Macaulay's letters have the same virtues as his other writings: their language is clear and energetic; their perceptions distinct and confident. They abound in passages of rapid and vivid description. Like all that he wrote, they have a strong rhetorical cast, arguing, instructing, persuading. And they show, without ostentation but naturally and habitually, the rich store of wide-ranging learning that Macaulay's quick impressibility and firm memory kept ready for his use, to be poured out at need. The letters are thus excellent reading. They are also limited in the same way that Macaulay's public writings are, having the overemphatic opinions, the liking for violent contrast, and the sometimes mechanical or superficial effects of their assertive manner. Critics do not exactly agree as to what the general defect is, but it is not misleading to say that Macaulay has no meditative, speculative tendency whatever, so that the pleasures of a shifting point of view, of the sudden opening out of an unexpected perspective, with the consequent effect of ironic self-doubt or of touching the region of the mysterious and hidden, are nowhere to be found in his writing. The absence of any directly personal element is also a notable feature of the essays and the History; as G. O. Trevelyan put it, ‘the most ardent admirers of Macaulay will admit that a minute study of his literary productions left them, as far as any but an intellectual knowledge of the writer himself was concerned, very much as it found them.’ But it is far otherwise with the letters.