it has in it the character of a true and very high work of art.

We are led, then, to the conclusion, or the conjecture, that, however the body of our writers may be reduced in a near future by many and many a decimation, Macaulay will, and must, survive. Personal existence is beset with dangers in infancy, and again in age. But authorship, if it survive the first, has little to fear from the afterperil. If it subsist for a few generations (and generations are for books what years are for their writers), it is not likely to sink in many. For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, shall not ring in the ears of civilised man. On a lower throne, in a less imperial hall of the same mansion, we believe that Macaulay will probably be found, not only in A.D. 2000, which he modestly specifies, but in 3000, or 2850, which he more boldly formulates, or for so much of this long, or any longer, lease as the commentators on the Apocalypse will allow the race to anticipate.

103. Whether he will subsist as a standard and supreme authority, is another question. Wherever and whenever read, he will be read with fascination, with delight, with wonder. And with copious instruction too; but also with copious reserve, with questioning scrutiny, with liberty to reject, and with much exercise of that liberty. The contemporary mind may in rare cases be taken by storm; but posterity, never. The tribunal of the present is accessible to influence; that of the future is incorrupt. The coming generations will not give Macaulay up; but they will, probably, attach much less value than we have done to his ipse dixit. They will

hardly accept from him his nett solutions of literary, and still less of historic, problems. Yet they will obtain from his marked and telling points of view great aid in solving them. We sometimes fancy that ere long there will be editions of his works in which his readers may be saved from pitfalls by brief, respectful, and judicious commentary, and that his great achievements may be at once commemorated and corrected by men of slower pace, of drier light, and of more tranquil, broadset, and comprehensive judgment. For his works are in many respects among the prodigies of literature; in some, they have never been surpassed. As lights that have shone through the whole universe of letters, they have made their title to a place in the solid firmament of fame. But the tree is greater and better than its fruit; and greater and better yet than the works themselves are the lofty aims and conceptions, the large heart, the independent, manful mind, the pure and noble career, which in this Biography have disclosed to us the true figure of the man who wrote them.

VII.

MEMOIR OF DR. NORMAN MACLEOD.*

1. THIS is a really good book, and, even in its present shape, a popular book. It does honour to its subject, and to its author, in their several degrees. It is, however, so good, that we wish it were made better; and this might be accomplished by a process of excision. Biography, and among other descriptions of it ecclesiastical biography, is in danger of losing its joint titles to durability and permanent interest through the vice of over-length. To record the life of a man in less than two portly volumes is already an invidious exception, and may soon be held an insult. But posterity will remain, as we are, under limitations of time and strength; and many works may perish in two volumes, which might have lived in one; or, again, in three or four, which might have lived in a smaller number.

2. In the present instance, it is not difficult to point to the heads, under which retrenchments might be rather largely effected. The wit and humour of Dr. Norman Macleod, on which his brother dwells with a natural fondness, appear to us to belong to the category of what is with more strict propriety called fun; and of this it is the characteristic property that it serves to refresh a

*Reprinted from the Church of England Quarterly Review for July Memoir of Norman Macleod, D.D. By his Brother, the Rev. Donald Macleod, M.A. Two Volumes. (London, 1876.)

1876.

wearied spirit, and enliven the passing hour, but that it will not well bear repetition, and stands hardly among the candidates for literary immortality. One or two specimens might fairly be given, as illustrative of the man. In any other view, this class of material is like the froth of an effervescent liquor; it dies in the moment of its birth. It brightens an occasion; it deadens a book. The same is to be said of the multitude of caricature sketches, with which the Doctor playfully adorned his letters to friends. Some of them may have merit as comic drawings, but nine-tenths of them at least ought certainly to be dismissed from a biography. The tracts again which appear as reprints in the Appendices, belong to his Works, not to his Life. We can, indeed, well believe that there must or may be others of his productions, which deserve to be reprinted; for his oratorical power appears to have been peculiar in its freshness, and in its sympathetic energy. Besides all this, we should desire a great contraction, for a reason presently to be stated, of those parts of the work which belong to the region of religious experience. All the suggestions now made are offered in the hope that a Biography of Macleod, rendered more compact by a free application of the pruning-knife, might hold a permanent place in the ecclesiastical literature of Scotland.

3. For this is, according to our mind, a really valuable biography, even in its present form. The Anglican position is marked off by various lines of doctrine, discipline, and spirit, from that of the Scottish Established Church. But there is much in these volumes with which we ought to cherish an entire and cordial sympathy; and even when differences of opinion and position intervene, there is still material from which we ought to draw some valuable lessons.