those historians, and particularly the later ones, could complain that they had been too sparing of imputation, or even vituperation, to the opposite party.  But not so Mr. Macaulay.  The most distinctive feature on the face of his pages is personal virulence—­if he has at all succeeded in throwing an air of fresh life into his characters, it is mainly due, as any impartial and collected reader will soon discover, to the simple circumstance of his hating the individuals of the opposite party as bitterly, as passionately, as if they were his own personal enemies—­ more so, indeed, we hope than he would a mere political antagonist of his own day.  When some one suggested to the angry O’Neil that one of the Anglo-Irish families whom he was reviling as strangers had been four hundred years settled in Ireland, the Milesian replied, “I hate the churls as if they had come but yesterday.”  Mr. Macaulay seems largely endowed with this (as with a more enviable) species of memory, and he hates, for example, King Charles I as if he had been murdered only yesterday.  Let us not be understood as wishing to abridge an historian’s full liberty of censure—­but he should not be a satirist, still less a libeller.  We do not say nor think that Mr. Macaulay’s censures were always unmerited—­far from it—­but they are always, we think without exception, immoderate.  Nay, it would scarcely be too much to say that this massacre of character is the point on which Mr. Macaulay must chiefly rest any claims he can advance to the praise of impartiality, for while he paints everything that looks like a Tory in the blackest colours, he does not altogether spare any of the Whigs against whom he takes a spite, though he always visits them with a gentler correction.  In fact, except Oliver Cromwell, King William, a few gentlemen who had the misfortune to be executed or exiled for high treason, and every dissenting minister that he has or can find occasion to notice, there are hardly any persons mentioned who are not stigmatized as knaves or fools, differing only in degrees of “turpitude” and “imbecility”.  Mr. Macaulay has almost realized the work that Alexander Chalmers’s playful imagination had fancied, a Biographia Flagitiosa, or The Lives of Eminent Scoundrels.  This is also an imitation of the Historical Novel, though rather in the track of Eugene Aram and Jack Sheppard than of Waverley or Woodstock; but what would you have?  To attain the picturesque—­the chief object of our artist—­he adopts the ready process of dark colours and a rough brush.  Nature, even at the worst, is never gloomy enough for a Spagnoletto, and Judge Jeffries himself, for the first time, excites a kind of pity when we find him (like one to whom he was nearly akin) not so black as he is painted.

From this first general view of Mr. Macaulay’s Historical Novel, we now proceed to exhibit in detail some grounds for the opinion which we have ventured to express.