Lord Macaulay.

413

the child is father of the man better exemplified than in Macaulay's case. Even when little more than a baby his unquenchable love of reading showed itself; and what he read was firmly retained in a memory of such iron tenacity that anything fixed in it was scarcely ever forgotten. He was a remarkably precocious child, writing when about twelve verse and prose which would have done credit to much maturer years. It is curious to find in his letters to his parents, written when he was a mere boy, that literary way of putting things which never deserted him either in his conversation or in his most familiar correspondence. In his nineteenth year he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Nothing could be imagined more to the taste of a youth of Macaulay's temperament than a university life, with its abundant means of access to books, and the facilities it affords for becoming acquainted with persons of similar character to oneself. The years of his residence at Cambridge were among the happiest of his very happy life, though he detested mathematics, then as now the favourite study of the place, and devoted as little time to them as possible. But in classics he acquired such facility as in 1821 to gain the proud distinction of the Craven Scholarship; and he twice gained the Chancellor's Medial for English verse. He also acquired great renown among his companions as one of the best orators of the Cambridge Union, and became noted among his friends for his perpetual flow of talk and his propensity to indulge in argument. In 1822 he took his degree of B.A., and in 1824 was elected a Fellow of Trinity College.

Macaulay's literary life began by some contributions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine in 1823-24. Most of these have been reprinted in his miscellaneous works, and prove that he was already master of that singularly readable, clear, incisive style to which he owes so much of his popularity. His abili ties soon made him known, and in 1825 overtures were made to him to become a contributor to the Edinburgh Review, Jeffrey being anxious to introduce a little fresh blood into the organ of the Whigs. The result of these overtures was the

famous article on Milton, published in the Review for August 1825. Though containing many assertions that will not stand the test of sober and rational criticism, and, as the author afterwards acknowledged, too glaring and redundant in style, the article, with its enthusiastic fervour, its sonorous rhetoric, and its bursts of splendid, if occasionally misleading eloquence, was one eminently calculated to attract attention. It did so to an extent almost without parallel in the history of periodical literature. "The effect on the author's reputation was instantaneous. Like Lord Byron, he awoke one morning and found himself famous." Invitations to dinner-parties came in crowds, and Macaulay soon became a great figure at Holland House, where the élite of Whig society gathered together, and began to associate on equal terms with Rogers, Sydney Smith, Luttrel, Allen, and other famous talkers who made that edifice famous in social annals. In 1826 he was called to the Bar and went the Northern Circuit, but he never looked seriously to law as a profession. It was to distinction in literature and in politics that his aspirations were turned. He was, and he felt himself to be, equally qualified to succeed in both. His literary fame steadily rose as article after article from his brilliant pen appeared in the Edinburgh Review. In 1828 Lord Lyndhurst made him a Commissioner of Bankruptcy, an office which, with the sums he derived from his Trinity Fellowship and from his contributions to the Edinburgh Review, made up his annual income to about £900. In 1830 he was, through the influence of Lord Lansdowne, who had been much struck by his articles on Mill, and wished to be the means of first introducing their author to public life, returned member of Parliament for the borough of Calne.

Macaulay soon made his mark in Parliament. He was one of the chief speakers in favour of the Reform Bill, and many were the eulogiums with which his orations were greeted by those whose praise was all the more valuable because they were themselves distinguished speakers. In 1832 he was ap pointed one of the Commissioners of the Board of Control, and in the same year was returned member for Leeds. Dur

Macaulay in India.

415

ing the first session of the reformed Parliament he spoke frequently, and always with success. In 1834 he was made president of a new Law Commission for India, and one of the members of the Supreme Council, with a salary of £10,000 a year. The motives which induced him to exchange the comforts, the books, and the lettered society of England for the heat and isolation of Calcutta are well explained in a letter of his to Lord Lansdowne. "I feel," he says, "that the sacrifice which I am about to make is great, but the motives which urge me to make it are quite irresistible. Every day that I live I become less and less desirous of great wealth, but every day makes me more sensible of the importance of a competence. Without a competence it is not very easy for a public man to be honest; it is almost impossible for him to be thought so. I am so situated that I can subsist only in two ways: by being in office, and by my pen. Hitherto, literature has been merely my relaxation-the amusement of perhaps a month in the year. I have never considered it as the means of support. I have chosen my own topics, taken my own time, and dictated my own terms. The thought of becoming a bookseller's hack; of writing to relieve, not the fulness of the mind, but the emptiness of the pocket; of spurring a jaded fancy to reluctant exertion; of filling sheets with trash merely that sheets may be filled; of bearing from publishers and editors what Dryden bore from Tonson, and what, to my own knowledge, Mackintosh bore from Lardner, is horrible to me. Yet thus it must be if I should quit office. Yet to hold office merely for the sake of emolument would be more horrible still." During his outward voyage to India, Macaulay passed his time in reading, with, to use his own. words, "keen and increasing enjoyment. I devoured Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English; folios, quartos, octavos, duodecimos." He arrived at Madras in June 1834, and returned to England in 1838. The most important piece of official work done by Macaulay during his residence in India was the Indian Penal Code. He always regarded this piece of work with very considerable pride and satisfac

tion. During his residence in India his contributions to the Edinburgh Review continued as before, and his insatiable love of reading suffered no abatement. Among other articles, that on Bacon (one of the most elaborate and ambitious, if also one of the most misleading of his performances) was written there; and there also he went through a course of classical reading almost incredible in its extent and variety. He used to define a scholar as "one who could read Plato with his feet on the fender." To this definition he himself exactly answered. While reading the works of the great Greek writers, he did not pause to trouble himself about verbal subtleties or grammatical minutiæ; he read them, as he would have read Shakespeare, or Milton, or Burke-for the sake of their literary charm. should not be forgotten that to Macaulay's exile in the East we owe the local colouring of two brilliant essays from which most people have drawn their slender store of Indian history -those on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings.

It

After a tour on the Continent, Macaulay was, in 1839, elected member for Edinburgh, and was appointed Secretary at War, with a seat in the Cabinet. On the fall of the Melbourne Ministry, of which the country had got heartily tired, he was re-elected for Edinburgh. In 1842 he published his "Lays of Ancient Rome," stirring ballads, not containing many intrinsically poetical qualities, but full of fire and spirit. In the following year he was prevailed on to republish his Edinburgh Review essays, of which, as in the case of the similar productions of De Quincey and Carlyle, a collected edition had already appeared in America. The most prominent event of his political career during the time his party was in opposition was the part he took in bringing about the present state of the law of copyright. In 1846, on the return of the Whigs to power, he obtained, in Lord Russell's administration, the office of Paymaster-General, with a seat in the Cabinet. At the general election which followed the dissolution of Parliament in 1847, Macaulay, who, principally by his attitude with regard to certain religious questions which then excited much attention, had contrived to make himself exceedingly un

Macaulay's Appearance.

417

popular in Edinburgh, lost his seat for that city. With his rejection his political life may be said to have closed. Edinburgh, indeed, atoned for its error in discarding one of the most honest and manly politicians that ever lived by returning him, unasked and free of expense, in 1852; but by that time all his thoughts and time were occupied in the composition of his History, and he took very little part in public business.

Macaulay's last article for the Edinburgh Review—the sketch of Chatham's later years—was written in 1844. After that all his literary energy was devoted to his History, of which the first two volumes appeared at the close of 1848. A few days after their publication he wrote in his diary, "I have felt today somewhat anxious about the fate of my book. . . . All that I hear is laudatory. But who can trust praise which is poured into his own ear? At all events, I have aimed high; I have tried to do something that may be remembered; I have had the year 2000, and even the year 3000, often in my mind; I have sacrificed nothing to temporary fashions of thought and style; and if I fail, my failure will be more honourable than nine-tenths of the successes which I have witnessed." His apprehensions were groundless. The History obtained enormous and universal success. In 1855 appeared the second two volumes, which were received with at least equal avidity. In 1857 he received a well-merited acknowledgment of his fame by being raised to the peerage as Baron Macaulay of Rothley. Induced by personal regard to the publisher, Mr Adam Black, he was induced to furnish, between 1853-1859, for the eighth edition of the "Encyclopædia Britannica," masterly sketches of Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Pitt. The biography of Pitt, which is one of the finest specimens of style, was the last work that he lived to publish. He died on December 28, 1859, leaving behind him the rough draft of what was afterwards published as the fifth volume of his History by his sister, Lady Trevelyan.

Macaulay's outward man, his nephew tells us, was never better described than in two sentences of Praed's Introduction to Knight's Quarterly Magazine. "There came up a short