# Littell's Living Age/Volume 129/Issue 1668/Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay

From The Edinburgh Review.
LIFE AND LETTERS OF LORD MACAULAY.
In the early years of this century two men were born in England, destined to exercise no common influence on the literature of their country and the opinions of their own age, and possibly of all future time. Both of them were devoted by natural gifts, by education, and by taste to the cultivation and the love of letters, and as men of letters they will be judged by posterity. The power they wielded, and sought to wield, was that most enduring of all dominions, the dominion of the pen. Statesmen, warriors, orators, judges, inventors cross the stage of life, but the great writers remain upon it. The influence of a Homer, a Thucydides, or a Bacon is not only untouched, but it is extended, by time. Countless generations will feel it, as past generations have felt it, as we feel it now. These are the fixed stars of human history; they shine with the pure lustre of thought; their constellation never sets; whatever is most abiding in the fitful destiny of man, abides in them.
To attain to some share in this influence was the object to which the two lives we have now in view were directed. From infancy they followed it with unconscious passion, for at an age when children are commonly engrossed by their toys or their grammars, these boys revelled in the works of great thinkers, poets, and historians. Their amazing powers of memory retained all these impressions with a vivacity and reality seldom acquired by the most laborious study. Like beings endowed with another sense, they only perceived by later observation that their fellow-creatures achieved by infinite drudgery what came to them by nature and intuition. The infancy and boyhood of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Babington Macaulay were marvellous, and, what is not less amazing, they both fulfilled the promise of their earliest years.
But here the parallel must cease, or rather the parallel becomes a contrast. We shall not again retrace the effects on Mill of the dogmatism of unbelief, of the excessive strain on the reasoning faculties, of a sensitive nature bound in an iron philosophical creed, of the absence of all tender domestic influences, of a passion rebellious to the laws of the world if not of morals, and of a morbid dislike to society, which soured his views of life and left him in doubt of all things. Invert every one of these propositions, and you have a Macaulay. He was, we readily concede it, inferior to Mill as a powerful and original thinker—less as a logician, less as an abstract philosopher. But he carried with him through life the most intense enjoyment of it; he was blest with affections for those nearly allied to him as warm and tender as ever touched the heart of man; he was harassed by no bitter or lawless passions; his sense of his own powers never swelled into vanity or affectation; everything amused and delighted him which set in motion the aerial shapes of his imagination; his conversation was the most brilliant and varied that had been heard for a century—if indeed anything like it was ever heard at all; and he held fast to manly, liberal, and enlightened principles, with a passionate earnestness which left no room for scepticism or despondency. These qualities may be traced in his writings, and they contributed largely to the charm with which he grouped the personages of history in the most picturesque and dramatic forms, giving to everything he touched the freshness of life. He has been accused of heightening the colours and exaggerating the attitudes he threw upon the canvas; but this was no more than the result of his own exuberant nature. He saw all things in strong light and shape, because there was sunshine on them all. Nothing was hazy or indistinct; nothing overcast with doubt or gloom.
This, however, is not the time or the place to expatiate in needless criticism or panegyric on Lord Macaulay's writings. They enjoy a popularity beyond the range of fiction, and they have merits which will fascinate the world when the most popular fictions of the day have ceased to please. Our business to-day is to trace, what his nephew well calls "the joyous and shining ​pilgrimage" of their author through the world, and we rejoice that these volumes record in the familiar language of common life the warmth of heart, the enthusiasm, and the simplicity of character which were united in Lord Macaulay to the most marvellous attainments. No man was ever less anxious to obtrude his personal claims to distinction on the world. He cultivated literature as an art, but the artist was kept out of sight. His work was purely objective. Even in his speeches and in his conversation, and still more in his writings, the nature of his discourse, the subject of his descriptions, absorbed him altogether. His biographer justly remarks that it would be almost as hard to compose a picture of the author from his "History," his "Essays," and his "Lays," as to evolve an idea of Shakespeare from "Henry the Fifth" and "Measure for Measure." His manner of life, his habits of thought, his lively affections, were really known to those only who enjoyed his intimacy. With a vast acquaintance his bosom friends were few in number, and of these by far the nearest and dearest were the members of his own family. By them, or by their descendants, the veil of privacy which it pleased him to retain over his inner life is now removed, and this publication presents to his admirers a living picture of himself, traced to a considerable extent by his own hand.
Scotland may claim both John Mill and Macaulay as her descendants, but not as her children—or, if children, they were, in some respects, undutiful sons. Yet Macaulay paid his debt to the land of his forefathers by his splendid contributions to a journal which is identified with Scotland by its best and dearest traditions; and the most brilliant of his Parliamentary speeches were delivered by him as the representative of our Scottish capital. Something, no doubt, he owed to the fervour and daring of the old Highland spirit, shown in former generations by the ministers of the Kirk, his ancestors, whom Dr. Johnson met in the Hebrides; and Zachary Macaulay, his father, retained the type of his descent unaltered. Never lived there a man of a sterner or more undoubting faith, of a higher sense of duty, of more indomitable industry in the great cause to which he devoted his existence—but he was absolutely devoid of those genial, imaginative, and humorous sympathies which, in despite of himself, shed such light and gaiety over his Cameronian household. Macaulay used to say that he derived his "joviality" from his mother, on the principle, we suppose, that it certainly did not come to him from his father. But his mother was a Quakeress, of Bristol extraction; his early education was conducted under the prim but benevolent eyes of Mrs. Hannah More. We must leave the champions of the rival influence of hereditary gifts and of educational authority to explain as best they may, the existence of a man who owed so little to his parents or to the position in which he was born.
We shall pass summarily over the period of baby hymns and juvenile epics, which streamed from the brain of this young prodigy almost as soon as he could speak or write. Mr. Trevelyan has wisely contented himself with a brief account of these performances, and has not given them to the public—a thing Macaulay himself would especially have abhorred, for he held that nothing ought to be brought to table but the ripe fruit of care and thought, and he held very cheap the crude efforts of his early life. Be it enough to say that when he went to Cambridge at eighteen, we already find him writing a vigorous and picturesque style, treating all subjects, himself included, with clear good sense, conversant with an astonishing amount of literature of all ages and languages, and thirsting for distinction in the liberal arts. He had not been sent to a public school, a circumstance which had perhaps allowed him a greater latitude and freedom in his studies, and when he entered Trinity College he entered upon the world. His first appearance in public life seems to have been at a Cambridge election, when the mob were hustling the successful candidates. His ardour was cooled by receiving a dead cat full in the face. The man who had thrown the missile assured him that it was by mistake, and that the cat was meant for Mr. Adeane. "I wish," ​said Macaulay, "that you had meant it for me and hit Mr. Adeane"—a joke worthy of an older politician.
Mr. Trevelyan has described with a tinge of hereditary sympathy the strong attachment of Macaulay for Cambridge, and above all for Trinity. That was in deed the starting-place and the goal, the very Mecca of his life; and it was there he received the impressions which formed and moulded his character and his intellect.
Of all his places of sojourn during his joy ous and shining pilgrimage through the world, Trinity, and Trinity alone, had any share with his home in Macaulay's affection and loyalty. To the last he regarded it as an ancient Greek or a mediaeval Italian felt towards his native city. As long as he had place and standing there, he never left it willingly or returned to it without delight. The only step in his course about the wisdom of which he sometimes expressed misgiving was his preference of a London to a Cambridge life. The only dig— nity that in his later days he was known to covet was an honorary fellowship which would have allowed him again to Took through his window upon the college grass-plots, and to sleep within sound of the splashing of the fountain; again to breakfast on commons, and dine beneath the portraits of Newton and Bacon on the dais of the hall; again to ramble by moonlight round Neville's cloister, discoursing the picturesque but somewhat exoteric philosophy which it pleased him to call by the name of metaphysics. From the door of his rooms, along the wall of the chapel, there runs a flagged pathway which affords an acceptable relief from the rugged pebbles that surround it. Here as a bachelor of arts he would walk, book in hand, morning after morning throughout the long vacation, reading with the same eagerness and the same rapidity whether the volume was the most abstruse of treatises, the loftiest of poems, or the flimsiest of novels. That was the spot where in his failing years he specially loved to renew the feelings of the past, and some there are who can never revisit it without the fancy that there, if anywhere, his dear shade must linger.
The group of men he met there was remarkable—the present Lord Grey, Lord Belper and Lord Romilly, the three brothers Villiers, Praed, Moultrie, Sidney Walker, and above all, Charles Austin,
whose fame would now be more in proportion to his extraordinary abilities had not his unparalleled success as an advocate tempted him before his day to retire from the toils of a career of whose rewards he had already enough. With his vigour and fervour, his depth of knowledge and breadth of humour, his close reasoning illustrated by an expansive imagination, set off, as these gifts were, by the advantage, at that period of life so irresistible, of some experience of the world at home and abroad,—Austin was indeed a king among his fellows.
Grave, sedate, And, (if the looks may indicate the age,) Our senior some few years:—no keener wit, No intellect more subtle, none more bold, Was found in all our host.
So writes Moultrie, and the testimony of his verse is borne out by John Stuart Mill's prose. "The impression he gave was that of boundless strength, together with talents which, combined with such apparent force of will and character, seemed capable of dominating the world." He certainly was the only man who ever succeeded in dominating Macaulay. Brimming over with ideas that were soon to be known by the name of utilitarian, a panegyrist of American institutions, and an unsparing assailant of ecclesiastical endowments and hereditary privileges, he effectually cured the young undergraduate of his Tory opinions, which were never more than skin deep, and brought him nearer to Radicalism than he ever was before or since. The report of this conversion, of which the most was made by ill-natured talebearers who met with more encouragement than they deserved, created some consternation in the family circle: while the reading set at Cambridge.was duly scandalized at the influence which one whose classical attainments were rather discursive than exact had gained over a Craven scholar. To this hour men may be found in remote parsonages who mildly resent the fascination which Austin of Jesus exercised over Macaulay of Trinity.
No doubt a life of Lord Macaulay would be incomplete without some allusion to Charles Austin, and we thank Mr. Trevelyan for this courteous allusion to one who may in aftertimes be chiefly remembered as Macaulay's rival and friend. Austin surpassed Macaulay himself in powers of argumentative conversation. He was less discursive, more logical, and he launched shafts barbed with "the scorn of scorn" with a more unsparing hand. But he had infinitely less of poetic fire and human sympathy; less ​imagination, less of heart, and less of persistent ambition. His radical opinions subsided at last into a mild form of conservatism, and either from indolence or indifference to the world, he never took a pen in hand to leave behind him any trace of his great intellect. Hence he is remembered more for what he might have been than for what he was.
The day and the night together were too short for one who was entering on the journey of life amidst such a band of travellers. So long as a door was open or a light burning in any of the courts Macaulay was always in the mood for conversation and companionship. Unfailing in his attendance at lecture and chapel, blameless with regard to college laws and college discipline, it was well for his virtue that no curfew was in force within the precincts of Trinity. He never tired of recalling the days when he supped at midnight on milk-punch and roast turkey, drank tea in floods at an hour when older men are intent upon anything rather than on the means of keeping themselves awake, and made little of sitting over the fire till the bell rang for morning chapel in order to see a friend off by the early coach. In the license of the summer vacation, after some prolonged and festive gathering, the whole party would pour out into the moonlight and ramble for mile after mile through the country till the noise of their wide-flowing talk mingled with the twittering of the birds in the hedges which bordered the Coton pathway or the Madingley road. On such occasions it must have been well worth the loss of sleep to hear Macaulay plying Austin with sarcasms upon the doctrine of the greatest happiness, which then had still some gloss of novelty; putting into an ever-fresh shape the time-honoured jokes against the Johnians for the benefit of the Villierses; and urging an interminable debate on Wordsworth's merits as a poet, in which the Coleridges, as in duty bound, were ever ready to engage. In this particular field he acquired a skill of fence which rendered him the most redoubtable of antagonists. Many years afterwards, at the time when "The Prelude" was fresh from the press, he was maintaining against the opinion of a large and mixed society that the poem was unreadable. At last, overborne by the united indignation of so many of Wordsworth's admirers, he agreed that the question should be referred to the test of personal experience: and on inquiry it was discovered that the only individual present who had got through "The Prelude" was Macaulay himself.
It is not only that the witnesses of these scenes unanimously declare that they have never since heard such conversation in the most renowned of social circles. The partiality of a generous young man for trusted and admired companions may well colour his judgment over the space of even half a century. But the estimate of university contemporaries was abundantly confirmed by the outer world. While on a visit to Lord Lansdowne at Bowood, Austin and Macaulay happened to get upon college topics one morning at breakfast. When the meal was finished they drew their chairs to either end of the chimney-piece, and talked at each other across the hearth-rug as if they were in a first-floor room in the Old Court of Trinity. The whole company, ladies, artists, politicians, and diners-out formed a silent circle found the two Cantabs, and, with a short break for lunch, never stirred till the bell warned them that it was time to dress for dinner.
It has all irrevocably perished. With life before them, and each intent on his own future, none among that troop of friends had" the mind to play Boswell to the others.
Neither of these friendly disputants, certainly, wanted either roXfia or favq, which were regarded as the two first conditions of Attic oratory; but let posterity be consoled. We are old enough to have heard in our time a great deal of Austin's argumentative conversation, and opportunities were not wanting to us; but brilliant as it undoubtedly was, something of the reputation of these eminent talkers was due to the disposition of their audience. It is true, however, that conversation pitched in so high a key—so animated, so instructive, and so amusing—is not to be heard in modern society.
These literary conversations, followed by the animated debates of the Cambridge Union, in which Austin, Macaulay, Romilly, and Praed took the lead, probably contributed as much to the future success of these men as the lessons of their tutors. Macaulay's definition of a scholar was a man who could read Plato with his feet, on the fender. He had himself no great share of that critical scholarship, then much in fashion, which raised a man to the bench of bishops by editing a Greek tragedy. But he had through life what is far better, a vast and lively acquaintance . with Greek literature. Homer was as familiar to him as "Paradise Lost." During his retirement in India the Greek poets and orators were his constant companions. But at Cambridge his classical attainments earned for him no distinction except a Craven scholarship, to which he added on two occasions the chancellor's medal for English verse. He was not chosen a fellow of his college until his third trial, nominally for the strange reason that his translations from Greek and Latin into English were too bald and unadorned. When the Tripos of 1822 appeared his name was not in it; in short, Macaulay was "gulfed" (as his nephew expresses it), and he was disabled from contending ​for the chancellor's classical medals. This failure, for such it was, was mainly due to his hatred of mathematics. Thus he exclaims to his mother in a letter written in 1818:—
I can scarcely bear to write on mathematics or mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomination of that science, if a name sacred to the useful and embellishing arts may be applied to the perception and recollection of certain properties in numbers and figures! Oh that l had to learn astrology, or demonology, or school divinity! Oh that I were to pore over Thomas Aquinas, and to adjust the relation of entity with the two predicaments, so that I were exempted from this miserable study! "Discipline" of the mind! Say rather starvation, confinement, torture, annihilation! But it must be. I feel myself becoming a personification of algebra, a living trigonometrical canon, a walking table of logarithms. All my perceptions of elegance and beauty gone, or at least going. By the end of the term my brain will be "as dry as the remainder biscuit after a voyage." Oh to change Cam for Isis!
Perhaps the recollection of these disappointments tended to give him a low estimate of university honours, much as he loved his university. In his later years he wrote, "After all, what a man does at Cambridge is, in itself, nothing. If he makes a poor figure in life, his having been senior wrangler, or university scholar, is never mentioned but with derision. If he makes a distinguished figure, his early honours merge in those of later date." This opinion is, however, inconsistent with the arguments of his celebrated speech (delivered in 1855), in favour of competitive examination, when he entertained and amazed the House of Commons by a rapid enumeration of the performances of a score of senior wranglers. It was said of Macaulay by his most intimate and dearest friend, that he never really applied himself to any pursuit that was against the grain. Had he set his mind on taking high honours, he probably could have accomplished it. But his mind wanted those habits of severe application, governed by a strong will, without which no man can conquer the reluctantes dracones of life. For this same reason it was not in his destiny to become a great lawyer or a great statesman. He wanted for his growth the liberty of the broad fields of literature. There without an effort he could roam and rule. At this very time, in 1822, he competed with success for a prize of ten pounds, bequeathed by Mr. Greaves of Fulbourn for the best essay on the conduct and character of William III. There was struck the keynote of his life. The essay is still in existence, and it shows that the junior bachelor of two and twenty, thought and wrote with the same spirit as the grave historian of forty-eight.
In a passage that occurs towards the close of the essay may be traced something more than an outline of the peroration in which, a quarter of a century later on, he summed up the character and results of the Revolution of 1688. "To have been a sovereign, yet the champion of liberty; a revolutionary leader, yet the supporter of social order, is the peculiar glory of William. He knew where to pause. He outraged no national prejudice. He abolished no ancient form. He altered no venerable name. He saw that the existing institutions possessed the greatest capabilities of excellence, and that stronger sanctions and clearer definitions were alone required to make the practice of the British constitution as admirable as the theory. Thus he imparted to innovation the dignity and stability of antiquity. He transferred to a happier order of things the associations which had attached the people to their former government. As the Roman warrior, before he assaulted Veii, invoked its guardian gods to leave its walls, and to accept the worship and patronize the cause of the besiegers, this great prince, in attacking a system of oppression, summoned to his aid the venerable principles and deeply-seated feelings to which that system was indebted for protection."
There was in truth in Macaulay, though to judge by the results of his life no one would suppose it, a vast amount of indolence. His reading was universal, but he wandered like a bee over every blossom in the garden, and the wonder is that any honey was made. The following passage from a journal kept by his sister Margaret is extremely curious:—
March 30, 1831.—Tom has just left me, after a very interesting conversation. He spoke of his extreme idleness. He said: "I never knew such an idle man as I am. When I go in to Empson or Ellis their tables are always covered with books and papers. I cannot stick at anything for above a day or two. I mustered industry enough to teach myself Italian. I wish to speak Spanish. I know I could master the difficulties in a week, and read any book in the language at the end of a month, but I have not the courage to attempt it. If there had not been really something in me, idleness would have ruined me."
I said that I was surprised at the great accuracy of his information, considering how desultory his reading had been. "My accuracy as to facts," he said, " I owe to a cause which many men would not confess. It is due to my love of castle-building. The past is in my mind soon constructed into a romance." ​He then went on to describe the way in which from his childhood his imagination had been filled by the study of history. "With a person of my turn," he said, "the minute touches are of as great interest, and perhaps greater, than the most important events. Spending so much time as I do in solitude, my mind would have rusted by gazing vacantly at the shop-windows. As it is, I am no sooner in the streets than I am in Greece, in Rome, in the midst of the French Revolution. Precision in dates, the day or hour in which a man was born or died, becomes absolutely necessary. A slight fact, a sentence, a word, are of importance in my romance. Pepys's "Diary" formed almost inexhaustible food for my fancy. I seem to know every inch of Whitehall. I go in at Hans Holbein's gate, and come out through the matted gallery. The conversations which I compose between great people of the time are long, and sufficiently animated: in the style, if not with the merits, of Sir Walter Scott's. The old parts of London, which you are sometimes surprised at my knowing so well, those old gates and houses down by the river, have all played their parts in my stories." He spoke, too, of the manner in which he used to wander about Paris, weaving tales of the Revolution, and he thought that he owed his command of language greatly to this habit.
On October I, 1824, Macaulay was elected fellow of Trinity, which gave him a temporary independence, of essential value to him in the next seven years, and in 1826 he was called to the Bar, and joined the Northern Circuit at Leeds. But his study of law had been as perfunctory as his study of mathematics, and his legal career seems to have been confined to writing Aristophanic jests for the bar mess. Fortunately in 1828 Lord Lyndhurst, just at the close of the Goderich ministry, gave him a commissionership of bankruptcy, which raised his income to about a thousand a year.
Nothing in Macaulay's literary career excites in us more astonishment than his contributions to Knight's Magazine, written when he was only three and four and twenty, whilst he was reading for this fellowship, which, with some little difficulty, he at last obtained. The "Fragment of a Roman Tale" (June 1823) breathes all the fire and tenderness of passionate love—a theme the writer never touched upon again; and perhaps it suggested to Bulwer the most graceful of the scenes in "The Last Days of Pompeii." The scenes from "Athenian Revels" reflect, as in a glass, the dramatic style of Plato and the daring wit of Aristophanes. The essays on the Italian writers show that Macaulay had already sounded the ocean depths of Dante and traced to their source the brighter streams of Petrarch's song. The review of Mitford's "Greece" (November 1824) displays the same marvellous acquaintance with Hellenic politics and literature, and it winds up with a passage of splendid eloquence on the immortal influence of Athens. No doubt, it may be said, that these pages are overcrowded with allusions and images, which a more mature age would have restrained. But what clearness of thought! what abundance and what rhythm of language! That young author might have been addressed in the prophetic words applied by Socrates to Isocrates at about the same age. "He seems to me to have a genius above the oratory of Lysias and altogether to be tempered of nobler elements. And so it would not surprise me if, as years go on, he should make all his predecessors seem like children in the kind of oratory to which he is now addressing himself; or if—supposing this should not content him—some diviner impulse should lead him to greater things. My dear Phædros, a certain philosophy is inborn in him." Already, at four and twenty, Macaulay was incontestably the first rhetorician of an age fertile in literary genius. Well might Jeffrey exclaim, as he did on the receipt of the first article written for this journal, "The more I think the less I can conceive where you picked up that style."
Of the contributions with which Macaulay continued for many years to honour these pages, it would be unbecoming and superfluous for us to speak. Though he regarded them as fugitive productions, they have taken a prominent place in literature, and we know not how many millions of copies have been circulated in Britain and America, throughout the English-speaking world.
The Macaulay family migrated in 1823 to a large rambling house in Great Ormond Street, at the corner of Powis Place, a quarter of London which, though not fashionable, was still in those days inhabited by judges, barristers, and merchants. These were Tom Macaulay's London quarters until 1829 (when he went to live in chambers in Gray's Inn), and here the great critic and future orator and statesman passed, in the bosom of his family, the gayest years of his life. His spirits and his drollery were inexhaustible.
The fun that went on in Great Ormond Street was of a jovial, and sometimes uproarious, description. Even when the family was ​by itself, the schoolroom and the drawing-room were full of young people; and friends and cousins flocked in numbers to a resort where so much merriment was perpetually on foot. There were seasons during the school holidays when the house overflowed with noise and frolic from morning to night; and Macaulay, who at any period of his life could literally spend whole days in playing with children, was master of the innocent revels. Games of hide-and-seek, that lasted for hours, with shouting and the blowing of horns up and down the stairs and through every room, were varied by ballads, which, like the scalds of old, he composed during the act of recitation, while the others struck in with the chorus. He had no notion whatever of music, but an infallible ear for rhythm. His knack of improvisation he at all times exercised freely. The verses which he thus produced, and which he invariably attributed to an anonymous author whom he styled "the judicious poet," were exclusively for home consumption. Some of these effusions illustrate a sentiment in his disposition which was among the most decided, and the most frequently and loudly expressed. Macaulay was only too easily bored, and those whom he considered fools he by no means suffered gladly. He once amused his sisters by pouring out whole Iliads of extempore doggerel upon the head of an unfortunate country squire of their acquaintance who had a habit of detaining people by the button, and who was especially addicted to the society of the higher order of clergy.
His Grace Archbishop Manners Sutton Could not keep on a single button. As for Right Reverend John of Chester, His waistcoats open at the breast are. Our friend has filled a mighty trunk With trophies torn from Doctor Monk, And he has really tattered foully The vestments of Archbishop Howley. No button could I late discern on The garments of Archbishop Vernon, And never had his fingers mercy Upon the garb of Bishop Percy. The buttons fly from Bishop Ryder, Like corks that spring from bottled cyder,
and so on throughout the entire bench, until, after a good half-hour of hearty and spontaneous nonsense, the girls would go laughing back to their Italian and their drawing-boards.
Mr. Trevelyan, who has himself the family taste for this quaint sort of humour, has not scrupled to mix a good many specimens of this amusing doggerel with the graver matters of his book. We see no reason to blame him. They are as characteristic of his uncle as the highest flights of his rhetoric or his eloquence. They are the natural outburst of his amazing spirits, which could extract as much amusement from a street-ballad or a bad novel as from the wit of Boiardo and Aristophanes. And, after all, if many of the jokes are bad jokes, they are not w r orse than the puns and gibes on which the name of Swift has conferred a lasting interest, and they are scrupulously free from Swift's vulgarity and coarseness. There never was a purer mind or more sensitive taste, in these respects, than that of Macaulay; and no doubt he owed this refinement partly to temperament, but far more to the circumstance that he had been brought up and spent his whole life, in the closest intimacy of friendship and sympathy with his sisters. Zachary Macaulay had five daughters and four sons; of whom Lord Macaulay was the eldest. Of the other sons it is unnecessary to speak. The daughters nearest to the age of their illustrious brother were, as far as we know, ladies educated in the strict opinions of the Clapham sect; but their brother always spoke of them with tender affection, and when Jane died he declared his heart was broken, Hannah More Macaulay, afterwards Lady Trevelyan, and Margaret, married to Mr. Edward Cropper, who died in 1834, though respectively ten and twelve years younger than their eldest brother, were his dearest playmates and associates. Lady Trevelyan was, of all the family, the member most congenial to himself. She shared his enthusiastic curiosity; she ranged like him through whole galleries of fiction, until it was said that she and her brother between them could have re-written " Sir Charles Grandison," and probably Miss Austen's novels to boot; she accompanied him to India; she returned with him to share the glory of his later years; and she bequeathed to her son the filial task of compiling this biography. We remember no other instance of so complete and unbroken a union of two persons in that charming relation of life. And the cause of this singularity is this, that Macaulay never, as far as we know, or as this book reveals to us, transferred his affections to any other woman. He seems never to have been in love; there is nowhere the slightest propensity to marriage; he does not appear even to have corresponded, or lived on terms of intimate friendship with any woman, outside his family circle. He liked the society of women—
When, in gilded drawing-rooms, thy breast Swells to the sweeter sound of woman's praise.
He was warmly attached to those who, high in heart and intellect, shed a lustre alike on society and on domestic life, as the late Lady Stanhope and the present Duchess of Argyll; he was grateful to Lady Holland for her kindness, even when she wept and raved at his going to ​India. But no woman appears ever to have exercised over him that irresistible charm, from which no other man of genius and feeling was ever, we believe, exempt. His heart, as it is termed, was given to his sisters alone; when Margaret died during his residence at Calcutta, he pours forth all the passionate grief of a lover, and declares he had almost lost his reason; henceforth Hannah and her children became and remained the sole objects of his affection.
The following passage describes his own intense feeling on this subject:—
The attachment between brothers and sisters [he writes in November 1832], blameless, amiable, and delightful as it is, is so liable to be superseded by other attachments that no wise man ought to suffer it to become indispensable to him. That women shall leave the home of their birth, and contract ties dearer than those of consanguinity, is a law as ancient as the first records of the history of our race, and as unchangeable as the constitution of the human body and mind. To repine against the nature of things, and against the great fundamental law of all society, because, in consequence of my own want of foresight, it happens to bear heavily on me, would be the basest and most absurd selfishness.
I have still one more stake to lose. There remains one event for which, when it arrives, I shall, I hope, be prepared. From that moment, with a heart formed, if ever any man's heart was formed, for domestic happiness, I shall have nothing left in this world but ambition. There is no wound, however, which time and necessity will not render endurable: and, after all, what am I more than my fathers,—than the millions and tens of millions who have been weak enough to pay double price for some favourite number in the lottery of life, and who have suffered double disappointment when their ticket came up a blank?
And he wrote in this strain at thirty-two!
These years, then, spent in Great Ormond Street, were chiefly employed in the duties of the Bankruptcy Court or on the Northern Circuit, where he held no brief, in writing a series of articles for this journal, some purely literary, and some directed with great force against the utilitarians of Queen Square, and in the keenest enjoyment of domestic life. The society of the Macaulay family was restricted to a few friends of the old Clapham set; their means were small; and genius had not yet broken through the wall which early habits had built round it. He had been obliged to sell the gold medals he won at Trinity, and even later he would sup on a bit of cheese sent him by a Wiltshire constituent, with a glass of audit ale from the old college. But at one of the most critical moments of his life, and, as it turned out, of English history, all this changed. The Marquis of Lansdowne, quick above all men to discern indications of ability in literature or in art beyond the circle in which his rank and age placed him, and not less kind than prompt in raising young aspirants from obscurity to fame, discerned the genius of Macaulay in his writings, even before he knew the man.
Public affairs [writes Lady Trevelyan] were become intensely interesting to him. Canning's accession to power, then his death, the repeal of the Test Act, the emancipation of the Catholics, all in their turn filled his heart and soul. He himself longed to be taking his part in Parliament, but with a very hopeless longing.
In February 1830 I was staying at Mr. Wilberforce's at Highwood Hill when I got a letter from your uncle, enclosing one from Lord Lansdowne, who told him that he had been much struck by the articles on Mill, and that he wished to be the means of first introducing their author to public life, by proposing to him to stand for the vacant seat at Calne. Lord Lansdowne expressly added that it was your uncle's high moral and private character which had determined him to make the offer, and that he wished in no respect to influence his votes, but to leave him quite at liberty to act according to his conscience. I remember flying into Mr. Wilberforce's study, and, absolutely speechless, putting the letter into his hands. He read it with much emotion, and returned it to me, saying: "Your father has had great trials, obloquy, bad health, many anxieties. One must feel as if Tom were given him for a recompense." He was silent for a moment, and then his mobile face lighted up, and he clapped his hand to his ear, and cried: "Ah! I hear that shout again. Hear! hear! What a life it was."
And so on the eve of the most momentous conflict that ever was fought out by speech and vote within the walls of a senate-house, the young recruit went gaily to his post in the ranks of that party whose coming fortunes he was prepared loyally to follow, and the history of whose past he was destined eloquently, and perhaps imperishably, to record.
We know no second argument for borough influence so practical as this, that Calne, under the guidance of Lord Lansdowne, sent to the House of Commons within thirty years two such men as Thomas Macaulay and Robert Lowe, who might, and probably would, otherwise, have sought for seats in vain, or not ventured to seek for them at all.
On entering Parliament, in April 1830, Macaulay addressed the House on a bill ​for the removal of Jewish disabilities, and once again on some other occasion; but he spoke no more; "doing more," as Mr. Trevelyan observes, "for future success in Parliament by silence, than he could have effected by half a dozen brilliant perorations." The time was at hand which was to give far greater occasions for his eloquence; and we do not know that any circumstance in Macaulay's career was more fortunate, than the accident which placed him in Parliament on the eve of the Reform agitation, but before it had begun. The Reform Bill was brought into the House by Lord John Russell on March 1, 1831. On the following day Macaulay delivered the first of his great speeches. It placed him at once in the first rank of Parliamentary orators. The excitement of the House knew no bounds. Men compared him to Fox, Burke, Canning, and Plunket—to the greatest masters of language and the noblest champions of liberty. And in the heat and fury of that great conflict, which was destined to regenerate by reform the constitution and the monarchy of England, none bore a more vigorous part than the young member from Calne. But we have here to speak less of his political achievements than of their personal results to himself.
We can assure Mr. Trevelyan, though he expresses an opposite opinion, that there was a vast deal more of the "exclusiveness of fashion" in 1831 than there is in 1876, for the sway of Lady Jersey, Lady Cowper, and Princess Lieven was an absolute despotism compared with the anarchy of the post-Reform period. Macaulay never aspired to be a man of fashion; he had too much pride and not enough vanity to be gratified by the flattery of people whom he despised. But it is curious to learn how far apart he had lived, even till he had passed his thirtieth year, from what is called the best society of London. Hence it was that whilst he remained singularly free from the levity and indifference of a man of the world, he never acquired the ease of manner, the lightness of touch, or the graces which accompany high breeding.
Macaulay had been well received in the character of an Edinburgh Reviewer, and his first great speech in the House of Commons at once opened to him all the doors in London that were best worth entering. Brought up, as he had been, in a household which was perhaps the strictest and the homeliest among a set of families whose creed it was to live outside the world, it put his strength of mind to the test when he found himself courted and observed by the most distinguished and the most formidable personages of the day. Lady Holland listened to him with unwonted deference, and scolded him with a circumspection that was in itself a compliment. Rogers spoke of him with friendliness and to him with positive affection, and gave him the last proof of his esteem and admiration by asking him to name the morning for a breakfast-party. He was treated with almost fatherly kindness by the able and worthy man who is still remembered by the name of Conversation Sharp. Indeed, his deference for the feelings of all whom he liked and respected, which an experienced observer could detect beneath the eagerness of his manner and the volubility of his talk, made him a favourite among those of a generation above his own. He bore his honours quietly, and enjoyed them with the natural and hearty pleasure of a man who has a taste for society, but whose ambitions lie elsewhere. For the space of three seasons he dined out almost nightly, and spent many of his Sundays in those suburban residences which, as regards the company and the way of living, are little else than sections of London removed into a purer air.
The descriptions of his new social relations, written for the amusement of his sisters, are entertaining enough, and will be read with the interest which always clings to such reminiscences. But, inasmuch as the writer could paint every portrait but his own, even the conversation of Holland House loses much of its brilliancy when Macaulay's voice takes no part in it. Yet we must borrow one or two sketches.
London: July 11, 1831.
My dear Sister,—Since I wrote to you I have been out to dine and sleep at Holland House. We had a very agreeable and splendid party; among others the Duke and Duchess of Richmond, and the Marchioness of Clanricarde, who, you know, is the daughter of Canning. She is very beautiful, and very like her father, with eyes full of fire, and great expression in all her features. She and I had a great deal of talk. She showed much cleverness and information, but, I thought, a little more of political animosity than is quite becoming in a pretty woman. However, she has been placed in peculiar circumstances. The daughter of a statesman who was a martyr to the rage of faction may be pardoned for speaking sharply of the enemies of her parent: and she did speak sharply. With knitted brows, and flashing eyes, and a look of feminine vengeance about her beautiful mouth, she gave me such a character of Peel as he would certainly have had no pleasure in hearing.
In the evening Lord John Russell came; and, soon after, old Talleyrand. I had seen Talleyrand in very large parties, but had never been near enough to hear a word that he said. ​I now had the pleasure of listening for an hour and a half to his conversation. He is certainly the greatest curiosity that I ever fell in with. His head is sunk down between two high shoulders. One of his feet is hideously distorted. His face is as pale as that of a corpse, and wrinkled to a frightful degree. His eyes have an odd glassy stare quite peculiar to them. His hair, thickly powdered and pomatumed, hangs down his shoulders on each side as straight as a pound of tallow candles. His conversation, however, soon makes you forget his ugliness and infirmities. There is a poignancy without effort in all he says, which reminded me a little of the character which the wits of Johnson's circle give of Beauclerk. For example, we talked about Metternich and Cardinal Mazarin. "J'y trouve beaucoup à redire. Le cardinal trompait; mais il ne mentait pas. Or, M. de Metternich ment toujours, et ne trompe jamais."
The same compliment, if it be one, that Talleyrand paid to the cardinal, might fairly be addressed to the most powerful and successful of living ministers. The portraits of the host and hostess are uncommonly like.
London: July 25, 1831.
My dear Sister,—On Saturday evening I went to Holland House. There I found the Dutch ambassador, M. de Wessemburg, Mr. and Mrs. Vernon Smith, and Admiral Adam, a son of old Adam who fought the duel with Fox. We dined like emperors, and jabbered in several languages. Her ladyship, for an esprit fort, is the greatest coward that I ever saw. The last time that I was there she was frightened out of her wits by the thunder. She closed all the shutters, drew all the curtains, and ordered candles in broad day to keep out the lightning, or rather the appearance of the lightning. On Saturday she was in a terrible taking about the cholera; talked of nothing else; refused to eat any ice because somebody said that ice was bad for the cholera; was sure that the cholera was at Glasgow; and asked me why a cordon of troops was not instantly placed around that town to prevent all intercourse between the infected and the healthy spots. Lord Holland made light of her fears. He is a thoroughly good-natured, open, sensible man; very lively; very intellectual; well read in politics, and in the lighter literature both of ancient and modern times. He sets me more at ease than almost any person that I know, by a certain good-humoured way of contradicting that he has. He always begins by drawing down his shaggy eyebrows, making a face extremely like his uncle, wagging his head and saying: "Now do you know, Mr. Macaulay, I do not quite see that. How do you make it out?" He tells a story delightfully, and bears the pain of his gout and the confinement and privations to which it subjects him, with admirable fortitude and cheerfulness. Her ladyship is all courtesy and kindness to me: but her demeanour to some others, particularly to poor Allen, is such as it quite pains me to witness. He is really treated like a negro slave. "Mr. Allen, go into my drawing-room and bring my reticule." "Mr. Allen, go and see what can be the matter that they do not bring up dinner." "Mr. Allen, there is not enough turtle soup for you. You must take gravy soup or none." Yet I can scarcely pity the man. He has an independent income, and, if he can stoop to be ordered about like a footman, I cannot so much blame her for the contempt with which she treats him.
Lord Grey was not very prompt to recognize the services which had been rendered to his government by the zeal and eloquence of this youthful ally. Office was notoriously of importance to Macaulay, and the sooner he was engaged in the active service of the government the better. Yet he was only offered at first a commissionship at the Board of Control, and it was not till the autumn of 1832 that he succeeded his friend Hyde Villiers in the secretaryship of that office. No doubt it was fortunate, as it turned out, that an official connection with the government of India was his first step in the public service. The following session, moreover, witnessed the passing of a most important India bill, which threw open the China trade; extinguished slavery in the British territories in the East; and made a considerable step towards the transfer of the sovereignty of India from the company to the crown. This measure was introduced by Mr. Charles Grant, as president of the Board of Control.' But it had been in a great part prepared by Macaulay, and it was defended by him in the House with the most brilliant eloquence. The session of 1833, however, did not pass without many anxieties. Macaulay, himself, who sat for Leeds in the first Reform Parliament, was desponding. He saw " nothing before him but a frantic conflict of extreme opinions; then a short period of oppression; then a convulsive reaction; and then a tremendous crash of the funds, the Church, the peerage and the throne." Mr. Stanley's bill for the emancipation of the West-Indian negroes, based on a long period of apprenticeship, was strongly condemned by the zealous abolitionists, by Zachary Macaulay and by Macaulay himself. At this moment, with all his hopes of political power and influence bursting into life, whilst pecuniary embarrassments were gathering round his family to such an extent that for several years every penny Macaulay earned, beyond what the necessities of life ​demanded, was devoted to paying off his father's creditors, with no professional income, and no means of subsistence but his pen, rather than support a measure which he conscientiously disapproved, Macaulay twice tendered his resignation. To the honour of the government it was not accepted, and he was allowed to stand aloof from the West India bill.
In the touching verses he wrote after his defeat at Edinburgh in 1847, the queen of gain, the queen of fashion, and the queen of power pass scornfully by his cradle, and leave the nursling to pursue a nobler and a happier aim,—
The sense of beauty and the thirst for truth.
Nothing could be more sincere. His indifference to gain was only modified by the desire to be generous to others, and he did not reckon the honours or amusements of the world amongst its real enjoyments. But it is singular that in 1833, after the extraordinary success of his earliest literary productions, it should not have occurred to him that he held between his fingers a power which might instantly create and command wealth, if not "beyond the dreams of avarice," yet certainly beyond his own wants. Had he devoted himself at once, and continuously, in 1833 to literary work—had he then commenced his "History," and brought out a volume a year, he might have realized as large a fortune as Sir Walter Scott, and probably far more than he brought back from India. But such was the simplicity of his character that this thought never struck him. It was with difficulty that he was persuaded to consent to the republication of his essays and articles—in themselves a fortune; and he seems to have thought there was something humiliating in degrading literature into a craft or profession.
Literary history is full of the miseries of authors. Macaulay knew every anecdote in existence of their privations and struggles. The affronts Dryden had endured from Tonson, the exigencies Mackintosh submitted to from Lardner. But he only discovered by long and late experience that in these times an author of genius, who manages his affairs with prudence, may realize gains quite equal to the returns of any other profession. It would probably have been to his own advantage, and certainly to the advantage of the world, if he had never been tempted to wander from the paths of literature into the beaten tracks of parliamentary and official life.
The India bill of 1833, which Macaulay had largely contributed to frame and to pass, contained a provision that one of the members of the Supreme Council at Calcutta should be appointed by the crown from among persons not being servants of the company. This office was called the legislative membership of council, and it was to be filled by a lawyer, chiefly with a view to improving and drafting the acts of the government of India. The salary was ten thousand a year, and to Macaulay himself, then in the thirty-fourth year of his life, this splendid post was offered. In an interesting letter to his sisters, which is too long to quote, he weighs the favourable and the adverse reasons. Money and office had in themselves no attraction for him; the most brilliant employment abroad was to him an almost intolerable exile. But he felt that the political prospects of his party were gloomy; he knew that the state of his father's affairs was disastrous; and he desired above all things to lay by a modest competency before he again embarked in public life. On these grounds he resolved to leave England, and he persuaded his sister Hannah to accompany him to Calcutta. Macaulay, to say the truth, knew but little of law and less of India—he had been a few times on the Northern Circuit, and he had sat for a few months at the Board of Control. This appointment gave a new direction to his powers, and studies, before repulsive, acquired a new interest. It is probable that we owe to Macaulay's Indian experience two of the most brilliant essays in the English language, which have brought the marvellous fabric of the British empire in the East visibly before millions of minds that had never thought of it before. But to Macaulay's dramatic genius the career of Clive and Warren Hastings—the triumph and the toil of the great Englishmen in India—was infinitely more captivating and attractive than the prodigious spectacle of India itself with its laws, its religions, its castes, its customs, its languages, dating from times when the British Isles were a swamp and a forest, inhabited by a barbarous race. It is extremely characteristic, that the chosen companions of his voyage to India were Richardson, Voltaire, Gibbon, Sismondi, Hallam, Don Quixote, Homer, and Horace, with a few books on jurisprudence and a couple of Persian and Hindostanee grammars. On the voyage he says, "I devoured Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English, folios, quartos, octavos, and duo. ​decimos." We have no doubt of it; but we question whether Colebrooke's Institutes or the land-tenures of India had a very large share of his attention. Indeed, what must strike every reader with astonishment, is the vast amount of classical reading and research, to which, judging from these letters, Macaulay's time was habitually devoted at Calcutta.
"During the last thirteen months I have read Æschylus twice; Sophocles twice; Euripides once; Pindar twice; Callimachus; Apollonius Rhodius; Quintus Calaber; Theocritus twice; Herodotus; Thucydides; almost all Xenophon's works; almost all Plato; Aristotle's "Politics," and a good deal of his "Organon," besides dipping elsewhere in him; the whole of Plutarch's "Lives; " about half of Lucian; two or three books of Athenaeus; Plautus twice; Terence twice; Lucretius twice; Catullus; Tibullus; Propertius; Lucan; Statius; Silius Italicus; Livy; Velleius Paterculus; Sallust; Caesar; and, lastly, Cicero. I have, indeed, still a little of Cicero left; but I shall finish him in a few days. I am now deep in Aristophanes and Lucian."
That the enormous list of classical works recorded in the foregoing letter was not only read through, but read with care, is proved by the pencil-marks, single, double, and treble, which meander down the margin of such passages as excited the admiration of the student; and by the remarks, literary, historical, and grammatical, with which the critic has interspersed every volume, and sometimes every page. In the case of a favourite writer, Macaulay frequently corrects the errors of the press, and even the punctuation, as minutely as if he were preparing the book for another edition. He read Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes four times through at Calcutta; and Euripides thrice. In his copy of Quintus Calaber, (a versifier who is less unknown by the title of Quintus Smyrnæus,) appear the entries
"September 22, 1835. Turned over, July 13, 1837."
It maybe doubted whether the Pandects would have attained the celebrity which they enjoy, if, in the course of the three years during which Justinian's law commission was at work, the president Tribonian had read Quintus Smyrnæus twice.
The Indian empire is a subject so vast and so profound, even to those whose lives have been spent in its service, that it is not too much to ask of the most gifted members of the Indian government that they should give it all their attention. But though Macaulay's knowledge of India was superficial, it would be unjust to suppose that his presence in the council was not of great value. He brought to Indian administration an intelligence, admirably stored by study and experience, with the most enlightened views of government; and his minutes are models of good judgment and practical sagacity. The part he took in India was essentially the application of sound liberal principles to a government which had till then been singularly jealous, close, and repressive. Thus he vindicated with the greatest energy the liberty of the Indian press, he maintained the equality of Europeans and natives before the law, and he gave an impulse to the work of education, to which the prodigious progress of the native races in the last thirty years, through the study of the English language, is mainly attributable. His greatest legislative work, in his own judgment, was the draft of a penal code—a subject which required less special technical knowledge of India than many others—for the rules of evidence and the definitions of offences might be common to all mankind. But twenty-two years elapsed before this code was promulgated. It was revised with great care and labour by experienced lawyers, and it owes a good deal to other hands, more especially to Sir Barnes Peacock, by whom it was at last brought into operation. Mr. Trevelyan quotes the high authority of Mr. Fitzjames Stephen in support of the fact that Macaulay had, somehow or other, acquired a very considerable knowledge of English criminal law, however little he had practised it. All these enlightened measures and reforms drew down on him a torrent of abuse, especially from the English society in Calcutta and the Mofussil, to which he seems to have been entirely indifferent. And as he strolled up and down his garden at early dawn or in the full splendour of Indian moonlight, his mind became gradually more and more indifferent to politics. What, he said, is the fame of Townshend to that of Hume, of Lord North to that of Gibbon, of Lord Chatham to that of Johnson?
I am more than half determined to abandon politics, and to give myself wholly to letters; to undertake some great historical work which may be at once the business and the amusement of my life; and to leave the pleasures of pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, aching heads, and diseased stpmachs to Roebuck and to Praed.
At the close of 1837 Macaulay embarked with his sister and her husband in the "Lord Hungerford" East Indiaman to return to England. The voyage was long and stormy. Zachary Macaulay died, in May 1838, before his children reached ​their native shore. The first business which awaited the returning legislator was a literary quarrel, that threatened to end in a duel. Lord Brougham had assumed towards Macaulay an attitude which boded no good. And, above all, the prospects of the political party with which Macaulay was so closely connected by principle and by regard were extremely depressing. We have read with curiosity and interest the remarks of Mr. Trevelyan on the causes which led to the fall of Lord Melbourne's government, differing as they do very widely from the impressions we ourselves retain of that event. But whatever those causes were, the fact is certain that a reaction had quickly succeeded to the violent emotions of the Reform agitation; that the party and the Parliament which had carried so many great measures, was soon broken up, partly by the secession of its more conservative members, but much more by the imprudent pressure of its radical adherents. At the moment of King William's death the cabinet was on the verge of defeat. It was rescued for a time by the popularity and Whig proclivities of the young queen. But we regard it as a misfortune to the Whig party that the existence of the ministry was prolonged after it had lost its power; and certainly there never was a moment less calculated to encourage a Whig statesman to resume his connection with public affairs.
Macaulay proceeded to make a tour of Italy in the autumn following his return. He visited that country, as his nephew justly remarks, with the eyes of an historian, but he had a faint appreciation of the beauties of natural scenery and still less of the great works of mediæval art. The charm of those portions of his Italian journals which are given to the reader consists in the vast array of historical associations which those spots, consecrated by the heroism of ages, awakened in his memory. And it is probable that he here first conceived the idea of those Roman ballads which he afterwards executed with such singular felicity. A proposal from Lord Melbourne to take the office of judge advocate followed him to Florence in November 1838, but the offer "did not strike him as even tempting," and was declined.
In Rome Macaulay had met Mr. Gladstone, then the rising hope of the Tory party. Oddly enough his first task on returning to London was to read and review Mr. Gladstone's "Essay on Church and State," which he did with the exclamation, "The Lord hath delivered him into our hand;" and certainly never was a crude theory more mercilessly demolished. Mr. Gladstone acted on the principle that a soft answer turneth away wrath, for he addressed his critic in the following terms:—
"I have been favoured with a copy of the forthcoming number of the Edinburgh Review; and I perhaps too much presume upon the bare acquaintance with you, of which alone I can boast, in thus unceremoniously assuming you to be the author of the article entitled 'Church and State,' and in offering you my very warm and cordial thanks for the manner in which you have treated both the work, and the author on whom you deigned to bestow your attention. In whatever you write you can hardly hope for the privilege of most anonymous productions, a real concealment; but, if it had been possible not to recognize you, I should have questioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candour and singlemindedness which it exhibits are, in one who has long been connected in the most distinguished manner with political party, so rare as to be almost incredible. . . . In these lacerating times one clings to everything of personal kindness in the past, to husband it for the future; and, if you will allow me, I shall earnestly desire to carry with me such a recollection of your mode of dealing with a subject upon which the attainment of truth, we shall agree, so materially depends upon the temper in which the search for it is instituted and conducted."
How much this letter pleased Macaulay is indicated by the fact of his having kept it unburned; a compliment which, except in this single instance, he never paid to any of his correspondents.
The elevation of Mr. Abercromby, the speaker, to the peerage, in May 1838, left a seat for Edinburgh vacant, and the Liberal constituency of our ancient city willingly accepted Macaulay as their candidate. He conciliated the Radicals by adopting the ballot, but in all other respects his political creed consisted in an emphatic renewal of his devoted attachment ​to Whig principles. The passage, in these days, it may be well to quote.
"I look with pride," said Macaulay, "on all that the Whigs have done for the cause of human freedom and of human happiness. I see them now hard pressed, struggling with difficulties, but still fighting the good fight. At their head I see men who have inherited the spirit and the virtues, as well as the blood, of old champions and martyrs of freedom. To those men I propose to attach myself. While one shred of the old banner is flying, by that banner will I, at least, be found. Whether in or out of Parliament—whether speaking with that authority which must always belong to the representative of this great and enlightened community, or expressing the humble sentiments of a private citizen—I will to the last maintain inviolate my fidelity to principles which, though they may be borne down for a time by senseless clamour, are yet strong with the strength, and immortal with the immortality, of truth; and which, however they may be misunderstood or misrepresented by contemporaries, will assuredly find justice from a better age."
The day came, even in Edinburgh, when the enthusiasm excited by this patriotic language was forgotten; but the day never came when Macaulay flinched from those principles; and the day will never come when those who follow, at however great a distance, in his footsteps, will forsake them.
It was not long before Macaulay was called upon to make a considerable sacrifice to his sense of public duty. The most cherished desire of his heart had been to devote himself, on his return to England, to some great literary work, for in his eyes all that he had hitherto achieved was desultory and ephemeral. He applied himself, indeed, with fresh energy to the review, and it was at this time that the splendid articles on Clive and Warren Hastings were written, to be followed by many others. But the magnum opus he had in view—the work which was to hand down his name to posterity, and perhaps be read and admired at the distance of a thousand years, was his English history. The plan was already framed in his mind, though in proportions very different from those which it afterwards assumed; and on March 9, 1839, it appears from his journal that he wrote a portion of the introduction. "Pretty well," was his own note upon it, "but a little too stately and rhetorical." But before the close of September he received a letter from Lord Melbourne, with an offer of the secretaryship at war and a seat in the Cabinet. No doubt to attain to a place in the executive government of England before a man is forty, by sheer force of intellect, is a triumph and a temptation which few men of strong political feelings and ambition could resist. But in accepting office Macaulay added nothing to his own fame. He had no inducement to accept it but the consciousness that it was his duty to support what he knew to be a falling government. His powers of debate were wasted in violent and fruitless altercations, and his duties as secretary at war might have been as well performed by a chief clerk of the department. In one respect his short ministerial career was remarkable. He gave a strenuous support to Lord Palmerston in the transactions of 1840 which nearly led to war with France; and he did not side with the dissentient voices in the Cabinet, though amongst them were several names dearest to the Whig party and to himself. The struggle of the Cabinet was not of long duration. In less than two years the Melbourne ministry fell, and Macaulay was liberated from office.
He wrote at this time to Macvey Napier;—
I am not at all disappointed by the elections. They have, indeed, gone very nearly as I expected. Perhaps I counted on seven or eight votes more; and even these we may get on petition. I can truly say that I have not, for many years, been so happy as I am at present. Before I went to India, I had no prospect in the event of a change of government, except that of living by my pen, and seeing my sisters governesses. In India I was an exile. When I came back, I was for a time at liberty; but I had before me the prospect of parting in a few months, probably forever, with my dearest sister and her children. That misery was removed; but I found myself in office, a member of a government wretchedly weak, and struggling for existence. Now I am free. I am independent. I am in Parliament, as honourably seated as man can be. My family is comfortably off. I have leisure for literature; yet I am not reduced to the necessity of writing for money. If I had to choose a lot from all that there are in human life, I am not sure that I should prefer any to that which has fallen to me. I am sincerely and thoroughly contented.
These agreeable prognostications were to a great extent realized. Eighteen years of life still remained to him, and he spent them in full and unbroken enjoyment. His influence in Parliament was considerable, and on more than one occasion he turned the opinion of the House, by the incomparable ingenuity of his arguments. He lost his seat for Edinburgh indeed but that was the result of a proud and ​manly adherence to principle and to his determination never to degrade the character of a representative. Although he gradually withdrew from general society, and was bored by the vacuity of country-houses and big dinners, he clung more closely to the intercourse of his relations and intimate friends; and meanwhile the history steadily, though slowly, advanced.
It is this period of Macaulay's life which offers the greatest interest to those of the present generation who enjoyed his society, and Mr. Trevelyan has fortunately preserved to us considerable portions of his daily journal at this time. The events recorded are indeed slight and few, but the picture of that animated and accomplished company of kindred minds is full of brilliancy and truth. It was an age of social breakfasts. Macaulay himself preferred a party of friends, assembled at a breakfast-table to eat muffins and broiled salmon, to any other mode of entertainment; and if he did not set the fashion, he certainly adopted it with great cordiality and gave it an unusual charm. Hallam, Sydney Smith, Lord Carlisle, Lord Stanhope, M. Van de Weyer, Senior, and Bishop Wilberforce shared this taste, and the breakfasts were incessant at their respective houses. Bright as those mornings always were, the brightest were the days on which Macaulay appeared, or on which he assembled the same party at the Albany or on Campden Hill. Rogers' breakfasts were a thing apart, for at them the chief object of the host seemed to be to exhibit himself and tell his own stories over again, with the well-known fall of the lip or the anticipated tear. But Macaulay's parties were perfectly natural and unaffected, the conversation was spontaneous and unprepared; yet involuntarily the circle found itself drawing closer round the magician's chair.
So charming left his voice that they awhile Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear.
Not less congenial to Macaulay were the dinners of "The Club"—that remarkable society founded in 1764 by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, which has numbered amongst its members the best talkers of a century, but certainly none more brilliant than him who was elected on March 19, 1839. For twenty years Macaulay constantly attended these dinners, which are held on alternate Tuesdays during the session. He was there completely in his element. Each of the guests was ear and voice to the others. Lord Carlisle's journal has preserved a few shadowy records of these delightful meetings, but, whatever else the club may have retained, the spirit of Boswell has ceased to haunt it. Mr. Trevelyan speaks of "The Club" in the past tense, as if he supposed that after the dissolution of so brilliant a company, nothing survived. We beg to assure him that he is mistaken. "Esto perpetua" is the motto of the club, and we hope that the time will never arrive when English gentlemen are wanting to support its literary and social traditions.
Whatever fault might be found with Macaulay's gestures as an orator, his appearance and bearing in conversation were singularly effective. Sitting bolt upright, his hands resting on the arms of his chair or folded over the handle of his walking-stick;—knitting his great eyebrows if the subject was one which had to be thought out as he went along, or brightening from the forehead downwards when a burst of humour was coming;—his massive features and honest glance suited well with the manly sagacious sentiments which he set forth in his pleasant sonorous voice, and in his racy and admirably intelligible language. To get at his meaning people had never the need to think twice, and they certainly had seldom, the time. And with all his ardour, and with all his strength and energy of conviction, he was so truly considerate towards others, so delicately courteous with the courtesy which is of the essence and not only in the manner! However eager had been the debate, and however prolonged the sitting, no one in the company ever had personal reasons for wishing a word of his unsaid, or a look or a tone recalled. His good things were never long in the making. During the Caff re war, at a time when we were getting rather the worst of it, he opened the street door for a walk down Westbourne Terrace. "The blacks are flying," said his companion. "I wish they were in South Africa," was the instant reply. His quotations were always ready, and never off the mark. He was always willing to accept a friendly challenge to a feat of memory. One day, in the Board-room of the British Museum, Sir David Dundas saw him hand to Lord Aberdeen a sheet of foolscap covered with writing arranged in three parallel columns down each of the four pages. This document, of which the ink was still wet, proved to be a full list of the senior wranglers at Cambridge with their dates and colleges, for the hundred years during which the names of senior wranglers had been recorded in the university calendar. On another occasion Sir David asked: "Macaulay, do you know your popes?" "No," was the answer; "I always get wrong among the Innocents."
"But can you say your Archbishops of Canterbury?" "Any fool," said Macaulay, "could say his Archbishops of Canterbury ​backwards:" and he went off at score, drawing breath only once in order to remark on the oddity of there having been an Archbishop Sancroft and an Archbishop Bancroft, until Sir David stopped him at Cranmer.
Macaulay was proud of his good memory, and had little sympathy with people who affected to have a bad one. In a note on the margin of one of his books he reflects upon this not uncommon form of self-depreciation: "They appear to reason thus: The more memory, the less invention."
Yet he had himself remarked on another occasion that it was dangerous for a man of strong memory to read too much, because in acquiring an amazing command over the thoughts of others, he might dilute the power of original thought in himself. That was undoubtedly to some extent the case with Macaulay. Every incident he heard of, every page he read, assumed in his mind a concrete, objective, spectral form. He saw them before him: but his genius was less conversant with abstract truths or their relations. These qualities made his writings and conversation eminently graphic, clear, and attractive, rather than profound studies of human nature or of the causes, of events. To this distinction between the most brilliant modern writer of history and the great models of antiquity, especially Thucydides and Tacitus, Macaulay was by no means insensible: it originates in a different order of mind and in far other powers of original thought. The historian of antiquity to whom his writings bear the nearest resemblance is Livy.
Macaulay never worked at anything so hard as he laboured at his "History." His method of composition was slow and toilsome; his care and correctness, both as to matter and style, endless. His researches to ascertain facts, even of trilling importance, were extraordinary. Yet the bulk of the materials he used were derived from printed sources—memoirs, pamphlets, sermons, ballads, broadsheets, Parliamentary journals and the statute-book. He seldom attempted to dive into that ocean of manuscript records, which threatens to bury the sources of history under strata of rubbish; but he made considerable use of the Dutch and Spanish despatches, and of Narcissus Luttrell's diary, then unpublished. He was also aided by the previous researches of Mackintosh. The work of preparing the materials of history, and that of writing actual history, must be performed by two distinct classes of men. All experience shows how impossible it is to attain to complete and indisputable accuracy even in the narrative of an ordinary contemporary event. With every fresh witness, with every fresh piece of evidence, the difficulty increases. We speak with confidence of the history of the ancients, because the witnesses are few in number: but the more we know, the more we doubt. Macaulay laboured with an honest and intense desire to be truthful and just, though he wrote under the influence of strong predilections; and his slips of memory are exceedingly rare. One of these is curious. We had occasion in reviewing the first volumes of his "History" to point out that he was mistaken in conferring on Schomberg, who was killed at the battle of the Boyne, a grave in Westminster Abbey. It now turns out from a journal of a tour in Ireland, made for the express purpose of visiting the scenes memorable in the history of those times, that Macaulay actually saw the tomb of Schomberg in St Patrick's, Dublin, and noted Swift's savage inscription on it. This must have escaped his recollection.
Early in 1849, in the midst of events which convulsed Europe with new revolutions, this great history of an old and triumphant revolution was given to the world. It is needless to say how it was received—the sale of edition after edition was rapid and enormous. It was read with enthusiasm by all classes; for if it contained some of the noblest passages of historical composition to instruct the statesman and delight the scholar, it was amusing enough to divert the frivolous, and clear enough to give pleasure and knowledge to the uneducated. Whatever Macaulay's hopes of success or consciousness of desert may have been, the results exceeded all expectation. In one instance alone was a serious attempt made to depreciate the merit and detract from the influence of the greatest historical work of our time. A contemporary reviewer, writing with the deliberation and judgment required on such an occasion, declared that—
Mr. Macaulay was a grand proficient in the picturesque, but a very poor professor of the historic. These volumes have been, and the future volumes as they may appear will be, devoured with the same eagerness that "Oliver Twist," or "Vanity Fair" excite, with the same quality of zest, though perhaps with a higher degree of it: but his pages will seldom, we think, receive a second perusal; and the work, we apprehend, will hardly find a ​permanent place on the historical shelf, nor ever, assuredly, be quoted as authority on any question or point of the history of England.
Such criticism could do Macaulay no harm, and as was said at the time, the writer of the article in attempting murder had committed suicide. But in his private journal, the historian made the following remark.
April 13.—To the British Museum, looked over the "Travels" of the Duke of Tuscany, and found the passage the existence of which Croker denies. His blunders are really incredible. The article has been received with general contempt. Really Croker has done me a great service. I apprehended a strong reaction, the natural effect of such a success; and, if hatred had left him free to use his very slender faculties to the best advantage, he might have injured me much. He should have been large in acknowledgment; should have taken a mild and expostulatory tone; and should have looked out for real blemishes, which, as I too well know, he might easily have found. Instead of that, he has written with such rancour as to make every body sick. I could almost pity him. But he is a bad, a very bad, man: a scandal to politics and to letters.
From that day to this, the same journal has never lost an opportunity of launching shafts against the literary reputation of Lord Macaulay. Mr. Croker is dead, but the race of Crokers is not extinct, nor is it likely to expire as long as the principal organ of the Tory party sedulously keeps it alive.
It is certainly not a matter of regret that Macaulay was relieved for some years from the fatigue of Parliament. In 1852, when the Whigs returned to office, he refused a seat in the Cabinet; but when it was proposed in June of the same year to put him in nomination for Edinburgh, the compliment of a voluntary amende paid by so great a constituency was not unwelcome to him. His own bearing was high and rigid. He had made no advance and no concession. But Edinburgh, to her honour, was glad to take him back on his own terms. Unhappily the time was already past for Macaulay to render to his constituents or his country any important political services. Within two days of the election and before he could go down to Scotland, on July 15, 1852, he felt suddenly oppressed with an exceeding weakness and languor. Dr. Bright was called in and pronounced that he was suffering from seriously deranged action of the heart. From that moment the exertions of public life became extremely painful and onerous to him, and at times he was scarcely able to write—as he himself expressed it, he had aged twenty years in a single week The case was a singular one: a man of fifty-two, scarcely past the prime of life, of temperate habits, given to daily exercise and regular hours, who had never been ill, suddenly found his powers of life impaired, and felt that, although he might linger for some years, the " strict arrest of the fell serjeant, death," was on him.
"December 31, 1853.— Another day of work and solitude. I enjoy this invalid life extremely. In spite of my gradually sinking health, this has been a happy year. My strength is failing. My life will not, I think, be long. But I have clear faculties, warm affections, abundant sources of pleasure."
At very distant intervals, he gives expression, in two or three pathetic sentences, to the dejection which is the inevitable attendant upon the most depressing of all ailments. " I am not what I was, and every month my heart tells it me more and more clearly. Jama little low; not from apprehension; for I look forward to the inevitable close with perfect serenity: but from regret for what I love. I sometimes hardly command my tears when I think how soon I must leave them. I feel that the fund of life is nearly spent."
His temper was unruffled by the thought that the great work he had commenced, and which he once hoped to bring down "to a period of living memory," must remain incomplete. Nothing but expressions of gratitude ever passed his lips, for the happiness of the life he had enjoyed. Enough for him to work on whilst it was yet day; and to persevere with unbroken industry, good humour, and benevolence to the end. Once he spoke in Parliament in favour of retaining the master of the rolls in the House of Commons, and again in defence of the competitive system of appointments to India; but he felt all the time that it was grevious waste of strength, with the reign of Anne still unwritten, for him to consume his scanty stock of vigour in the tedious and exhausting effort of political debate.
The desire of literary fame was certainly one of Macaulay's strongest passions. To be ranked with those great writers who had shed a glory and a joy over his own existence—to be read by future ages and distant countries—to be incorporated
With that dear language which I spake like thee,—
were results intensely gratifying to his ​imagination. He lived to enjoy these as fully as a man can enjoy, or taste, the pleasures of posthumous fame, by anticipated distinction. Yet he was not prone to exaggerate his own importance, and he looked at it, willingly enough, from the comical side. Thus he writes in March 1850:—
At last I have attained true glory. As I walked through Fleet Street the day before yesterday, I saw a copy of Hume at a bookseller's window with the following label: "Only 2l 2s. Hume's 'History of England' in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduction to Macaulay." I laughed so convulsively that the other people who were staring at the books took me for a poor demented gentleman. Alas for poor David! As for me, only one height of renown yet remains to be attained. I am not yet in Madame Tussaud's waxwork. ••••••••• I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God. But you must hear of my triumphs. Thackeray swears that he was eye-witness and ear-witness of the proudest event of my life. Two damsels were just about to pass that doorway which we, on Monday, in vain attempted to enter, when I was pointed out to them. "Mr. Macaulay!" cried the lovely pair. "Is that Mr. Macaulay? Never mind the hippopotamus." And, having paid a shilling to see behemoth, they left him in the very moment at which he was about to display himself to them, in order to see—but spare my modesty. I can wish for nothing more on earth, now that Madame Tussaud, in whose pantheon I once hoped for a place, is dead.
Or, to quote another form of honour paid to his memory—that perhaps which he would himself most highly have appreciated—amongst the national relics in the British Museum a few lines traced by his hand have been deemed worthy to find a place, as one of the choicest of our treasures.
A manuscript page of his "History," thickly scored with dashes and erasures,—it is the passage in the twenty-fifth chapter where Sir Hans Sloane is mentioned as "the founder of the magnificent museum which is one of the glories of our country,"—is preserved at that museum in a cabinet, which may truly be called the place of honour; within whose narrow limits are gathered together a rare collection of objects such as Englishmen of all classes and parties regard with a common reverence and pride. There may be seen Nelson's hasty sketch of the line of battle at the Nile; and the sheet of paper on which Wellington computed the strength of the cavalry regiments that were to fight at Waterloo; and the note-book of Locke; and the autographs of Samuel Johnson's "Irene," and Ben Jonson's "Masque of Queens;" and the rough copy of the translation of the "Iliad," written, as Pope loved to write, on the margin of frayed letters and the backs of tattered envelopes. It is pleasant to think what Macaulay's feelings would have been, if, when he was rhyming and castle-building among the summer-houses at Barley Wood, or the laurel-walks at Aspenden, or under the limes and horse-chestnuts in the Cambridge Gardens, he could have been assured that the day would come when he should be invited to take his place in such a noble company.
But indeed no form of human honour and reward was wanting to his success. The Institute of France conferred on him the rank of an associate. Oxford made him a doctor of laws. The town council of Cambridge elected him in 1857 to the high-stewardship of the borough—an honorary office which had been held by the protector Somerset, by Bacon, by Oliver Cromwell, and by Clarendon. The members of the Prussian Order of Merit elected him a knight. And soon after his health compelled him to retire from the representation of Edinburgh, the queen raised him to the rank of a peer of England—the first example of a peerage bestowed on literary genius, for at the time it was granted Macaulay had ceased to be a politician. It was, however, not unwelcome to him that this mark of the queen's favour was conferred by the hand of Lord Palmerston. Though Lord Palmerston was certainly not a representative of Whig opinions, but rather of the liberal side of Toryism, his high-spirit, his pluck, and vigour in action had always exercised a powerful attraction over the mind of Macaulay. In 1852, when he was dismissed from the Foreign Office, Macaulay wrote in his journal:—
December 24.—Palmerston is out. It was high time; but I cannot help being sorry. A daring, indefatigable, high-spirited man; but too fond of conflict, and too ready to sacrifice everything to victory when once he was in the ring.
In fact Macaulay liked Lord Palmerston, not only in spite of his defects, but in some degree for his defects, which warmed his imagination. It was therefore with peculiar pleasure that he received life peerage from so friendly a hand. He took his seat with modest pride beside the representatives of the historic families of England, whose forefathers were to him better known than his own contemporaries. But his elevation to the peerage produced no other results. He never spoke in the ​House of Lords, for though he had once prepared an answer to Lord Ellenborough on some Indian question, the opportunity passed and the speech was not delivered.
Scarcely any portion of these volumes will be read with greater interest than the record of the years (chiefly under Macaulay's own hand), which were spent in the steady prosecution of his historical labours. Yet there are no events to record—nothing but the play of his own mind and fancy, the pursuit of a noble object, and numberless touches of humour, tenderness, and generosity, which endear him more and more to us. These we must rapidly pass by: but the success of the second instalment of his great work must be commemorated, for it was the most extraordinary occurrence of the kind not only in his own life, but in all literary history.
On the 21st of November 1855, he writes: "I looked over and sent off the last twenty pages. My work is done, thank God; and now for the result. On the whole, I think that it cannot be very unfavourable. At dinner I finished 'Melpomene.'" The first effect upon Macaulay of having completed an instalment of his own "History" was now, as in 1848, to set him reading Herodotus.
"November 23.—Longman came. All the twenty-five thousand copies are ordered. Monday, the 27th of December, is to be the day; but on the evening of the preceding Saturday those booksellers who take more than a thousand are to have their books. The stock lying at the bookbinders' is insured for ten thousand pounds. The whole weight is fifty-six tons. It seems that no such edition was ever published of any work of the same bulk. I earnestly hope that neither age nor riches will narrow my heart."
"November 29.—I was again confined to my room all day, and again dawdled over my book. I wish that the next month were over. I am more anxious than I was about the first part, for then I had no highly-raised expectations to satisfy, and now people expect so much that the seventh book of Thucydides would hardly content them. On the other hand, the general sterility, the miserably enervated state of literature, is all in my favour. We shall see. It is odd that I should care so very little about the money, though it is full as much. as I made by banishing myself for four and a half of the best years of my life to India."
On the last day of February 1856, Macaulay writes in his journal: "Longman called. It is necessary to reprint. This is wonderful. Twenty-six thousand five hundred copies sold in ten weeks! I should not wonder if I made twenty thousand pounds clear this year by literature. Pretty well, considering that, twenty years ago, I had just nothing when my debts were paid; and all that I have, with the exception of a small part left me by my uncle, the general, has been made by myself, and made easily and honestly, by pursuits which were a pleasure to me, and without one insinuation from any slanderer that I was not even liberal in all my pecuniary dealings."
"March 7.—Longman came, with a very pleasant announcement. He and his partners find that they are overflowing with money; and think that they cannot invest it better than by advancing to me, on the usual terms of course, part of what will be due to me in December. We agreed that they shall pay twenty thousand pounds into Williams's bank next week. What a sum to be gained by one edition of a book! I may say, gained in one day. But that was harvest-day. The work had been near seven years in hand. I went to Westbourne Terrace by a Paddington omnibus, and passed an hour there, laughing and laughed at. They are all much pleased. They have, indeed, as much reason to be pleased as I, who am pleased on their account rather than on my own, though I am glad that my last years will be comfortable. Comfortable, however, I could have been on a sixth part of the income which I shall now have."
The cheque is still preserved as a curiosity among the archives of Messrs. Longman's firm.
To this statement Mr. Trevelyan adds the following details, which are an appropriate answer to the predictions of the Quarterly Review.
Messrs. Longman's books show that, in an ordinary year, when nothing is done to stimulate the public appetite by novelty of form or reduction of price, their stock of the "History" goes out of their hands at the rate of seventy complete copies a week. But a computation founded on this basis would give a very inadequate notion of the extent to which Macaulay's most important work is bought and read; for no account would have been taken of the years in which large masses of new and cheap editions were sold off in the course of a few months. 12,024 copies of a single volume of the "History" were put into circulation in 1858, and 22,925 copies of a single volume in 1864. During the nine years ending with the 25th of June 1857, Messrs. Longman disposed of 30,478 copies of the first volume of the "History;" 50,783 copies during the nine years ending with June 1866; and 52,392 copies during the nine years ending with June 1875. Within a generation of its first appearance, upwards of a hundred and forty thousand copies of the "History" will have been printed and sold in the United Kingdom alone.
Caring little for money, except in so far as he was able to make a liberal and generous use of it, Macaulay enjoyed the power his new opulence had conferred on him. Until he was fifty-two years of age, he had never had a carriage of his own, except when in office; indeed he had ​never even had a house. He now removed from the Albany to an agreeable villa on Campden Hill, with a gallery to the south and a garden—an abode perfectly suited to him: and he continued, with increasing liberality, to assist those who had any claims on him, and a great many of those who had not. The appeals to him from distressed literary men were numberless, but he never turned a deaf ear to them. One morning a gentleman calls on him and relates his embarrassments; he was a Cambridge man and his name was known in philology; Macaulay is moved, and without even ascertaining his identity, gives him a cheque for a hundred pounds. His generosity, when his heart was touched, and his heart was easily touched, was really unbounded.
Macaulay lived exactly four years after the publication of the second portion of his "History," and had his health and energy not been greatly impaired, that time would have sufficed to carry him to the close of the reign of Anne. But the truth is that although he had only then completed his fifty-fifth year he was prematurely old—as old, physically, as most men are at seventy. In intellectual power and in the gift of memory he suffered no decline. It is a subject of eternal regret that he should not so far have husbanded or applied his time and strength as to include the reign of Anne in his "History"—that reign which has been so often attempted, and as yet so inadequately described.
Gradually and unwillingly Macaulay acquiesced in the conviction that he must submit to leave untold that very portion of English history which he was competent to treat as no man again will treat it. Others may study the reign of Anne with a more minute and exclusive diligence,—the discovery of materials hitherto concealed cannot fail from time to time to throw fresh light upon transactions so extensive and complicated as those which took place between the rupture of the peace of Ryswick and the accession of the house of Brunswick; but it may safely be affirmed that few or none of Macaulay's successors will be imbued like him with the enthusiasm of the period. There are phases of literary taste which pass away, never to recur; and the early associations of future men of letters will seldom be connected with "The Rape of the Lock," and the "Essay on Criticism,"—with "The Spectator," "The Guardian," "The Freeholder," the "Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus," and the "History of John Bull."
But Macaulay's youth was nourished upon Pope, and Bolingbroke, and Atterbury, and Defoe. Everything which has been written by them, or about them, was as familiar to him as "The Lady of the Lake," and "The Bride of Abydos," were to the generation which was growing up when Lockhart's "Life of Scott" and Moore's "Life of Byron" were making their first appearance in the circulating libraries. He had Prior's burlesque verses, and Arbuthnot's pasquinades, as completely at his fingers'-ends as a clever public-schoolboy of fifty years ago had the "Rejected Addresses," or the poetry of the Anti-Jacobin. He knew every pamphlet which had been put forth by Swift, or Steele, or Addison as well as Tories of 1790 knew their Burke, or Radicals of 1820 knew their Cobbett. There were times when he amused himself with the hope that he might even yet be permitted to utilize these vast stores of information, off each separate fragment of which he could so easily lay his hand. His diary shows him to have spent more than one summer afternoon "walking in the portico, and reading pamphlets of Queen Anne's time." But he had no real expectation that the knowledge which he thus acquired would ever be turned to account.
In truth he was conscious that, with no acute disease, and with little actual suffering, the sand of life was well-nigh spent in the hour-glass. He turned with deeper affection to those he loved. His tears flowed more readily at any passage of his favourite authors that touched his sensibility, or at any kind and generous action which kindled his admiration. To use Mr. Trevelyan's touching language:—
Of the feelings which he entertained towards the great minds of bygone ages it is not for any one except himself to speak. He has told us how his debt to them was incalculable; how they guided him to truth; how they filled his mind with noble and graceful images; how they stood by him in all vicissitudes,—comforters in sorrow, nurses in sickness, companions in solitude, "the old friends who are never seen with new faces; who are the same in wealth and in poverty, in glory and in obscurity." Great as were the honours and possessions which Macaulay acquired by his pen, all who knew him were well aware that the titles and rewards, which he gained by his own works, were as nothing in the balance as compared with the pleasure which he derived from the works of others. That knowledge has largely contributed to the tenderness with which he has been treated by writers whose views on books, and events, and politics past and present differ widely from his own. It has been well said that even the most hostile of his critics cannot help being "awed and touched by his wonderful devotion to literature." And, while his ardent and sincere passion for letters has thus served as a protection to his memory, it was likewise the source of much which calls for admiration in his character and conduct. The confidence with which he could rely upon intellectual pursuits for occupation and amusement assisted him not a little to preserve that dignified ​sure, with which he met all the changes and chances of his public career; and that spirit of cheerful and patient endurance, which sustained him through years of broken health and enforced seclusion.
There are people who conceive themselves to be fond of reading and conversant with literature, because they devour the nerveless publications of the day, and exhaust the circulating libraries. They forget, or they do not know, that the broadest and richest fields of literature lie in more remote regions. Macaulay, with his boundless appetite for books, had but scant indulgence for the writers of his own time. Measured by his standard they appeared to him paradoxical, fantastical, and even contemptible. He rushed past these ephemeral productions, to dwell more constantly and more frequently with the imperishable remains of former ages. That which really charmed him in letters was not their novelty but their antiquity, their vitality, their duration. His biographer admits, apparently with regret, that writers of the stamp of Mr. Buckle, Mr. Carlyle, and Mr. Ruskin had not the power to command his attention. Perhaps if they could have come down to him with the authority of a thousand years, and a dead language, he would have appreciated them more highly.
The gloom of the winter of 1859 was heightened to him by the dread of an approaching separation from his beloved sister and one of his nieces, who were to join Sir Charles Trevelyan at Madras in February: but from the terrible pang of that departure he was mercifully spared. On Christmas-day his family once more gathered round his hearth—but he talked little and continually fell asleep. On the morning of December 28, he dictated a letter to a poor curate, enclosing a cheque for twenty-five pounds. That was the last time he signed his name. That same evening, sitting in his library, with a book before him, still open at the last-read page, he ceased to breathe. "He died as he had always wished to die;—without pain, without any formal farewell; preceding to the grave all whom he loved; and leaving behind him a great and honourable name, and the memory of a life every action of which was as clear and transparent as one of his own sentences." On January 9, 1860, they laid him in Westminster Abbey, at the foot of the statue of Addison, and he was joined to that illustrious company of scholars and statesmen whom it had been the study and the glory of his life to emulate.
What Lord Macaulay was his own writings and these volumes sufficiently attest. We shall not attempt to retrace the outlines of his genius and his character, for we have already recorded in these pages our own sense of his greatness His extraordinary powers of intellect and memory were already known to the world. But the world had yet to learn with how fine a poetic temperament and with what warmth of heart these gifts were combined.
In conclusion, it only remains to us to acknowledge the skill and candour with which Mr. Trevelyan has executed a very delicate and difficult task. So much of the life of his illustrious uncle was spent within the sanctuary of domestic life, that it was impossible to make it entirely known to posterity without lifting those veils of privacy which are commonly drawn closer by the ties of kindred and personal affection. But it was his good fortune to have nothing to conceal, and nothing to relate that was not amiable, honourable, and true. Details, sometimes trivial in themselves, add to the reality of the picture, and we do not doubt that these volumes will be read throughout the world with a curiosity and an interest, only to be surpassed by the success of Lord Macaulay's own writings.
* ↑ The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. By George Otto Trevelyan, Esq., M.P. 2 vols. 8vo. London; 1876.
* ↑ Plato, Phædros, sup. fin.
* ↑ Some of these "Lays" must already have been composed in his mind, for he says; "I then went towards the river, to the spot where the old Pons Sublicius stood and looked about to see how my Horatius agreed with the topography. Pretty well; but his house must be on Mount Palatinus, for he never could see Mount Cælius from the spot where he fought." This evidently refers to the passage,— But he saw on Palatinus The white porch of his home, And he spake to the noble river That rolls by the walls of Rome. Yet his brother Charles seems to have supposed that the "Lays" were composed after his return to England.
* ↑ Quarterly Review, March 1849.
* ↑ See Edinburgh Review vol. cxi., p. 273.