"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" set him upon a poem which he called "The Battle of Cheviot." Next he essayed an epic, "Olaus the Great; or, The Conquest of Mona," with episodes leading up to prophecies of the future fortunes of his own family. Sir George Trevelyan tells us that the manuscripts which have been preserved from these years of childhood are not only correct in spelling and in grammar, but display the same lucidity of meaning and scrupulous accuracy in punctuation and other details of the literary art which distinguish his mature writings.

His elders

To such a child it was of little consequence how much formal teaching he received. The books and sympathy which he found at home sufficed for his earliest education. Young Macaulay went first to a private school at Clapham kept by a Mr. Greaves, and afterwards to a Mr. Preston's school at Little Shelford, near Cambridge. As athletic exercises had not then become the tyranny which they now are, he was allowed to remain sedentary and studious. It is remarkable that, with fair health and more than common sensibility, he never showed any taste for the country or found much pleasure in rural landscape. "London is the place for me," he wrote in his fifteenth year. Study at all events did not dry up the springs of natural affection. He was always fondly attached to father and mother, brothers and sisters, and always returned with joy to his serious home. interfered little with his passion for reading. consider the severity of Low Church opinions in the early part of the nineteenth century, we are surprised to find Macaulay writing to his mother from Mr. Preston's in eager praise of the Decameron, and referring her to Dryden's adaptations of Boccaccio's stories. His father disapproved, it is true, of novel-reading, but seems hardly to have resisted, certainly did not succeed in checking, the boy's appetite for novels. As time went on, indeed, father and son were less and less in sympathy. The spirit of ascetic piety and the love of letters are not easily reconciled. Zachary must often have thought his son's pursuits frivolous, and sometimes tried to hinder his son's cleverness from breeding self-conceit. The boy, affectionate and loyal as he was, felt his father's treatment a little unkind. He respected, but certainly did not

When we

share, the feelings which were the stay and consolation of his father's life. He fulfilled his duty as a son most nobly, and, it should seem, without even the consciousness that he was doing anything uncommon, but he ceased to be in perfect intelligence with his father.

In October, 1818, Macaulay entered at Trinity College, Cambridge. Here, amid the happiest surroundings, he could indulge his habits of incessant reading and eager conversation. For the peculiar study of Cambridge, the study of mathematics, he had a violent distaste and probably no great capacity. Although Macaulay could argue forcibly upon a practical issue, abstract reasoning was always distasteful to him. He brooded much over what he had read, but rather in order to construct pictures than to analyse ideas. At all periods of life he spent many hours over Plato, but much more for the eloquence, the wit, the irony, than for the dialectic. It was unfortunate that, being ill-suited to mathematics, he had no chance of a discipline in logic and metaphysics, which could never have made him a philosopher, but might have saved him from writing some very unphilosophical tirades. What literary taste and talent could do was accomplished by Macaulay as an undergraduate. He was elected Craven University Scholar in 1821. He twice gained the Chancellor's medal for English verse. He also gained the prize, founded by a certain Mr. Greaves, for the best essay on the conduct and character of William III., a success to which we possibly owe the first suggestion of the History of England. He spoke with applause in the debates of the Cambridge Union. But he shone most in those endless, delightful discussions of all great subjects with clever friends which afford the best part of a university education and the truest pleasures of university life. One of these friends, Charles Austin, afterwards so eminent at the parliamentary bar, had the honour of converting Macaulay from Toryism. For a moment Macaulay thought himself a Radical, and it is clear that his father was seriously alarmed. But he speedily became an irreproachable Whig, and seems thenceforwards to have varied as little in his political opinions as is possible to any able man who mixes in the world and reaches middle life. While he cultivated his mind in the way he liked best, he took so little pains to

satisfy the examiners that his name did not appear in the Class List of 1822, and his election as a Fellow of Trinity was delayed until 1824.

When Macaulay first went up to Cambridge he had the hope of an independence. But before he had taken his degree this prospect was overcast. More and more possessed with enthusiasm for the cause of negro freedom, Zachary Macaulay neglected his own business concerns until they fell into a disorder beyond the possibility of repair. As his children grew up, his means of settling them in the world diminished, and Thomas was forced to adopt a profession. He chose the law and became a member of Lincoln's Inn, but did not study hard, preferring to read widely and to write when he felt inclined. He had gained a literary reputation before he was called to the bar in 1826, and, although he then went the northern circuit, he can scarcely be said to have practised. Most of the early ventures of his pen were made in Knight's Quarterly Magazine. Several have been reprinted in his Miscellaneous Works. Macaulay himself preferred the "Conversation between Mr. Abraham Cowley and Mr. John Milton touching the Great Civil War," and there can be little doubt that he was right. For although we may note in all these fugitive pieces the early ripeness of his style, in the "Conversation we also find a measure and a sober dignity which he did not always preserve in later years and which remind us of his admirable contributions to the Encyclopædia Britannica. The "Conversation" and other pleasant trifles passed, however, with some slight applause. It was the essay on "Milton" in the Edinburgh Review for August, 1825, which made Macaulay famous. Crude, garish, and superficial as this essay now seems to many readers, it then carried away the public. Its worst faults as a piece of criticism did not offend, for people were accustomed to criticism drugged with party politics. Its vehement eloquence and clear-cut political doctrines announced a valuable recruit to the Whig party, then returning to life and popularity after a generation of impotence. At a time when letters were far more closely allied with politics than they are now, when political leaders still had pocket boroughs to bestow, and polished eloquence was still a valued accomplishment in

public men, the young barrister was not likely to be left much longer to the company of his books.

Macaulay was indeed too poor to make his own way in politics unaided. He had nothing but his fellowship and the emoluments of a Commissioner in Bankruptcy, an office which he owed to the kindness of Lord Lyndhurst. But Lord Lansdowne offered to bring him in for the family borough of Calne without exacting any pledges or imposing any conditions. Macaulay accepted the offer, was returned to Parliament at the general election of 1830, a most inspiring moment for an ardent young Whig, and made his first speech in favour of a bill for removing Jewish disabilities. He was almost immediately recognised as an orator of the highest promise. He finally established his reputation in the memorable debates on the Reform Bill. After his first speech for the bill, the Speaker sent for Macaulay and said that in a prolonged experience he had never seen the House so much excited. "Portions of the speech," said Sir Robert Peel, "were as beautiful as anything I have ever heard or read." Such an orator and such a talker was warmly welcomed by Whig society. In May of 1831 he paid his first visit to Holland House and took his place in the brilliant circle which submitted to the imperious friendship of Lady Holland. Then followed a series of successes which might have spoiled a weak man, but had no effect upon Macaulay's sensible, affectionate nature. In October of 1831 he was invited to become a candidate for the city of Leeds. In the following year he was appointed a member of the Board of Control, and a little later was made its Secretary. Thus began his connection with India. His speeches were heard with wonder and delight in the House, while his conversation, if a continuous flow of utterance can be so termed, amazed and sometimes piqued the cleverest people by its unflagging energy and unequalled range of quotation and allusion. At the same time his simplicity and frankness saved him from most of the ill-will which great talents, too eagerly displayed, are apt to excite. Although he took and enjoyed all the good things which came in his way and never affected the airs of a philosopher, he never became fortune's slave or set his heart on pleasures which at best are not unmingled and must always depend on other men's caprice.

Essentially a man of letters, he never threw himself into the struggle for power with the zest of a born politician like Disraeli. Unusually domestic in his instincts, he did not, at bottom, care very much for social intercourse or even for intellectual display. The ease and freedom of conversation with his books and with his sisters outweighed it all. Moreover, young as he was and buoyant as were his spirits, he bore at this time a heavy load of care. His father, now growing old and weak, was less and less able to make head against adversity, so that the burden of supporting the family fell in some measure upon Macaulay. His fellowship, tenable by a layman for seven years only, was running out and his office of Commissioner in Bankruptcy had been suppressed by a recent reform. Even when his parliamentary fame was at the height, he had been forced to sell his Cambridge medals. So long as his party remained in power, he might reckon on his stipend as Secretary to the Board of Control, but a political reverse might at any moment reduce him to poverty. There was, indeed, another resource. Macaulay had continued to write for the Edinburgh Review just often enough to maintain and improve his position as an author from whom great things might be expected, and, with the advantage of those political and parliamentary honours which ensure a sale even to indifferent productions, he might reasonably hope to make a handsome competence by his books. But he wisely and nobly resolved not to traffic away his fine literary gift, not to sink into a bookseller's hack or to write save upon subjects for which he cared and in the manner which his own judgment approved. He preferred to make himself independent by a few years' exile from the pursuits and the friends of his heart. In December of 1833 he accepted a seat in the Supreme Council of the Governor-General of India, and in June of the following year he landed at Madras.

Macaulay remained in India just three years and a half, by far the most memorable portion of his public career. In Parliament he had shown himself a speaker of rare merit, but he had exerted little political influence and had not been admitted to the Cabinet. At Calcutta he set a lasting mark upon the history of British India. By a celebrated minute