The Cambridge University Extension meeting, which has already had Mr.
Balfour as a lecturer, was privileged on Friday week to hear Sir Richard Jebb on " Macaulay." The old fashion, set by Matthew Arnold, which spoke of Macaulay with a kind of contemptuous patronage, has almost disap- peared, and the Regina Professor of Greek did ample justice to his brilliance and sanity, his love of constitutional free- dom, his insight into the tendencies of an era, and his genuine honesty of souL He represents, indeed, the farthest extreme from Hegel's "pragmatic historian." "He never sought a spurious credit for originality," said the lecturer, "by white- washing bad characters and blackening great ones." He was above all things a consummate historical artist, a master of detail, a cunning arranger of light and shade. In his analysis of Macaulay's style Sir Richard Jebb was especially good,— " it was not merely rhetorical, it had the life, swiftness, and glow of oratory." We are glad to see that he paid a tribute to a side of Macaulay's poetical talent which is often for- gotten, the real tenderness and simplicity which appears in his "Epitaph on a Jacobite."
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