
day of the week, and yet, to his mind, each day like something--like
Horace, like Lucian, like the "Tales of Scheherezade." He draws long
comparisons between Walpole and Townshend, between Congreve and Wycherley,
between Essex and Villiers, between the fall of the Carlovingians and the
fall of the Moguls. He follows up a general statement with swarms of
instances. Have historians been given to exaggerating the villainy of
Machiavelli? Macaulay can name you half a dozen who did so. Did the
writers of Charles's faction delight in making their opponents appear
contemptible? "They have told us that Pym broke down in a speech, that
Ireton had his nose pulled by Hollis, that the Earl of Northumberland
cudgeled Henry Marten, that St. John's manners were sullen, that Vane had
an ugly face, that Cromwell had a red nose." Do men fail when they quit
their own province for another? Newton failed thus; Bentley failed; Inigo
Jones failed; Wilkie failed.
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