Buvtrm

The population of towns, the statistics of commerce, the prosaic56 facts of life are all transmuted57 into wonder and interest by the handling of the master. You feel that he could have cast a glamour over the multiplication58 table had he set himself to do so.

It has always seemed to me the very high-water mark of Macaulay's powers, with its marvellous mixture of precise fact and romantic phrasing.

Do you recollect55 the third chapter of that work—the one which reconstructs the England of the seventeenth century?

My four-volume edition of the History stands, as you see, to the right of the Essays.