Macaulay reviews a book that could almost be a modern fantasy
bestseller -- at least, one that might succeed if it were padded out to
meet the requirements of today's market.
The work of Dr. Nares *
has filled us with astonishment similar to that which Captain Lemuel
Gulliver felt when first he landed in Brobdingnag, and saw corn as high
as the oaks in the New Forest, thimbles as large as buckets, and wrens
of the bulk of turkeys. The whole book, and every component part of it,
is on a gigantic scale. The title is as long as an ordinary preface: the
prefatory matter would furnish out an ordinary book; and the book
contains as much reading as an ordinary library. We cannot sum up the
merits of the stupendous mass of paper which lies before us better than
by saying that it consists of about two thousand closely printed quarto
pages, that it occupies fifteen hundred inches cubic measure, and that
it weighs sixty pounds avoirdupois. Such a book might, before the
deluge, have been considered as light reading by Hilpa and Shallum. But
unhappily the life of man is now three-score years and ten; and we
cannot but think it somewhat unfair in Dr. Nares to demand from us so
large a portion of so short an existence.
Compared with the
labour of reading through these volumes, all other labour -- the labour
of thieves on the treadmill, of children in factories, of negroes in
sugar plantations -- is an agreeable recreation. There was, it is said, a
criminal in Italy, who was suffered to make his choice between
Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa
was too much for him. He changed his mind, and went to the oar.
Guicciardini, though certainly not the most amusing of writers, is a
Herodotus or a Froissart, when compared with Dr. Nares. It is not merely
in bulk, but in specific gravity also, that these memoirs exceed all
other human compositions. On every subject which the Professor
discusses, he produces three times as many pages as another man; and one
of his pages is as tedious as another man's three. His book is swelled
to its vast dimensions by endless repetitions, by episodes which have
nothing to do with the main action, by quotations from books which are
in every circulating library, and by reflections which, when they happen
to be just, are so obvious that they must necessarily occur to the mind
of every reader. He employs more words in expounding and defending a
truism than any other writer would employ in supporting a paradox. Of
the rules of historical perspective, he has not the faintest notion.
There is neither foreground nor background in his delineation. The wars
of Charles the Fifth in Germany are detailed at almost as much length as
in Robertson's life of that prince. The troubles of Scotland are
related as fully as in M'Crie's Life of John Knox. It would be most
unjust to deny that Dr. Nares is a man of great industry and research;
but he is so utterly incompetent to arrange the materials which he has
collected that he might as well have left them in their original
repositories.
-- From
Critical And Miscellaneous Essays, Volume II, by T. Babington Macaulay. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1857.
* Memoirs of the Life and Administration of the Right Honourable
William Cecil Lord Burghley, Secretary of State in the Reign of King
Edward the Sixth, and Lord High Treasurer, of England in the Reign of
Queen Elizabeth. Containing an historical View of the Times in which he
lived, and of the many eminent and illustrious Persons with whom he was
connected; with Extracts from his Private and Official Correspondence
and other Papers, now first published from the Originals. By the
Reverend EDWARD NARES, D.D., Regius Professor of Modern History in the
University of Oxford. 3 vols. 4to. London: 1828, 1832.