Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Macaulay's Essays: On Oliver Goldsmith Frederic the Great and Madame D'arblay
Twenty years ago, writes O. W. Firkins in The Forum of November, 1912, one would have said that the style Of Macaulay, except as a qualifying force, had disappeared from English literature - that it belonged with the sackbut and the virginals, with the baldric and the coat-of-mail, among the curiosities Of history. But the fact of death is not always estab lished, in literature at least, by the fact Of inquest, and one Of the youngest Of our later writers has taken the relic from its cabinet, reset and refurbished it, and found its merits preferable to the praise Of origi nality. The Old marks Of Macaulay, the short, forcible sentence with the velocity and the impact Of a missile, the clash Of a word upon its repeated self like Jingling castanets, the Old readiness, if not quite the Old rich ness and remoteness, Of allusion, the controversial zest, the glow of con?ict, the impatience Of half-truths and half-certainties, the insistence that all assertions shall be sweeping and all demonstrations final, the Old and more than the Old fertility Of comparison and the relish for the homely simile that rivets and clamps the idea, the fearless use of balance, the terse, casual sarcasm which, like the scythe On the chariot, does execution as an incident Of transit - all these traits, for the most part unabated and u'nabashed, reappear today in the style Of.
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