The Express.
London, England, 1862-02-10 00:00:00

A Meissoir of Lord Macaulay. By the Very Rev.
the DIAN of Sr. Paces. Reprinted from the
Papers of the Royal Society. Longman'.
The Dean of St. Paul's baa rendered a welcome
service to the lovers of English literature in re-
printing this short biographical sketch of his life-
long friend, Lord Macaulay. Having been written
in the form of a Paper for the Royal Society, it
could of course furnish nothing beyond a mere
outline of the great historian's - career. But short
sa it is, it is by far the best memoir of Lord
Macaulay that has yet appeared. Within the
narrow space of thirty pages Dean Milman
gives all the leading facts of lord Mscaulay'a
life, with a just and discriminating esti-
mate of his powers and achievements es
jurist, statesman, orator, poet, essayist and his-
torian, and toward" the close of the sketch a few
characteristic sentences on his conversational powers,
and private life and character. Though he early
chose the profession of the law, was duly called to
the bar, and joined the northern circuit, Macaulay'"
career is so thoroughly identified with public life
and literature that many may be surprised to hear
that he has any claim to be eoesidered a jurist at
all. This however, it will be remembered, was the
capacity la which be went to India, within a few
years after his first entrance on public life. At
Calcutta, he was not only member of the Supreme
Council but President of the Law Commission,
and in the discharge of his duties in this poet he
assisted in the elaborationof a code which is just now,
for the first time, co • into operation. "It has
been supposed," says Data Milman, " and, in-
, deed, asserted, that this legislative minion was
' barren and without result ; now, however, it is
bearing its mature fruits. After much, perhaps
inevitable delay, and repeated revisions, the Indian
Criminal Code, in the formation of which he took
a leading part, and which he had enriched with most
valuable explanatory notes, will, with some
alterations, and those not substantial, from January,
1882, have the force of law throughout British
India. Macaulay's share in this great work, espe-
cially his notes, is declared by those who have a
right to judge on such subject to have placed his
reputation as a jurist on a solid foundation. It is
the first, and, therefore, the most important, of a
series of operations upon the judicial system of India,
which will have a great effect upon the state of
society in that country, and will not be without in-
fluence upon the jurisprudence of England."
Although public life must have bad great at-
tractions to a mind so gifted, energetic, sod am-
bitious as that of Lord Macaulay, every one who
has followed his career must feel that he yielded
himself to its claims with a divided heart, and
never even in the most active period of his parlia-
mentary career wholly abandoned his first love.
Dr. Milman says, referring to this period :
Bat threeghout this period of his life the great inward
struggle was going on within his mind Wires& the ambi-
tion of public usetulness, of parliamentary and official dis-
tinction, and the love of letter, which will rarely brook a
rival on the throne, the still higher ambition, as he thought,
of adding some great work to the treasures of English
thought sad English literature. In the offire at Whitehall
or the Horse Guards, oa the benches of the House of Com-
mons, said the spplauses or admiring silence of the house,
his heart was in - his library and among his books. He
yesreed for • plum not so much among the great parlia-
mentary leaders and the famous statesmen of the land—
the Chathanis, Burkee, Foxe—as among the immortal
writers in verse and prose—the Hiltons, Clarendon, Addi-
son, Gibbons. The auditory which he coveted was that
vast expanding world throughout which the English
language is spoken : the fame, that which will only die with
the death of English lettere. Throughout the whole time
of his abeam» from /inland, on his voyage to India and on
his return, in India, as far ea leisure would allow, and
during his parliamentary and effrial career, he was still
with has inlefatipble tawdry heaping up stores of Maori-
ledge, steeps wheat meld net overload his capacious and
retentive memory—memory, whose grasp and self-command
seemed to expend with its accumulating treasures—me-
mory which disdained nothing as beneath it, and was never
perplexed or burdened by is incalculable possessions. As
• curious instance of his range and activity of reading,
among the books which he took with him to India were
the many huge volumes of St. Chrasostom's works. Their
stall almost pure and barmosious Greek. and their impor-
tance in the history of religious opinion (always • subject of
deep interest), carried him through a task which has been
achieved by few professiemal theologies". As an illustra-
tion of his powers of memory, he has said, and he was a
most tiabosedul man, that if Milton's peat poem were lost
he thought that he could accurately commit to writing at
least all the first books of " Paradise Lost."
Of Macaulay's style his friend and biographer
justly says :
It was eminently his own, but his own not by strange
words, or strange collocation of words, by phrases of perpe-
teal occurrence, or the straining after original and striking
terms of expression. Its characteristics were vigour and
animation, copiousness, clematis, above all, sound English,
now a rare excellence. The vigour and life were unabatiug ;
perhaps in that conscious strength which cost no exertion
be did not always gauge and measure the force of his own
words. Those who studied the progress of his writing
might perhaps see that the full stream, though it never
stagnated, might at first overflow its hank ;in later days it
ran with a more direct undivided torrent. His copiousness
had nothing tumid, diffuse, Asiatic ; no ornament for the
sake of ornament. As to its clearness, one may read a sen-
tence of Macaulay twice, to judge of its full force, never to
comprehend its meaning. His English was pure, both in
idiom and in words, pure to fastidiousness; sot that he dis-
carded, or did not make free use of the plainest and moat
homely terms (be had a sovereign contempt for what
is called the dignity of history, which would keep itself
above the vulgar tongue). but every word must be ge-
nuine English, nothing that approached real vulgarity ;
nothing that had not the stamp of popular use, or the
authority of sound English writers, nothing unfamiliar to
the common ear.
W e must make room for another interesting pas-
sage on Macaulay's conversational powers :
There is • common impression that in society he was
engrossing and overpowering. Every one has heard the
witty saying of his old friend (no two men could appreciate
aseh other sure highly or more justly) about " flashes of
atlases.' But in the quiet intercourse with the single
Irked, no great talker was more free, easy and genial, than
Macaulay. There was the most equable interchange of
thought ; he listened with as much courtesy, as he spoke
with gentle and pleasant persuasiveness. la a larger circle,
such as he delighted to meet and assemble around him to the
cloeeof his life, a few chosen intimates, some accomplished
ladies, foreigners of the highest distinction, who were eager
to make his acquaintance, his manner were frank and open.
In conversation in such a circle, a commanding voice, high
animal spirits, unrivalled quickness of apprehension, • flow
of language as rapid as inexhaustible, gave him perhaps •
larger share, but • share which few were not delighted to
yield up to him. His thoughts were like ligbtuing, and
clothed theniselves at once in words. While other men
were thinking what they should my, and how they should
say it, Macaulay bad said it all, and a great deal more. And
the stores which his memory had at instantaneous com-
mand ! A wide range of Greek and Lain history and Me-
nton, English, French, Italian, Spanish ; of German he
had not so full a stock, but be knew the best works of the
beet authors ; Dutch he learned for the purpose dins His-
tory. With these came anecdote, touches of character,
drollery, fun, excellent stories excellently told. The
hearer often longed fur Macaulay's memory to carry off
what he heard in • single morning, in an after-dinner col-
loquy, or in a few hours in •country-house.
It should be added that the Memoir is printed in
a form that will enable it to be bound up with the
octavo edition of Lord Macaulay's Essays or
History ; and that it contains an admirable por-
trait of the historian as he must have appeared in
the period of his greatest intellectual vigour. It ex-
presses far more of the animation and power that
must have characterised the original in his best days
than any portrait we ever remember to have seen.

Messrs. Sampson Low and Co. have just published
a photographic fac-simile of the manuscript of
Gray's
etiqr." It has been executed under the
auspices of Mr. Robert Charles Wrightson, the
r of the original, and will, we have no
:71:t, prove an object of much interest to every
admirer of the poet, whose sweet lines have conse-
crated afresh the country churchyards of England.