, . ^ THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. PART III. SARATOGA AND BRANDYWINE VALLEY FORGE- ENGLAND AND FRANCE AT WAR. BY THE Rt. Hon. Sir GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, Bart. \VITH 3 MAPS. 8vo. 12*. 6d. NET. The previous Parts of this Work are as follows : LIBRARY EDITION. PA.RT I. 8vo. (out of print). PABT II. (2 vola.) 8vo. 21s. net. CABINET EDITION. VOLS. I., II., III. (comprising PARTS I. and II.). Crown 8vo. 5s. net each. DAILY TELEGRAPH.-' It will be regarded as an indispensable authority whenever the period is reconsidered and discussed.' MORNING POST. 'Is everywhere bright, readable, interesting ; and few who take up the volume will put it aside till they have finished it.' PALL MALL GAZETTE. ' If Sir George brings us down to the peace nego- tiations and the treaty of 1783 with the same success he has hitherto attained, it will round off a remarkable contribu- tion to international history, worthy of a house that boasts three generations of historians.' S TAND A RD.' Englishmen and Americans alike must be grateful for what Sir George Trevelyan has done. No writer in either country has, so far, told the story of the great revolt with more fulness, impartiality and literary skill. So much of our modern historical writing is either ponderous or slipshod, that it is a pleasure to meet with a serious work of history which also, and essentially, belongs to literature.' SPECTATOR. ' Sir George Trevelyan proves himself an admirable military his- torian, showing merits of lucidity, arrange- ment, and criticism which his earlier work had not prepared us for.' TRIBUNE. ' These volumes have few superiors in the whole range of English historical literature, and no rival as an English history of the American Revolu- tion.' DAILY NEWS. -'Another stage is reached in the stately progress of Sir George's work on the American Revolu- tion, and we welcome this third part as being, like the other two, a very worthy addition to its class. The period it covers is small, but it was the turning-point of the war.' SCOTTISH REVIEW. -'This book is informed by a union of history and literature, too often unhappily divorced in modern writing. Planned on a large scale with sound architectural qualities, it is written in a st . le worthy of the best tradition of clear, plain and forthright English.' LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO., 89 Paternoster Bow, London ; New York, Bombay, and Calcutta. RT. HON. SIR GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, Bart. HOSORABY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE. THE AMEEICAN REVOLUTION. Library Edition. Part I., 8vo. (out of print}. Part II., 2 vols. 8vo. 21s. net. Part III., 8vo, 12*. 6d. net. Cabinet Edition. Vols. I., II., III. (comprising Parts I. and II.) Crown 8vo. 5s. net. each. THE LIFE AND LETTEES OF LOED MACUALAY. Popular Edition. Crown 8vo. 2s. Gd. ' Silver Library ' Edition. (With an additional Chapter). Crown 8vo. 3s. Gd. Cabinet Edition. 2 vols. Post 8vo. 12*. Student's Edition. Crown 8vo. 6*. net. ' Edinburgh ' Edition. 2 vols. 8vo. 6*. each. Library Edition. 2 vols. 8vo. 36s. MAEGINAL NOTES BY LOED MACAULAY. Selected and Edited by the Bt. Hon. Sir GEORGE OTTO TREVEYLAN, Bart. 8vo. 2*. net. SELECTIONS FEOM THE WEITINGS OF LOED MACAULAY. Edited, with Occasional Notes, by the Right Hon. Sir G. 0. TREVELYAN, Bart, Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. THE EAELYHISTOEY OF CHAELES JAMES FOX. Library Edition. 8vo. 18*. | Cabinet Edition. Crown 8vo. 6*. Cheap Edition. Crown 8vo. 3s. Gd. LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO., London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta. CAWNPOEE. Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net, THE COMPETITION WALLAH. Crown 8vo. 3*. erf. net. MACMILLAN & CO., LTD., London. INTEELUDES IN PEOSE AND VEESE. Crown 8vo. 6*. net. BELL & SONS, London. ~BY~QEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYANT" Late Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. ENGLAND IN THE AGE OF WYCLIFFE. 8vo. is.. THE PEASANTS' EISING AND THE LOLLAEDS : a Collection of Unpublished Documents, forming an Appendix to ' England in the Age of Wycliffe.' Edited by EDGAR POWELL and Q. M. TREVELYAN. 8vo. 6*. net. GAEIBALDI'S DEFENCE OF THE EOMAN EE- PUBLIC. With 7 Maps and 35 Illustrations. 8vo. 6*. 6d.net. LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO., London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta. MACAULAY'S LIFE AND LETTERS THE LIFE AND LETTERS LORD MACAULAY BY HIS NEPHEW THE RIGHT HON. SIR GEORGE OTTO TREVELYAN, BART. ENLARGED AND COMPLETE EDITION LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW. LONDON NEW YORK, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1908 c BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE. First printed, 2 vols. 8vo., February 1876. Reprinted November 1876, February 1877. CABINET EDITION, 2 vols. post 8vo., December 1877, January 1878, January 1880, Atignst 1883, January 1895, December 1902. STUDENT'S EDITION, i zW. ., December 1888, February 1889, ^//r// iSgo, /w;^ 1893, February 1899, August 1900, August 1901, November 1905. ' EDINBURGH' EDITION, 2 zWj. Sz/0., 71/0^ 1897. 'SILVER LIBRARY' EDITION, i z^/. f/^w Szw., Enlarged and Complete Edition, September 1908. PREFACE. MORE than thirty years have already passed since the Life and Letters of Lord MACAULAY first saw the light ; and the author of that book has now reached the age when it is none too soon to set his affairs in order, and put his work into the final shape in which he would wish the world to read it. I have thought it prudent to use a very sparing hand in dealing with MACAULAY'S biography ; for I have been warned by the examples, which literary history only too frequently affords, of the risk inseparable from any attempt to alter the form, or increase the bulk, of a literary production that has had the good fortune not to displease the public. The existing text has accordingly been left untouched ; but new matter of importance will nevertheless be found between the covers. Fresh notes have been inserted at the close of the Fourth, the Eleventh, and the Fourteenth Chapters. The First Appendix contains a contemporary account of MACAULAY'S earliest appearance upon a public platform, written by a lady who was a family friend of the young orator; and the Third Appendix pictures MACAULAY in his aspect of a customer at the book-stalls. A more noteworthy addition to this book is the Sixteenth Chapter which, now concludes the volume. That chapter gives a selection, some parts of which have never yet been published, from the remarks pencilled by my uncle on the blank spaces of volumes that he had in reading. His marginal notes possess a merit and attraction of their 2018885 vi PREFACE. own. They bear a close similarity in their literary value to his writings, his speeches, his familiar letters, and, (so far as the impression left on my memory can be trusted,) to his conversation ; and this interview with MACAULAY, in the quiet of his study, will not be unacceptable to those who have been admirers of his books. For many years past I have received assistance from many quarters towards making this Edition letter-perfect. There is pleasant evidence that MACAULAY'S readers share MACAULAY'S partiality for the details of literature. In several instances a misprint, or a verbal error, has been brought to my notice by at least five-and- twenty different persons ; and there is hardly a page in the book which has not afforded occasion for com- ment or suggestion from a friendly, and in some cases a sceptical, correspondent. It is not, however, too much to say that there is no statement, of any importance, the accuracy of which has been circumstantially impugned. Some expressions, which had given personal pain or annoyance, were softened or removed in the Second Edition of the work ; and some names, which had been mentioned with disappro- bation, were thenceforward disguised by asterisks, or by mis- leading initials, and most certainly will never again be revealed in my lifetime. As MACAULAY'S biographer I could not be unconscious of a peculiar difficulty, and a grave responsibility, in dealing with his private papers. To give to the world compositions, not intended for the world, may be no injury to the fame of writers who, by habit, were slovenly and hasty workmen ; but it is far otherwise in the case of one who made it a rule for himself to publish nothing -which was not strenuously exe- cuted, and perfectly finished. It was impossible to examine MACAULAY'S journals and correspondence without being per- suaded that the idea of their being printed, even in part, was never present to his mind ; and I should not have felt myself PREFACE. vii justified in laying a part of them before the public if it were not that their unlaboured and spontaneous character added to their biographical value all, and perhaps more than all, that it detracted from their literary merit. Even so the selection was made with careful circumspection, and sedulous attention to what his own feelings would have been on each point in question. In that work of gratitude and affection I was aided by the advice and sympathy of my sister Margaret, the late Viscountess Knutsford, who, from her birth to his death, had been the light of his eyes and the joy of his existence. There is one class of criticism to which I have found myself altogether unable to defer. I was frequently told by reviewers that I should have "better consulted MACAULAY'S reputation," or " done more service to MACAULAY'S memory," if I had omitted passages in the letters and diaries which bear traces of intellectual narrowness, or political prejudice. But I regarded it as my business to show my uncle as he was, and not as I, or any one else, would have had him. If a faithful picture of MACAULAY could not have been produced without injury to his memory, I should have left the task of drawing that picture to others ; but, having once undertaken the work, I had no choice except to ask myself, with regard to each feature of the portrait, not whether it was attractive, but whether it was characteristic. We who had the best opportunities of knowing him were always convinced that he would stand the test of an exact, and even a minute, delineation ; and the event has proved that our confidence was not misplaced. WALLINGTON, NORTHUMBERLAND: G. O. T. /une 1908. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. 1800-1818. PAGE Plan and scope of the work History of the Macaulay family Aulay Kenneth Johnson and Boswell John Macaulay and his chil- dren Zachary Macaulay His career in the West Indies and in Africa His character Visit of the French squadron to Sierra Leone Zachary Macaulay's marriage Birth of his eldest son Lord Macaulay's early years His childish productions Mrs. Hannah More General Macaulay Choice of a school Shel- ford Dean Milner Macaulay's early letters Aspenden Hall The boy's habits and mental endowments His home The Clapham set The boy's relations with his father The political ideas amongst which he was brought up, and their influence on the work of his life I CHAPTER II. 1818-1824. Macaulay goes to the University His love for Trinity College His contemporaries at Cambridge Charles Austin The Union De- bating Society University studies, successes, and failures The Mathematical Tripos The Trinity Fellowship William the Third- LettersPrize p ems Peterloo Novel-reading The Queen's Trial Macaulay's feeling towards his mother A Read- ing-party Hoaxing an editor Macaulay takes pupils . . 53 CHAPTER III. 1824-1830. Macaulay is called to the bar DyKB not make it a serious profession Speech before the Anti-Slavery Society Knight's Quarterly CONTENTS. PAGE Magazine The Edinburgh Review and the Essay on Milton M.icaulay's personal appearance and mode of existence His defects and virtues, likings and antipathies Croker Sadler Zachary Macaulay's circumstances Description of the family habits of life in Great Ormond Street Macaulay's sisters Hannah Macaulay The Judicious Poet Macaulay's humour in conversation His articles in the Review His attacks on the Utilitarians and on Southey Blackwood's Magazine Macaulay is made Commissioner of Bankruptcy Enters Parliament Letters from Circuit and Edinburgh ..... 79 CHAPTER IV. 1830-1832. atate of public affairs when Macaulay entered Parliament His maiden speech The French Revolution of July 1830 Mac- aulay's Letters from Paris The Palais Royal Lafayette Lard- ner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia The new Parliament meets Fall of the Duke of Wellington Scene with Croker The Reform Bill Political success House of Commons life Macaulay's party spirit London society Mr. Thomas Flower Ellis Visit to Cambridge Rothley Temple Margaret Macaulay's Journal Lord Brougham Hopes of office Macaulay as a politician Letters to Hannah Macaulay, Mr. Napier, and Mr. Ellis . . 112 CHAPTER V. 1832-1834. Macaulay is invited to stand for Leeds The Reform Bill passes Macaulay appointed Commissioner of the Board of Control His life in office Letters to his sisters Contested election at Leeds Macaulay's bearing as a candidate Canvassing Pledges Intrusion of religion into politics- Placemen in Parliament Liverpool Margaret Macaulay's marriage How it affected her brother lie is returned for Leeds Becomes Secretary of the Board of Control Letters to Hannah Macaulay Session of 1 832 -Macaulay's Speech on the India Bill His regard for Lord Glenelg Letters to Hannah Macaulay The West Indian question Macaulay resigns office He gains his point, and resumes his place Emancipation of the Slaves Death of Wil- berforce Macaulay is appointed Member of the Supreme Council of India Letters to Hannah Macaulay, Lord Lansdowne, and Mr. Napier Altercation between Lord Althorp and Mr. Shiel Macanlay's appearance before the Committee of Investigation He sails for India ........ 182 CONTENTS,. x i CHAPTER VI. 1834-1838. PAGE The outward voyage Arrival at Madras Macaulay is summoned to join Lord William Bentinck in the Neilgherries His journey up-country His native servant Arcot Bangalore Seringa- patam Ascent of the Neilgherries -- First sight of the Governor- General Letters to Mr. Ellis, and the Miss Macaulays A summer on the Neilgherries Native Christians Clarissa A tragi-comedy Macaulay leaves the Neilgherries, travels to Cal- cutta, and there sets up house Letters to Mr. Napier, and Mrs. Cropper Mr. Charles Trevelyan Marriage of Hannah Mac- aulay Death of Mrs. Cropper Macaulay's work in India His Minutes for Council Freedom of the Press Literary gratitude Second Minute on the Freedom of the Press The Black Act A Calcutta public meeting Macaulay's defence of the policy of the Indian Government His Minute on Education He becomes President of the Committee of Public Instruction His industry in discharging the functions of that post Specimens of his official writing Results of his labours He is appointed President of the Law Commission, and recommends the framing of a Criminal Code Appearance of the Code Comments of Mr. Fitzjames Stephen- Macaulay's private life in India Oriental delicacies Breakfast -parties --Macaulay's longing for England Calcutta and Dublin Departure from India Letters to Mr. Ellis, Mr. Sharp, Mr. Napier, and Mr. Z. Macaulay . . . .261 CHAPTER VII. 1838-1839. Death of Zachary Macaulay Mr. Wallace and Mackintosh betters to Mr. Napier, and Mr. Ellis Sir Walter Scott Lord Brougham First mention of the History Macaulay goes abroad His way of regarding scenery Chalons-sur-Marne Lyons Mar- seilles Genoa Pisa Florence Macaulay refuses the Judge Advocateship Florence to Rome Thrasymene St. Peter's The New Zealander The Vatican The Temporal Power The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception Letter to Lord Lans- downe The Canadian Insurrection Gibbon Rome to Naples Bulwer's novels Impressions of Naples Virgil's tomb Macaulay sets out homewards Mr. Goulburn Versailles 338 CHAPTER VIII. 1839-1841. Macaulay returns to London He meets Lord Brougham Letters to Mr. Napier, and Mrs. Trevelyan Correspondence with Mr. xii CONTENTS. PAOB Gladstone Heated state of politics The hostility of the Peers to Lord Melbourne's Government Macaulay's view of the situa- tion Verses by Praed The Bed -.chamber question Macaulay is elected for Edinburgh Debate on the Ballot Macaulay becomes a Cabinet Minister The Times Windsor Castle Vote of Want of Confidence The Chinese War Irish Regis- tration : scene in the House of Commons Letters to Mr. Napier Religious Difficulties in Scotland Lord Cardigan The Corn Laws The Sugar Duties Defeat of the Ministry, and Dissolu- tion of Parliament Macaulay is re-elected for Edinburgh His love for street-ballads The change of Government . . 373 CHAPTER IX. 1841-1844. Macaulay settles in the Albany Letters to Mr. Napier Warren Hastings, and the Vicar of Wakefield Leigh Hunt Macaulay's doubts about the wisdom of publishing his Essays Lord Pal- merston as a writer The Lays of Rome Handsome conduct of Professor Wilson Republication of the Essays Miss Aikin's Life of Addison Macaulay in Opposition The Copyright ques- tion Recall of Lord Ellenborough Macaulay as a public speaker : opinions of the Reporters' Gallery Tour on the Loire Letters to Mr. Napier Payment of the Irish Roman Catholic Clergy Barere ......... 408 CHAPTER X. 1844-1847. Letters to Mr. Napier- -Macaulay remodels his design for an article on Burke and his Times, into a sketch of Lord Chatham's later years Tour in Holland Scene off Dordrecht Macaulay on the Irish Church Maynooth The Ministerial crisis of Decem- ber 1845 : letters to Mrs. Trevelyan Letter to Mr. Macfarlan Fall of Sir Robert Peel Macaulay becomes Paymaster-General His re-election at Edinburgh His position in the House of Commons General election of 1847 Macaulay's defeat at Edinburgh .......... 448 CHAPTER XL 1847-1849. Macaulay retires into private life Extracts from Lord Carlisle's journal "Macaulay's conversation His memory His distaste for general society -His ways with children Letters to his niece Margaret The Judicious Poet Valentines Sight-seeing CONTENTS. xiii PACK Eastern Tours Macaulay's method of work His diligence in collecting his materials Glencoe Londonderry Macaulay's accuracy : opinions of Mr. Bagehot and Mr. Buckle Macaulay's industry at the desk His love for his task Extracts from his diary His attention to the details of the press The History appears- Congratulations- Lord Halifax; Lord Jeffrey; Lord Auckland; Miss Edgeworth The popularity of the work Extract from "Punch" Macaulay's attitude in relation to his critics The Quarterly Review The sacrifices which Macaulay made to literature 477 CHAPTER XII. 1848-1852. Extracts from Macaulay's diary Herodotus Mr. Roebuck Antici- pations of failure and success Appearance of the History- Progress of the sale The Duke of Wellington Lord Palmer- ston Letters to Mr. Ellis Lord Brougham on Euripides Macaulay is elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University His inaugural address Good resolutions Croker Dr. Parr The Historical Professorship at Cambridge Byron Tour in Ireland Althorp Lord Sidmouth Lord Thurlow Death of Jeffrey Mr. Richmond's portrait of Macaulay Dinner at the Palace Robert Montgomery Death of Sir Robert Peel The Pre- lude Ventnor Letters to Mr. Ellis Plautus Fra Paolo Gibbon The Papal Bull Death of Henry Hal lam Person's Letters to Archdeacon Travis Charles Mathews Windsor Castle Macaulay sets up his carriage Opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851 Cobbett Malvern Letters to Mr. Ellis Wilhelm Meister The battle of Worcester Palmerston leaves the Foreign Office Macaulay refuses an offer of the Cabinet Windsor Castle King John - Scene of the Assassination Plot Royal Academy dinner ...... . 514 CHAPTER XIII. 1852-1856. The magnetoscope, and table-turning Macaulay's re-election for Edinburgh, and the general satisfaction which it occasioned He has a serious attack of illness Clifton Extracts from Mac- aulay's journal His strong feelings for old associations Barley Wood Letters to Mr. Ellis Great change in Macaulay's health and habits His speech at Edinburgh The House of Commons Mr. Disraeli's Budget Formation of Lord Aberdeen's Ministry The Judges' Exclusion Bill The India Bill The Annuity Tax- Macaulay ceases to take an active part in politics Letters CONTENTS. PAQK to Mr. Ellis Mrs. Beecher Stowe Tunbridge Wells Plato- Mr. Vizetelly Macaulay's patriotism - The Crimean War Open competition The History Thames Ditton Publication of Mac- aulay's Third and Fourth Volumes Statistics of the sale of the History Honours conferred on Macaulay The British Museum 559 CHAPTER XIV. 1856-1858. Macaulay resigns his seat for Edinburgh He settles himself at Holly Lodge His house and garden His notions of hospitality L'Almanach des Gourmands Country visits Continental Tours Chateaubriand Macaulay as a man of business His generosity in money matters His kindness to his relations, and towards children Picture galleries Macaulay as an instructor He pays a compliment to Lord Palmerston Macaulay is made a Peer His attachment to his old University He is elected Lord High Steward of the Borough of Cambridge Macaulay in the House of Lords French politics The Indian Mutiny The National Fast-day The capture of Delhi, and relief of Lucknow Professor Owen, and the British Museum Literary ease The Fifth Volume of the History Macaulay's contribu- tions to the Encyclopaedia Britannica His habit of learning by heart Foreign languages Macaulay's modes of amusing him- self The consequences of celebrity Extracts from Macaulay's journal His literary Conservatism His love for Theology and Church History His devotion to literature .... 625 CHAPTER XV. 1859. Melancholy anticipations Visit to the English Lakes, and to- Scot- land Extracts from Macaulay's journal His death and funeral 680 CHAPTER XVI. Macaulay's Marginal Notes Ben Jonson Pope -Swift Gibbon Conyers Middleton Shakspeare Cicero Plato . . . 689 APPENDIX I. Macaulay's Speech to the Anti-Slavery Society . 721 ,, II. Macaulay's Studies at Calcutta .... 723 ,, III. Macaulay and the Book-stalls .... 729 ,, IV. Macaulay and Miss Seward's Letters . . . 730 INDEX. 733 LIFE AND LETTEES OP LORD MACAULAY. CHAPTER I 1800-1818. Plan and scope of the work History of the Macaulay family Aulay Kenneth Johnson and Boswell John Macaulay and his children Zachary Macaulay His career in the West Indies and in Africa His character Visit of the French squadron to Sierra Leone Zachary Macaulay's marriage Birth of his eldest son Lord Macaulay's early years His childish productions Mrs. Hannah More General Macaulay Choice of a school Shelford Dean Milner Macaulay's early letters Aspenden Hall The boy's habits and mental endow- ments His home The Clapham set The boy's relations with his father The political ideas amongst which he was brought up, and their influence on the work of his life. HE who undertakes to publish the memoirs of a distinguished man may find a ready a-pology in the custom of the age. If we measure the effective demand for biography by the supply, the person commemorated need possess but a very moderate reputation, and have played no exceptional part, in order to carry the reader through many hundred pages of anecdote, dis- sertation, and correspondence. To judge from the advertise- ments of our circulating libraries, the public curiosity is keen with regard to some who did nothing worthy of special note, and others who acted so continuously in the face of the world that, when their course was run, there was little left for the world to learn about them. It may, therefore, be taken for granted that a desire exists to hear something authentic about the life of a man who has produced works which are universally known, but which bear little or no indication of the private history and the personal qualities of the author. 2 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. 1. This was in a marked degree the case with Lord Macaulay. His two famous contemporaries in English literature have, con- sciously or unconsciously, told their own story in their books. Those who could see between the lines in " David Copperfield" were aware that they had before ' them a delightful autobio- graphy ; and all who knew how to read Thackeray could trace him in his novels through every stage in his course, on from the day when as a little boy, consigned to the care of English relatives and schoolmasters, he left his mother on the steps of the landing-place at Calcutta. The dates and names were wanting, but the man was there ; while the most ardent ad- mirers of Macaulay will admit that a minute study of his literary productions left them, as far as any but an intellectual know- ledge of the writer himself was concerned, very much as it found them. A consummate master of his craft, he turned out works which bore the unmistakeable marks of the artificer's hand, but which did not reflect his features. It would be almost as hard to compose a picture of the author from the History, the Essays, and the Lays, as to evolve an idea of Shakespeare from Henry the Fifth and Measure for Measure. But, besides being a man of letters, Lord Macaulay was a statesman, a jurist, and a brilliant ornament of society, at a time when to shine in society was a distinction which a man of eminence and ability might justly value. In these several capacities, it will be said, he was known well, and known widely. But in the first place, as these pages will show, there was one side of his life (to him, at any rate, the most important,) of which even the persons with whom he mixed most freely and confidentially in London drawing-rooms, in the Indian Council chamber, and in the lobbies and on the benches of the House of Commons, were only in part aware. And in the next place, those who have seen his features and heard his voice are few already and become yearly fewer; while, by a rare fate in literary annals, the number of those who read his books is still rapidly increasing. For everyone who sat with him in private company or at the transaction of public business, for every ten who have listened to his oratory in Parliament or from the hustings, there must be tens of thousands whose interest in history and literature he has awakened and informed by his pen, and who would gladly know what manner of man it was that has done them so great a service. To gratify that most legitimate wish is the duty of those who have the means at their command. His lifelike image is indelibly impressed upon their minds, (for how could it be otherwise with any who had enjoyed so close relations with LORD MACAULAY. 3 such a man?) although the skill which can reproduce that image before the general eye may well be wanting. But his own letters will supply the deficiencies of the biographer. Never did any one leave behind him more copious materials for enabling others to put together a narrative which might be the history, not indeed of his times, but of the man himself. For in the first place he so soon showed promise of being one who would give those among whom his early years were passed reason to be proud, and still more certain assurance that he would never afford them cause for shame, that what he wrote was preserved with a care very seldom bestowed on childish compositions ; and the value set upon his letters by those with whom he corresponded naturally enough increased as years went on. And in the next place he was by nature so incapable of affectation or concealment that he could not write otherwise than as he felt, and, to one person at least, could never refrain from writing all that he felt; so that we may read in his letters, as in a clear mirror, his opinions and inclinations, his hopes and affections, at every succeeding period of his existence. Such letters could never have been submitted to an editor not con- nected with both correspondents by the strongest ties ; and even one who stands in that position must often be sorely puzzled as to what he has the heart to publish and the right to withhold. I am conscious that a near relative has peculiar temptations towards that partiality of the biographer which Lord Macaulay himself so often and so cordially denounced ; and the danger is greater in the case of one whose knowledge of him coincided with his later years ; for it would not be easy to find a nature which gained more by time than his, and lost less. But be- lieving, as I do, (to use his own words,) that "if he were now living he would have sufficient judgment and sufficient great- ness of mind " to wish to be shown as himself, I will suppress no trait in his disposition, or incident in his career, which might provoke blame or question. Such in all points as he was, the world, which has been so indulgent to him, has a right to know him : and those who best love him do not fear the consequences of freely submitting his character and his actions to the public verdict. The most devout believers in the doctrine of the transmis- sion of family qualities will be content with tracing back descent through four generations ; and all favourable hereditary influ- ences, both intellectual and moral, are assured by a genealogy which derives from a Scotch Manse. In the first decade of the eighteenth century Aulay Macaulay, the great-grandfather of B 2 4 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. the historian, was minister of Tiree and Coll ; where he was " grievously annoyed by a decreet obtained after instance of the Laird of Ardchattan, taking away his stipend." The Duchess of Argyll of the day appears to have done her best to see him righted ; " but his health being much impaired, and there being no church or meeting-house, he was exposed to the violence of the weather at all seasons ; and having no manse or glebe, and no fund for communion elements, and no mortification for schools or any pious purpose in either of the islands, and the air being unwholesome, he was dissatisfied;" and so, to the great regret of the parishioners whom he was leaving behind, he migrated to Harris, where he discharged the clerical duties for nearly half a century. Aulay was the father of fourteen children, of whom one, Kenneth, the minister of Ardnamurchan, still occupies a very humble niche in the temple of literature. He wrote a History of St. Kilda which happened to fall into the hands of Dr. Johnson, who spoke of it more than once with favour. His reason for liking the book is characteristic enough. Mr. Macaulay had recorded the belief prevalent in St. Kilda that, as soon as the factor landed on the island, all the inhabitants had an attack which from the account appears to have partaken of the nature both of influenza and bronchitis. This touched the superstitious vein in Johnson, who praised him for his " magnanimity" in venturing to chronicle so questionable a phenomenon: the more so because, said the Doctor, " Macaulay set out with a prejudice against prejudice, and wanted to be a smart modern thinker." To a reader of our day the History of St. Kilda appears to be innocent of any trace of such pretension : unless it be that the author speaks slightingly of second-sight, a subject for which Johnson always had a strong hankering. In 1773 Johnson paid a visit to Mr. Macaulay, who by that time had removed to Calder, and began the interview by congratulating him on having produced "a very pretty piece of topography," a compliment which did not seem to the taste of the author. The conversation turned upon rather delicate subjects, and, before many hours had passed, the guest had said to the host one of the very rudest things recorded by Boswell. Later on in the same evening he atoned for his incivility by giving one of the boys of the house a pocket Sallust, and promising to procure him a servitorship at Oxford. Subsequently Johnson pronounced that Mr. Macaulay was not competent to have written the book that went by his name ; a decision which, to those who happen to have read the work, will give a very poor notion of mv ancestor's abilities. i8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. $ The eldest son of old Aulay, and the grandfather of Lord Macaulay, was John, born in the year 1720. He was minister successively of Barra, South Uist, Lismore, and Inverary; the last appointment being a proof of the interest which the family of Argyll continued to take in the fortunes of the Macaulays. He, likewise, during the famous tour in the Hebrides, came across the path of Boswell, who mentions him in an exquisitely absurd paragraph, the first of those in which is described the visit to Inverary Castle. 1 Mr. Macaulay after- wards passed the evening with the travellers at their inn, and provoked Johnson into what Boswell calls warmth, and anyone else would call brutality, by the very proper remark that he had no notion of people being in earnest in good professions if their practice belied them. When we think what well-known ground this was to Lord Macaulay, it is impossible to suppress a wish that the great talker had been at hand to avenge his grandfather and grand-uncle. Next morning " Mr. Macaulay breakfasted with us, nothing hurt or dismayed by his last night's correction. Being a man of good sense he had a just admira- tion of Dr. Johnson." He was rewarded by seeing Johnson at his very best, and hearing him declaim some of the finest lines that ever were written in a manner worthy of his subject. There is a tradition that, in his younger days, the minister of Inverary proved his Whiggism by giving information to the authorities which almost led to the capture of the young Pre- tender. It is perhaps a matter of congratulation that this item was not added to the heavy account that the Stuarts have against the Macaulay family. John Macaulay enjoyed a high reputation as a preacher, and was especially renowned for his fluency. In 1774 he removed to Cardross in Dumbartonshire, where, on the bank of the noble estuary of the Clyde, he spent the last fifteen years of a useful and honoured life. He was twice married. His first wife died at the birth of his first child. Eight years afterwards, in 1757, he espoused Margaret, daughter of Colin Campbell of Inveresragan, who survived him by a single year. By her he had the patriarchal number of twelve children, whom he brought up on the old Scotch 1 "Monday, Oct. 25. My acquaintance, the Rev. Mr. John M 'Aulay, one of the ministers of Inverary, and brother to our good friend at Calder, came to us this morning, and accompanied us to the castle, where I presented Dr. Johnson to the Duke of Argyll. We were shown through the house ; and I never shall forget the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies' maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long time little but rusticity, their lively manner, and gay inviting appearance, pleased me so much, that I thought for a moment I could have been a knight-errant for them." 6 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. system, common to the households of minister, man of business, farmer, and peasant alike, on fine air, simple diet, and a solid training in knowledge human and divine. Two generations after, Mr. Carlyle, during a visit to the late Lord Ashburton at the Grange, caught sight of Macaulay's face in unwonted repose, as he was turning over the pages of a book. " I noticed," said he, " the homely Norse features that you find everywhere in the Western Isles, and I thought to myself : ' Well 1 Anyone can see that you are an honest good sort of fellow, made out of oatmeal.' " Several of John Macaulay's children obtained position in the world. Aulay, the eldest by his second wife, became a clergyman of the Church of England. His reputation as a scholar and antiquary stood high, and in the capacity of a private tutor he became known even in royal circles. He pub- lished pamphlets and treatises, the list of which it is not worth while to record, and meditated several large works that perhaps never got much beyond a title. Of all his undertakings the one best deserving commemoration in these pages was a tour that he made into Scotland in company with Mr. Thomas Babington, the owner of Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, in the course of which the travellers paid a visit to the manse at Cardross. Mr. Babington fell in love with one of the daughters of the house, Miss Jean Macaulay, and married her in 1787. Nine years afterwards he had an opportunity of presenting his brother-in-law Aulay Macaulay with the very pleasant living of Rothley. Alexander, another son of John Macaulay, succeeded his father as minister of Cardross. Colin went into the Indian army, and died a general. He followed the example of the more ambi- tious among his brother officers, and exchanged military for civil duties. In 1799 he acted as secretary to a political and diplo- matic Commission which accompanied the force that marched under General Harris against Seringapatam. The leading Commissioner was Colonel Wellesley, and to the end of General Macaulay's life the great Duke corresponded with him on terms of intimacy, and (so the family flattered themselves) even of friendship. Soon after the commencement of the century Colin Macaulay was appointed Resident at the im- portant native state of Travancore. While on this employment he happened to light upon a valuable collection of books, and rapidly made himself master of the principal European languages, which he spoke and wrote with a facility surprising in one who had acquired them within a few leagues of Cape Comoria l8oo-l8. LORD MAC A UL AY. ^ There was another son of John Macaulay, who in force and elevation of character stood out among his brothers, and who was destined to make for himself no ordinary career. The path which Zachary Macaulay chose to tread did not lead to wealth, or worldly success, or indeed to much worldly happi- ness. Born in 1768, he was sent out at the age of sixteen by a Scotch house of business as bookkeeper to an estate in Jamaica, of which he soon rose to be sole manager. His posi- tion brought him into the closest possible contact with negro slavery. His mind was not prepossessed against the system of society which he found in the West Indies. His personal interests spoke strongly in its favour, while his father, whom he justly respected, could see nothing to condemn in an institution recognised by Scripture. Indeed, the religious world still allowed the maintenance of slavery to continue an open question. John Newton, the real founder of that school in the Church of England of which in after years Zachary Mac- aulay was a devoted member, contrived to reconcile the business of a slave trader with the duties of a Christian, and to the end of his days gave scandal to some of his disciples, (who by that time were one and all sworn abolitionists,) by his supposed reluctance to see that there could be no fellowship between light and such darkness. But Zachary Macaulay had eyes of his own to look about him, a clear head for forming a judgment on what he saw, and a conscience which would not permit him to live otherwise than in obedience to its mandates. The young Scotchman's innate respect for his fellows, and his appreciation of all that instruc- tion and religion can do for men, was shocked at the sight of a population deliberately kept ignorant and heathen. His kind heart was wounded by cruelties practised at the will and pleasure of a thousand petty despots. He had read his Bible too literally to acquiesce easily in a state of matters under which human beings were bred and raised like a stock of cattle, while outraged morality was revenged on the governing race by the shameless licentiousness which is the inevitable accompani- ment of slavery. He was well aware that these evils, so far from being superficial or remediable, were essential to the very existence of a social fabric constituted like that within which he lived. It was not for nothing that he had been behind the scenes in that tragedy of crime and misery. His philanthropy was not learned by the royal road of tracts, and platform speeches, and monthly magazines. What he knew he had spelt out for himself with no teacher except the aspect of human suffering, and degradation, and sin. 8 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. t He was not one of those to whom conviction comes in a day ; and, when convinced, he did nothing sudden. Little more than a boy in age, singularly modest, and constitutionally averse to any course that appeare4 pretentious or theatrical, he began by a sincere attempt to make the best of his calling. For some years he contented himself with doing what he could, (so he writes to a friend,) " to alleviate the hardships of a con- siderable number of my fellow-creatures, and to render the bitter cup of servitude as palatable as possible." But by the time he was four-and-twenty he became tired of trying to find a compromise between right and wrong, and, refusing really great offers from the people with whom he was connected, he threw up his position, and returned to his native country. This step was taken against the wishes of his father, who was not prepared for the construction which his son put upon the paternal precept that a man should make his practice square with his professions. But Zachary Macaulay soon had more congenial work to do. The young West Indian overseer was not alone in his scruples. Already for some time past a conviction had been abroad that individual citizens could not divest themselves of their share in the responsibility in which the nation was in- volved by the existence of slavery in our colonies. Already there had been formed the nucleus of the most disinterested, and perhaps the most successful, popular movement which history records. The question of the slave trade was well before Parliament and the country. Ten years had passed since the freedom of all whose feet touched the soil of our island had been vindicated before the courts at Westminster, and not a few negroes had become their own masters as a con- sequence of that memorable decision. The patrons of the race were somewhat embarrassed by having these expatriated freedmen on their hands ; an opinion prevailed that the traffic in human lives could never be efficiently checked until Africa had obtained the rudiments of civilisation ; and, after long discussion, a scheme was matured for the colonisation of Sierra Leone by liberated slaves. A company was organised, with a charter from the Crown, and a board which included the names of Granville Sharpe and Wilberforce. A large capital was speedily subscribed, and the Chair was accepted by Mr. Henry Thornton, a leading City banker and a member of Parliament, whose determined opposition to cruelty and oppression in every form was such as might be expected in one who had in- herited from his father the friendship of the poet Cowper. Mr. Thornton heard Macaulay's story from Thomas Babington, i8oo-i8 LORD MACAULAY. 9 with whom he lived on terms of close intimacy and political alliance. The Board, by the advice of its Chairman, passed a resolution appointing the young man Second Member in the Sierra Leone Council, and early in the year 1793 he sailed for Africa, where soon after his arrival he succeeded to the position and duties of Governor. The Directors had done well to secure a tried man. The colony was at once exposed to the implacable enmity of mer- chants whose market the agents of the new company spoiled in their capacity of traders, and slave-dealers with whom they interfered in their character of philanthropists. The native tribes in the vicinity, instigated by European hatred and jealousy, began to inflict upon the defenceless authorities of the settlement a series of those monkey-like impertinences which, absurdly as they may read in a narrative, are formidable and ominous when they indicate that savages feel their power. These barbarians, who had hitherto commanded as much rum and gunpowder as they cared to have by selling their neigh- bours at the nearest barracoon, showed no appreciation for the comforts and advantages of civilisation. Indeed, those ad- vantages were displayed in anything but an attractive shape even within the pale of the company's territory. An aggrega- tion of negroes from Jamaica, London, and Nova Scotia, who possessed no language except an acquired jargon, and shared no associations beyond the recollections of a common servitude, were not very promising apostles for the spread of Western culture and the Christian faith. Things went smoothly enough as long as the business of the colony was mainly confined to eating the provisions that had been brought in the ships ; but as soon as the work became real, and the commons short, the whole community smouldered down into chronic mutiny. Zachary Macaulay was the very man for such a crisis. To a rare fund of patience, and self-command, and perseverance, he united a calm courage that was equal to any trial. These qualities were, no doubt, inherent in his disposition ; but no one except those who have turned over his voluminous private journals can understand what constant effort, and what inces- sant watchfulness, went to maintain throughout a long life a course of conduct, and a temper of mind, which gave every appearance of being the spontaneous fruit of nature. He was not one who dealt in personal experiences ; and few among even the friends who loved him like father or brother, and who would have trusted him with all their fortune on his bare word, knew how entirely his outward behaviour was the express image of his religious belief. The secret of his character and of his 10 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. actions lay in perfect humility and an absolute faith. Events did not discompose him, because they were sent by One who best knew his own purposes. He was not fretted by the folly of others, or irritated by their hostility, because he regarded the humblest or the worst of mankind as objects, equally with him- self, of the divine love and care. On all other points he examined himself so closely that the meditations of a single evening would fill many pages of diary ; but so completely in his case had the fear of God cast out all other fear that amidst the gravest perils, and the most bewildering responsibilities, it never occurred to him to question whether he was brave or not He worked strenuously and unceasingly, never amusing himself from year's end to year's end, and shrinking from any public praise or recognition as from an unlawful gratification, because he was firmly persuaded that, when all had been accomplished and endured, he was yet but an unprofitable servant, who had done that which was his duty to do. Some, perhaps, will consider such motives as oldfashioned, and such convictions as out of date ; but self-abnegation, self-control, and self-know- ledge that does not give to self the benefit of any doubt, are virtues which are not oldfashioned, and for which, as time goes on, the world is likely to have as much need as ever. 1 Mr. Macaulay was admirably adapted for the arduous and uninviting task of planting a negro colony. His very deficien- cies stood him in good stead ; for, in presence of the elements with which he had to deal, it was well for him that nature had denied him any sense of the ridiculous. Unconscious of what was absurd around him, and incapable of being flurried, fright- ened, or fatigued, he stood as a centre of order and authority amidst the seething chaos of inexperience and insubordination. 1 Sir James Stephen writes thus of his friend Macaulay : " That his under- standing was proof against sophistry, and his nerves against fear, were, indeed, conclusions to which a stranger arrived at the first interview with him. But what might be suggesting that expression of countenance, at once so earnest and so monotonous by what manner of feeling those gestures, so uniformly firm and deliberate, were prompted whence the constant traces of fatigue on those overhanging brows, and on that athletic though ungraceful figure what might be the charm which excited amongst his chosen circle a faith approach- ing to superstition, and a love rising to enthusiasm, towards a man whose de- meanour was so inanimate, if not austere : it was a riddle of which neither Gall nor Lavater could have found the key." That Sir James himself could read the riddle is proved by the concluding words of a passage marked by a force and tenderness of feeling unusual even in him: "His earthward affections, active and all-enduring as they were, could yet thrive without the support of human sympathy, because they were sustained by so abiding a sense of the divine presence, and so absolute a sub- mission to the divine will, as raised him habitually to that higher region where the reproach of man could not reach, and the praise of man might not presume to follow him.' i8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. \\ The staff was miserably insufficient, and every officer of the Company had to do duty for three in a climate such that a man is fortunate if he can find health for the work of one dur- ing a continuous twelvemonth. The Governor had to be in the counting-house, the law-court, the school, and even the chapel. He was his own secretary, his own paymaster, his own envoy. He posted ledgers, he decided causes, he conducted correspondence with the Directors at home, and visited neigh- bouring potentates on diplomatic missions which made up in danger what they lacked in dignity. In the absence of properly qualified clergymen, with whom he would have been the last to put himself in competition, he preached sermons and performed marriages ; a function which must have given honest satisfac- tion to one who had been so close a witness of the enforced and systematised immorality of a slave-nursery. Before long, something fairly resembling order was established, and the settlement began to enjoy a reasonable measure of prosperity. The town was built, the fields were planted, and the schools filled. The Governor made a point of allotting the lightest work to the negroes who could read and write ; and such was the stimulating effect of this system upon education that he confidently looked forward " to the time when there would be few in the colony unable to read the Bible." A printing-press was in constant operation, and in the use of a copying-machine the little community was three-quarters of a century ahead of the London public offices. But a severe ordeal was in store for the nascent civilisation of Sierra Leone. On a Sunday morning in September 1794, eight French sail appeared off the coast. The town was about as defensible as Brighton ; and it is not difficult to imagine the feelings which the sansculottes inspired among Evangelical colonists whose last advices from Europe dated from the very height of the Reign of Terror. There was a party in favour of escaping into the forest with as much property as could be removed at so short a notice : but the Governor insisted that there would be no chance of saving the Company's buildings unless the Company's servants could make up their minds to remain at their posts, and face it out. The squadron moored within musket-shot of the quay, and swept the streets for two hours with grape and bullets ; a most gratuitous piece of cruelty that killed a negress and a child, and gave one unlucky English gentleman a fright which ultimately brought him to his grave. The invaders then proceeded to land, and Mr. Macaulay had an opportunity of learning something about the condition of the French marine during the heroic period of the Republic. 12 LIFE AND LETTERS Of CH. I. A personal enemy of his own, the captain of a Yankee slaver, brought a party of sailors straight to the Governor's house. What followed had best be told in Mr. Macaulay's own words. " Newell, who was attended by half-a-dozen sans- culottes, almost foaming with rage, presented a pistol to me, and with many oaths demanded instant satisfaction for the slaves who had run away from him to my protection. I made very little reply, but told him he must now take such satisfac- tion as he judged equivalent to his claims, as I was no longei master of my actions. He became so very outrageous that, after bearing with him a little while, I thought it most prudent to repair myself to the French officer, and request his safe- conduct on board the Commodore's ship. As I passed along the wharf the scene was curious enough. The Frenchmen, who had come ashore in filth and rags, were now many of them dressed out with women's shifts, gowns, and petticoats. Others had quantities of cloth wrapped about their bodies, or perhaps six or seven suits of clothes upon them at a time. The scene which presented itself on my getting on board the flag-ship was still more singular. The quarter-deck was crowded by a set of ragamuffins whose appearance beggared every previous description, and among whom I sought in vain for some one who looked like a gentleman. The stench and filth exceeded anything I had ever witnessed in any ship, and the noise and confusion gave me some idea of their famous Mountain. I was ushered into the Commodore's cabin, who at least received me civilly. His name was Citizen Allemand. He did not appear to have the right of excluding any of his fellow-citizens even from this place. Whatever might be their rank, they crowded into it, and conversed familiarly with him." Such was the discipline of the fleet that had been beaten by Lord Howe on the first of June ; and such the raw material of the armies which, under firm hands, and on an element more suited to the military genius of their nation, were destined to triumph at Rivoli and Hohenlinden. Mr. Macaulay, who spoke French with ease and precision, in his anxiety to save the town used every argument which might prevail on the Commodore, whose Christian name, (if one may use such a phrase with reference to a patriot of the year two of the Republic,) happened oddly enough to be the same as his own. He appealed first to the traditional gene- rosity of Frenchmen towards a fallen enemy, but soon discerned that the quality in question had gone out with the old order of things, if indeed it ever existed. He then represented that a people, who professed to be waging war with the express object i8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 13 of striking off the fetters of mankind, would be guilty of flagrant inconsistency if they destroyed an asylum for liberated slaves ; but the Commodore gave him to understand that sentiments, which sounded very well in the Hall of the Jacobins, were out of place on the West Coast of Africa. The Governor returned on shore to find the town already completely gutted. It was evident at every turn that, although the Republican battalions might carry liberty and fraternity through Europe on the points of their bayonets, the Republican sailors had found a very different use for the edge of their cutlasses. " The sight of my own and of the Accountant's offices almost sickened me. Every desk, and every drawer, and every shelf, together with the printing and copying presses, had been completely demo- lished in the search for money. The floors were strewed with types, and papers, and leaves of books ; and I had the morti- fication to see a great part of my own labour, and of the labour of others, for several years totally destroyed. At the other end of the house I found telescopes, hygrometers, barometers, thermometers, and electrical machines, lying about in frag- ments. The view of the town library filled me with lively concern. The volumes were tossed about and defaced with the utmost wantonness ; and, if they happened to bear any resemblance to Bibles, they were torn in pieces and trampled on. The collection of natural curiosities next caught my eye. Plants, seeds, dried birds, insects, and drawings were scattered about in great confusion, and some of the sailors were in the act of killing a beautiful musk-cat, which they afterwards ate. Every house was full of Frenchmen, who were hacking, and destroying, and tearing up everything which they could not convert to their own use. The destruction of live stock on this and the following day was immense. In my yard alone they killed fourteen dozen of fowls, and there were not less than twelve hundred hogs shot in the town." It was unsafe to walk in the streets of Freetown during the forty-eight hours that followed its capture, because the French crews, with too much of the Company's port wine in their heads to aim straight, were firing at the pigs of the poor freedmen over whom they had achieved such a questionable victory. To readers of Erckmann-Chatrian it is unpleasant to be taken thus behind the curtain on which those skilful artists have painted the wars of the early Revolution. It is one thing to be told how the crusaders of '93 and '94 were received with blessings and banquets by the populations to whom they brought freedom and enlightenment, and quite another to read the journal in which a quiet accurate-minded Scotchman tells 14 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. us how a pack of tipsy ruffians sat abusing Pitt and George to him, over a fricassee of his own fowls, and among the wreck of his lamps and mirrors which they had smashed as a protest against aristocratic luxury. "There is not a boy among them who has not learnt to accompany the name of Pitt with an execration. When I went to bed, there was no sleep to be had on account of the sentinels thinking fit to amuse me the whole night through with the revenge they meant to take on him when they got him to Paris. Next morning I went on board the 'Experiment.' The Commodore and all his officers messed together, and I was admitted among them. They are truly the poorest-looking people I ever saw. Even the Commodore has only one suit which can at all distinguish him, not to say from the officers, but from the men. The filth and confusion of their meals was terrible. A chorus of boys usher in the dinner with the Marseilles hymn, and it finishes in the same way. The en- thusiasm of all ranks among them is astonishing, but not more so than their blindness. They talk with ecstasy of their revo- lutionary government, of their bloody executions, of their revolutionary tribunal, of the rapid movement of their revolu- tionary army with the Corps of Justice and the flying guillotine before it : forgetting that not one of them is not liable to its stroke on the accusation of the greatest vagabond on board. They asked me with triumph if yesterday had not been Sunday. 'Oh,' said they, 'the National Convention have decreed that there is no Sunday, and that the Bible is all a lie.' " After such an experience it is not difficult to account for the keen and almost personal interest with which, to the very day of Waterloo, Mr. Macaulay watched through its vary- ing phases the rise and the downfall of the French power. lie followed the progress of the British arms with a minute and intelligent attention which from a very early date communicated itself to his son ; and the hearty patriotism of Lord Macaulay is perhaps in no small degree the consequence of what his father suffered from the profane and rapacious sansculottes of the revolutionary squadron. Towards the middle of October the Republicans took their departure. Even at this distance of time it is provoking to learn that they got back to Brest without meeting an enemy that had teeth to bite. The African climate, however, reduced the squadron to such a plight, that it was well for our frigates that they had not the chance of getting its fever-stricken crews under their hatches. The French never revisited Freetown. Indeed, they had left the place in such a condition that it was I8oo i8. LORD MACAULAY. |J not worth their while to return. The houses had been care- fully burned to the ground, and the live stock killed. Except the clothes on their backs, and a little brandy and flour, the Europeans had lost everything they had in the world. Till assistance came from the mother country they lived upon such provisions as could be recovered from the reluctant hands of the negro settlers, who providentially had not been able to resist the temptation of helping the Republicans to plunder the Company's stores. Judicious liberality at home, and a year's hard work on the spot, did much to repair the damage ; and, when his colony was again upon its feet, Mr. Macaulay sailed to England with the object of recruiting his health, which had broken down under an attack of low fever. On his arrival he was admitted at once and for ever within the innermost circle of friends and fellow-labourers who were united round Wilberforce and Henry Thornton by indissoluble bonds of mutual personal regard and common public ends. As an indispensable part of his initiation into that very pleasant confederacy, he was sent down to be introduced to Hannah More, who was living at Cowslip Green, near Bristol, in the enjoyment of general respect, mixed with a good deal of what even those who admire her as she deserved must in conscience call flattery. He there met Selina Mills, a former pupil of the school which the Miss Mores kept in the neighbouring city, and a lifelong friend of all the sisters. The young lady is said to have been extremely pretty and attractive, as may well be believed by those who saw her in later years. She was the daughter of a member of the Society of Friends, who at one time was a bookseller in Bristol, and who built there a small street called " Mills Place," in which he himself resided. His grandchildren remembered him as an old man of imposing appearance, with long white hair, talking incessantly of Jacob Boehmen. Mr. Mills had sons, one of whom edited a Bristol journal exceedingly well, and is said to have made some figure in light literature. This uncle of Lord Macaulay was a very lively, clever man, full of good stories, of which only one has survived. Young Mills, while resident in London, had looked in at Rowland Hill's chapel, and had there lost a new hat. When he reported the misfortune to his father, the old Quaker replied : "John, if thee'd gone to the right place of worship, thee'd have kept thy hat upon thy head." Lord Macaulay was accustomed to say that he got his "joviality" from his mother's family. If his power of humour was indeed of Quaker origin, he was rather ungrateful in the use to which he sometimes put it 16 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. Mr. Macaulay fell in love with Miss Mills, and obtained her affection in return. He had to encounter the opposition of her relations, who were set upon her making another and a better match, and of Mrs. Patty More,. (so well known to all who have studied the somewhat diffuse annals of the More family,) who, in the true spirit of romantic friendship, wished her to promise never to marry at all, but to domesticate herself as a youngest sister in the household at Cowslip Green. Miss Hannah, how- ever, took a more unselfish view of the situation, and advocated Mr. Macaulay's cause with firmness and good feeling. Indeed, he must have been, according to her particular notions, the most irreproachable of lovers, until her own Coelebs was given to the world. By her help he carried his point in so far that the engagement was made and recognised ; but the friends of the young lady would not allow her to accompany him to Africa ; and, during his absence from England, which began in the early months of 1796, by an arrangement that under the circumstances was very judicious, she spent much of her time in Leicestershire with his sister Mrs. Babington. His first business after arriving at Sierra Leone was to sit in judgment on the ringleaders of a formidable outbreak which had taken place in the colony ; and he had an opportunity of proving by example that negro disaffection, from the nature of the race, is peculiarly susceptible to treatment by mild remedies, if only the man in the post of responsibility has got a heart and can contrive to keep his head. He had much more trouble with a batch of missionaries, whom he took with him in the ship, and who were no sooner on board than they began to fall out, ostensibly on controversial topics, but more probably from the same motives that so often set the laity quarrelling during the incessant and involuntary companionship of a sea- voyage. Mr. Macaulay, finding that the warmth of these debates furnished sport to the captain and other irreligious characters, was forced seriously to exert his authority in order to separate and silence the disputants. His report of these occurrences went in due time to the Chairman of the Company, who excused himself for an arrangement which had turned out so ill by telling a story of a servant who, having to carry a number of gamecocks from one place to another, tied them up in the same bag, and found on arriving at his journey's end that they had spent their time in tearing each other to pieces. When his master called him to account for his stupidity he replied : " Sir, as they were all your cocks, I thought they would be all on one side." Things did not go much more smoothly on shore. Mr. i8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 17 Macaulay's official correspondence gives a curious picture of his difficulties in the character of Minister of Public Worship in a black community. " The Baptists under David George are decent and orderly, but there is observable in them a great neglect of family worship, and sometimes an unfairness in their dealings. To Lady Huntingdon's Methodists, as a body, may with great justice be addressed the first verse of the third chapter of the Revelation. The lives of many of them are very disorderly, and rank antinomianism prevails among them." But his sense of religion and decency was most sorely tried by Moses Wilkinson, a so-called Wesleyan Methodist, whose congregation, not a very respectable one to begin with, had recently been swollen by a Revival which had been accom. panied by circumstances the reverse of edifying. 1 The Governor must have looked back with regret to that period in the history of the colony when he was underhanded in the clerical department. But his interest in the negro could bear ruder shocks than an occasional outburst of eccentric fanaticism . He liked his work, because he liked those for whom he was working. "Poor people," he writes, "one cannot help loving them. With all their trying humours, they have a warmth of affection which is really irresistible." For their sake he endured all the risk and worry inseparable from a long engagement kept by the lady among disapproving friends, and by the gentleman at Sierra Leone. He stayed till the settlement had begun to thrive, and the Company had almost begun to pay ; and until the Home Government had given marked tokens of favour and protection, which some years later developed into a negotiation under which the colony was transferred to the Crown . It was not till 1799 that he finally gave up his appointment, and left a region which, alone among men, he quitted with unfeigned, and, except in one particular, with unmixed regret. But for the absence of an Eve, he regarded the West Coast of Africa as a veritable Paradise, or, to use his own expression, as a more agreeable Montpelier . With a temper which in the intercourse of society was proof against being ruffled by any possible treat- ment of any conceivable subject, to the end of his life he 1 Lord Macaulay had in his youth heard too much about negro preachers, and negro administrators, to permit him to entertain any very enthusiastic anticipations with regard to the future of the African race. He writes in his journal for July 8, 1858 : " Motley called. I like him much. We agree wonderfully well about slavery, and it is not often that I meet any person with whom I agree on that subject. For I hate slavery from the bottom of my soul ; and yet I am made sick by the cant and the silly mock reasons of the Abolitionists. The nigger driver and the negrophile are two odious things to me. I must make Lady Macbeth's reservation : ' Had he not resembled, ,' " C 18 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. showed faint signs of irritation if anyone ventured in his presence to hint that Sierra Leone was unhealthy. On his return to England he was appointed Secretary to the Company, and was married at. Bristol on the 26th of August, 1799. A most close union it was, and, (though in latter years he became fearfully absorbed in the leading object of his exist- ence, and ceased in a measure to be the companion that he had been,) his love for his wife, and deep trust and confidence in her, never failed. They took a small house in Lambeth for the first twelve months. When Mrs. Macaulay was near her confinement, Mrs. Babington, who belonged to the school of matrons who hold that the advantage of country air outweighs that of London doctors, invited her sister-in-law to Rothley Temple ; and there, in a room panelled from ceiling to floor, like every corner of the ancient mansion, with oak almost black from age, looking eastward across the park, and south- ward through an ivy-shaded window into a little garden, Lord Macaulay was born. It was on the 25th of October 1800, the day of St. Crispin, the anniversary of Agincourt, (as he liked to say,) that he opened his eyes on a world which he was des- tined so thoroughly to learn and so intensely to enjoy. His father was as pleased as a father could be ; but fate seemed determined that Zachary Macaulay should not be indulged in any great share of personal happiness. The next morning the noise of a spinning-jenny, at work in a cottage, startled his horse as he was riding past He was thrown, and both arms were broken ; and he spent in a sick-room the remainder of the only holiday worth the name which, (as far as can be traced in the family records,) he ever took during his married life. Owing to this accident the young couple were detained at Rothley into the winter ; and the child was baptised in the private chapel which formed part of the house, on the 26th November 1800, by the names of Thomas Babington : the Rev. Aulay Macaulay, and Mr. and Mrs. Babington, acting as sponsors. The two years which followed were passed in a house in Birchin I^ane, where the Sierra Leone Company had its office. The only place where the child could be taken for exercise, and what might be called air, was Drapers' Gardens, which (already under sentence to be covered with bricks and mortar at an early date) lies behind Throgmorton Street, and within a hundred yards of the Stock Exchange. To this dismal yard, containing as much gravel as grass, and frowned upon by a board of Rules and Regulations almost as large as itself, his mother used to convoy the nurse and the little boy through the crowds that towards noon swarmed along Cornhill and Thread- i8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 19 needle Street ; and thither she would return, after a due interval, to escort them back to Birchin Lane. So strong was the power of association upon Macaulay's mind that in after years Drapers' Garden was among his favourite haunts. Indeed, his habit of roaming for hours through and through the heart of the City, (a habit that never left him as long as he could roam at all,) was due in part to the recollection which caused him to regard that region as native ground. Baby as he was when he quitted it, he retained some im- pression of his earliest home. He remembered standing up at the nursery window by his father's side, looking at a cloud of black smoke pouring out of a tall chimney. He asked if that was hell ; an inquiry that was received with a grave displeasure which at the time he could not understand. The kindly father must have been pained, almost against his own will, at finding what feature of his creed it was that had embodied itself in so very material a shape before his little son's imagination. When in after days Mrs. Macaulay was questioned as to how soon she began to detect in the child a promise of the future, she used to say that his sensibilities and affections were remarkably developed at an age which to her hearers appeared next to in- credible. He would cry for joy on seeing her after a few hours' absence, and, (till her husband put a stop to it,) her power of exciting his feelings was often made an exhibition to her friends. She did not regard this precocity as a proof of cleverness ; but, like a foolish young mother, only thought that so tender a nature was marked for early death. The next move which the family made was into as healthy an atmosphere, in every sense, as the most careful parent could wish to select. Mr. Macaulay took a house in the High Street of Clapham, in the part now called the Pavement, on the same side as the Plough inn, but some doors nearer to the Common. It was a roomy comfortable dwelling, with a very small garden behind, and in front a very small one indeed, which has entirely disappeared beneath a large shop thrown out towards the road- way by the present occupier, who bears the name of Heywood. Here the boy passed a quiet and most happy childhood. From the time that he was three years old he read incessantly, for the most part lying on the rug before the fire, with his book on the ground, and a piece of bread and butter in his hand. A very clever woman, who then lived in the house as parlour-maid, told how he used to sit in his nankeen frock, perched on the table by her as she was cleaning the plate, and expounding to her out of a volume as big as himself. He did not care for toys, but was very fond of taking his walk, when he would hold 20 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. forth to his companion, whether nurse or mother, telling intermin- able stories out of his own head, or repeating what he had been reading in language far above his years. His memory retained without effort the phraseology of the book which he had been last engaged on, and he talked, as the maid said, "quite printed words," which produced an effect that appeared formal, and often, no doubt, exceedingly droll. Mrs. Hannah More was fond of relating how she called at Mr. Macaulay's, and was met by a fair, pretty, slight child, with abundance of light hair, about four years of age, who came to the front door to receive her, and tell her that his parents were out, but that if she would be good enough to come in he would bring her a glass of old spirits : a propo- sition which greatly startled the good lady, who had never aspired beyond cowslip wine. When questioned as to what he knew about old spirits, he could only say that Robinson Crusoe often had some. About this period his father took --him on a visit to Lady Waldegrave at Strawberry Hill, and was much pleased to exhibit to his old friend the fair bright boy, dressed in a green coat with red collar and cuffs, a frill at the throat, and white trousers. After some time had been spent among the wonders of the Orford Collection, of which he ever after carried a catalogue in his head, a servant who was waiting upon the company in the great gallery spilt some hot coffee over his legs. The hostess was all kindness and compassion, and when, after a while, she asked how he was feeling, the little fellow looked up in her face and replied : " Thank you, madam, the agony is abated." But it must not be supposed that his quaint manners pro- ceeded from affectation or conceit ; for all testimony declares that a more simple and natural chili never lived, or a more lively and merry one. He had at his command the resources of the Common ; to this day the most unchanged spot within ten miles of St. Paul's, and which to all appearance will ere long hold that pleasant pre-eminence within ten leagues. That delightful wilderness of gorse bushes, and poplar groves, and gravel-pits, and ponds great and small, was to little Tom Ma- caulay a region of inexhaustible romance and mystery. He explored its recesses ; he composed, and almost believed, its legends ; he invented for its different features a nomenclature which has been faithfully preserved by two generations of children. A slight ridge, intersected by deep ditches, towards the west of the Common, the very existence of which no one above eight years old would notice, was dignified with the title of the Alps ; while the elevated island, covered with shrubs, that gives a name to the Mount pond, was regarded with iSoo-i8. LORD MACAULAV. 21 infinite awe as being the nearest approach within the circuit of his observation to a conception of the majesty of Sinai. In- deed, at this period his infant fancy was much exercised with the threats and terrors of the Law. He had a little plot of ground at the back of the house, marked out as his own by a row of oyster-shells, which a maid one day threw away as rubbish. He went straight to the drawing-room, where his mother was entertaining some visitors, walked into the circle, and said very solemnly : " Cursed be Sally ; for it is written, Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour's land-mark." While still the merest child he was sent as a day-scholar to Mr. Greaves, a shrewd Yorkshireman with a turn for science, who had been originally brought to the neighbourhood in order to educate a number of African youths sent over to imbibe Western civilisation at the fountain-head. The poor fellows had found as much difficulty in keeping alive at Clapham as Englishmen experience at Sierra Leone ; and, in the end, their tutor set up a school for boys of his own colour, and at one time had charge of almost the entire rising generation of the Common. Mrs. Macaulay explained to Tom that he must learn to study without the solace of bread and butter, to which he replied : "Yes, mama, industry shall be my bread and attention my butter." But, as a matter of fact, no one ever crept more unwillingly to school. Each several afternoon he made piteous entreaties to be excused returning after dinner, and was met by the unvarying formula : " No, Tom, if it rains cats and dogs, you shall go." His reluctance to leave home had more than one side to it. Not only did his heart stay behind, but the regular lessons of the class took him away from occupations which in his eyes were infinitely more delightful and important ; for these were probably the years of his greatest literary activity. As an author he never again had more facility, or anything like so wide a range. In September 1808, his mother writes : "My dear Tom continues to show marks of uncommon genius. He gets on wonderfully in all branches of his education, and the extent of his reading, and of the knowledge he has derived from it, are truly astonishing in a boy not yet eight years old. He is at the same time as playful as a kitten. To give you some idea of the activity of his mind I will mention a few circumstances that may interest you and Colin. You will believe that to him we never appear to regard anything he does as anything more than a schoolboy's amusement. He took it into his head to write a compendium of Universal History about a year ago, and he really contrived to give a tolerably connected view of C2 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. the leading events from the Creation to the present time, filling about a quire of paper. He told me one day that he had been writing a paper, which Henry Daly was to translate into Malabar, to persuade the people of Travancore to embrace the Christian religion. On reading it I found it to contain a very clear idea of the leading facts and doctrines of that religion, with some strong arguments for its adoption. He was so fired with reading Scott's Lay and Marmion, the former of which he got entirely, and the latter almost entirely, by heart, merely from his delight in reading them, that he determined on writing himself a poem in six cantos which he called the 'Battle of Cheviot' After he had finished about three of the cantos of about 120 lines each, which he did in a couple of days, he became tired of it I make no doubt he would have finished his design, but, as he was proceeding with it, the thought struck him of writing an heroic poem to be called ' Olaus the Great, or the Conquest of Mona,' in which, after the manner of Virgil, he might introduce in prophetic song the future fortunes of the family ; among others, those of the hero who aided in the fall of the tyrant of Mysore, after having long suffered from his tyranny ; ' and of another of his race who had exerted himself for the deliverance of the wretched Africans. He has just begun it. He has composed I know not how many hymns. I send you one, as a specimen, in his own handwriting, which he wrote about six months ago on one Monday morning while we were at breakfast" The affection of the last generation of his relatives has pre- served all these pieces, but the piety of this generation will refrain from submitting them to public criticism. A marginal note, in which Macaulay has expressed his cordial approval of Uncle Toby's 2 remark about the great Lipsius, indicates his own wishes in the matter too clearly to leave any choice for those who come after him. But there still may be read in a boyish scrawl the epitome of Universal History, from " a new king who knew not Joseph," down through Rameses, and Dido, and Tydeus, and Tarquin, and Crassus, and Gallienus, and Edward the Martyr, to Louis, who " set off on a crusade against the Albigenses," and Oliver Cromwell, who "was an unjust and wicked man." The hymns remain, which Mrs. Hannah More, surely a consummate judge of the article, pro- nounced to be "quite extraordinary for such a baby." To a somewhat later period probably belongs a vast pile of blank verse, entitled "Fingal, a poem in xn books;" two of which 1 General Macaulay had been one of Tippoo Sahib's prisoners. 2 Tristram Shandy, chapter clxiii. i8oo 18. LORD MACAULA?. 23 are in a complete and connected shape, while the rest of the story is lost amidst a labyrinth of many hundred scattered lines, so transcribed as to suggest a conjecture that the boy's demand for foolscap had outrun the paternal generosity. Of all his performances, that which attracted most attention at the time was undertaken for the purpose of immortalising Olaus Magnus, King of Norway, from whom the clan to which the bard belonged was supposed to derive its name. Two cantos are extant, of which there are several exemplars, in every stage of calligraphy from the largest round hand downwards, a circumstance which is apparently due to the desire on the part of each of the little Macaulays to possess a copy of the great family epic. The opening stanzas, each of which contains more lines than their author counted years, go swinging along with plenty of animation and no dearth of historical and geo- graphical allusion. Day set on Cambria's hills supreme, And, Menai, on thy silver stream. The star of day had reached the West. Now in the main it sunk to rest. Shone great Eleindyn's castle tall : Shone every battery, every hall : Shone all fair Mona's verdant plain ; But chiefly shone the foaming main. And again : " Long," said the Prince, " shall Olave's name Live in the high records of fame. Fair Mona now shall trembling stand That ne'er before feared mortal hand. Mona, that isle where Ceres' flower In plenteous autumn's golden hour Hides all the fields from man's survey As locusts hid old Egypt's day." The passage containing a prophetic mention of his father and uncle after the manner of the sixth book of the ^neid, for the sake of which, according to Mrs. Macaulay, the poem was originally designed, can nowhere be discovered. It is possible that in the interval between the conception and the execution the boy happened to light upon a copy of the Rolliad. If such was the case, he already had too fine a sense of humour to have persevered in his original plan after reading that master piece of drollery. It is worthy of note that the voluminous writings of his childhood, dashed off at headlong speed in the odds and ends of leisure from school-study and nursery routine, 24 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. are not only perfectly correct in spelling and grammar, but display the same lucidity of meaning, and scrupulous accuracy in punctuation and the other minor details of the literary art, which characterise his mature works. Nothing could be more judicious than the treatment that Mr. and Mrs. Macaulay adopted towards their boy. They never handed his productions about, or encouraged him to parade his powers of conversation or memory. They abstained from any word or act which might foster in him a perception of his own genius with as much care as a wise millionaire expends on keeping his son ignorant of the fact that he is destined to be richer than his comrades. " It was scarcely ever,'' writes one who knew him well from the very first, " that the consciousness was expressed by either of his parents of the superiority of their son over other children. Indeed, with his father I never remember any such expression. What I most observed myself was his extraordinary command of language. When he came to describe to his mother any childish play, I took care to be present, when I could, that I .might listen to the way in which he expressed himself, often scarcely exceeded in his later years. Except this trifle, I remember him only as a good-tempered boy, always occupied, playing with his sisters without assumption of any kind." One effect of this early dis- cipline showed itself in his freedom from vanity and suscepti- bility, those qualities which, coupled together in our modern psychological dialect under the head of "self-consciousness," are supposed to be the besetting defects of the literary cha- racter. Another result was his habitual over-estimate of the average knowledge possessed by mankind. Judging others by himself, he credited the world at large with an amount of in- formation which certainly few have the ability to acquire, or the capacity to retain. If his parents had not been so diligent in concealing from him the difference between his own intel- lectual stores and those of his neighbours, it is probable that less would have been heard of Lord Macaulay's Schoolboy. The system pursued at home was continued at Barley Wood, the place where the Misses More resided from 1802 onwards. Mrs. Macaulay gladly sent her boy to a house where he was encouraged without being spoiled, and where he never failed to be a welcome guest. The kind old ladies made a real com- panion of him, and greatly relished his conversation ; while at the same time, with their ideas on education, they would never have allowed him, even if he had been so inclined, to forget that he was a child. Mrs. Hannah More, who had the rare gift of knowing how to live with both young and old, was the i8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 25 most affectionate and the wisest of friends, and readily under- took the superintendence of his studies, his pleasures, and his health. She would keep him with her for weeks, listening to him as he read prose by the ell, declaimed poetry by the hour, and discussed and compared his favourite heroes, ancient, modern, and fictitious, under all points of view and in every possible combination ; coaxing him into the garden under pretence of a lecture on botany ; sending him from his books to run round the grounds, or play at cooking in the kitchen ; giving him Bible lessons which invariably ended in a theological argument, and following him with her advice and sympathy through his multifarious literary enterprises. ' She writes to his father in 1809 : " I heartily hope that the sea air has been the means of setting you up, and Mrs. Macaulay also, and that the dear little poet has caught his share of bracing. . . . Tell Tom I desire to know how ' Olaus ' goes on. The sea, I suppose, furnished him with some new images." The broader and more genial aspect under which life showed itself to the boy at Barley Wood has left its trace in a series of childish squibs and parodies, which may still be read with an interest that his Cambrian and Scandinavian rhapsodies fail to inspire. The most ambitious of these lighter efforts is a pas- quinade occasioned by some local scandal, entitled " Childe Hugh and the labourer, a pathetic ballad." The " Childe " of the story was a neighbouring baronet, and the " Abbot " a neighbouring rector, and the whole performance, intended, as it was, to mimic the spirit of Percy's Reliques, irresistibly sug- gests a reminiscence of John Gilpin. It is pleasant to know that to Mrs. Hannah More was due the commencement of what eventually became the most readable of libraries, as is shown in a series of letters extending over the entire period of Macaulay's education. When he was six years old she writes : " Though you are a little boy now, you will one day, if it please God, be a man : but long before you are a man I hope you will be a scholar. I therefore wish you to purchase such books as will be useful and agreeable to you then, and that you employ this very small sum in laying a little tiny corner-stone for your future library." A year or two afterwards she thanks him for his "two letters, so neat and free from blots. By this obvious improvement you have entitled yourself to another book. You 1 "The next time," (my uncle once said to us,) "that I saw Hannah More was in 1807. The old ladies begged my parents to leave me with them for a week, and this visit was a great event in my life. In parlour and kitchen they could not make enough of me. They taught me to ccok ; and I was to preach, and they got in people from the fields, and I stood on a chair, and preached sermons. I might have been indicted for holding a conventicle." 26 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. i. must go to Hatchard's and choose. I think we have nearly exhausted the Epics. What say you to a little good prose? Johnson's Hebrides, or Walton's Lives, unless you would like a neat edition of Cowper's poems or Paradise Lost for your own eating ? In any case choose something which you do not possess. I want you to become a complete Frenchman, that I may give you Racine, the only dramatic poet I know in any modern language that is perfectly pure and good. I think you have hit off the Ode very well, and I am much obliged to you for the Dedication." The poor little author was already an adept in the traditional modes of requiting a patron. He had another Maecenas in the person of General Macaulay, who came back from India in 1810. The boy greeted him with a copy of verses, beginning "Now safe returned from Asia's parching strand, Welcome, thrice welcome to thy native land." To tell the unvarnished truth, the General's return was not altogether of a triumphant character. After very narrowly escaping with his life from an outbreak at Travancore, incited by a native minister who owed him a grudge, he had given proof of courage and spirit during some military operations which ended in his being brought back to the Residency with flying colours. But, when the fighting was over, he counte- nanced, and perhaps prompted, measures of retaliation which were ill taken by his superiors at Calcutta. In his congratu- latory effusion the nephew presumes to remind the uncle that on European soil there still might be found employment for so redoubtable a sword. <( For many a battle shall be lost and won Ere yet thy glorious labours shall be done." The General did not take the hint, and spent the remainder of his life peacefully enough between London, Bath, and the Continental capitals. He was accustomed to say that his travelling carriage was his only freehold ; and, wherever he fixed his temporary residence, he had the talent of making himself popular . At Geneva he was a universal favourite ; he always was welcome at Coppet ; and he gave the strongest conceivable proof of a cosmopolitan disposition by finding him- self equally at home at Rome and at Clapham. When in England he lived much with his relations, to whom he was sincerely attached. He was generous in a high degree, and the young people owed to him books which they otherwise could never have obtained, and treats and excursions which l8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 27 formed the only recreations that broke the uniform current of their lives. They regarded their uncle Colin as the man of the world of the Macaulay family. Zachary Macaulay's circumstances during these years were good, and constantly improving. For some time he held the post of Secretary to the Sierra Leone Company, with a salary of 5/. per annum. He subsequently entered into partnership with a nephew, and the firm did a large business as African merchants under the names of Macaulay and Babington. The position of the father was favourable to the highest interests of his children . A boy has the best chance of being well brought up in a household where there is solid comfort, combined with thrift and simplicity ; and the family was increasing too fast to leave any margin for luxurious expenditure . Before the eldest son had completed his thirteenth year he had three brothers and five sisters. 1 In the course of 1812 it began to be evident that Tom had got beyond the educational capabilities of Clapham ; and his father seriously contemplated the notion of removing to London in order to place him as a day-scholar at Westminster. Thorough as was the consideration which the parents gave to the matter, their decision was of more importance than they could at the time foresee. If their son had gone to a public school, it is more than probable that he would have turned out a different man, and have done different work. So sensitive and home- loving a boy might for a while have been too depressed to enter fully into the ways of the place ; but, as he gained confidence, he could not have withstood the irresistible attractions which the life of a great school exercises over a vivid eager nature, and he would have sacrificed to passing pleasures and emula- tions a part, at any rate, of those years which, in order to be what he was, it was necessary that he should spend wholly among his books. Westminster or Harrow might have sharp- ened his faculties for dealing with affairs and with men ; but the world at large would have lost more than he could by any 1 It was in the course of his thirteenth year that the boy wrote his " Epitaph on Henry Martyn." Here Martyn lies. In manhood's early bloom The Christian hero finds a Pagan tomb. Religion, sorrowing o'er her favourite son, Points to the glorious trophies that he won. Eternal trophies ! not with carnage red, Not stained with tears by hapless captives shed, But trophies of the Cross. For that dear name, Through every form of danger, death, and shame, Onward he journeyed to a happier shore, Where danger, death, and shame assault no more." 28 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. possibility have gained. If Macaulay had received the usual education of a young Englishman, he might in all probability have kept his seat for Edinburgh ; but he could hardly have written the Essay on Von Ranke, or the description of England in the third chapter of the History. Mr. Macaulay ultimately fixed upon a private school, kept by the Rev. Mr. Preston, at Little Shelford, a village in the immediate vicinity of Cambridge. The motives which guided this selection were mainly of a religious nature. Mr. Preston held extreme Low Church opinions, and stood in the good books of Mr. Simeon, whose word had long been law in the Cambridge section of the Evangelical circle. But whatever had been the inducement to make it, the choice proved singu- larly fortunate. The tutor, it is true, was narrow in his views, and lacked the taste and judgment to set those views before his pupils in an attractive form. Theological topics dragged into the conversation at unexpected moments, inquiries about their spiritual state, and long sermons which had to be listened to under the dire obligation of reproducing them in an epitome, fostered in the minds of some of the boys a reaction against the outward manifestations of religion : a reaction which had already begun under the strict system pursued in their respec- tive homes. But, on the other hand, Mr. Preston knew both how to teach his scholars, and when to leave them to teach themselves. The eminent Judge, who divided grown men into two sharply defined and most uncomplimentary categories, was accustomed to say that private schools made poor creatures, and public schools sad dogs ; but Mr. Preston succeeded in giving a practical contradiction to Sir William Maule's proposi- tion. His pupils, who were limited to an average of a dozen at a time, got far beyond their share of honours at the univer- sity and of distinction in after life. George Stainforth, a grand- son of Sir Francis Baring, by his success at Cambridge was the first to win the school an honourable name, which was more than sustained by Henry Maiden, now Greek Professor at University College, London, and by Macaulay himself. Shelford was strongly under the influence of the neighbouring university ; an influence which Mr. Preston, himself a fellow of Trinity, wisely encouraged . The boys were penetrated with Cambridge ambitions and ways of thought j- and frequent visitors brought to the table, where master and pupils dined in common, the freshest Cambridge gossip of the graver sort . Little Macaulay received much kindness from Dean Milner, the President of Queen's College, then at the very summit of a celebrity which is already of the past. Those who care to I8oo-i8. LORD MA CAUL AY. 29 search among the embers of that once brilliant reputation can form a fair notion of what Samuel Johnson would have been if he had lived a generation later, and had been absolved from the necessity of earning his bread by the enjoyment of ecclesi- astical sinecures, and from any uneasiness as to his worldly standing by the possession of academical dignities and func- tions. The Dean, who had boundless goodwill for all his fellow-creatures at every period of life, provided that they were not Jacobins or sceptics, recognised the promise of the boy, and entertained him at his college residence on terms of friend- liness, and almost of equality. After one of these visits he writes to Mr. Macaulay : "Your lad is a fine fellow. He shall stand before kings, he shall not stand before mean men." Shelford : February 22, 1813. My dear Papa, As this is a whole holiday, I cannot find a better time for answering your letter. With respect to my health, I am very well, and tolerably cheerful, as Blundell, the best and most clever of all the scholars, is very kind, and talks to me, and takes my part He is quite a friend of Mr. Preston's. The other boys, especially Lyon, a Scotch boy, and Wilberforce, are very good-natured, and we might have gone on very well had not one , a Bristol fellow, come here. He is unani- mously allowed to be a queer fellow, and is generally charac- terised as a foolish boy, and by most of us as an ill-natured one. In my learning I do Xenophon every day, and twice a week the Odyssey, in which I am classed with Wilberforce, whom all the boys allow to be very clever, very droll, and very impudent. We do Latin verses twice a week, and I have not yet been laughed at, as Wilberforce is the only one who hears them, being in my class. We are exercised also once a week in English composition, and once in Latin composition, and letters of persons renowned in history to each other. We get by heart Greek grammar or Virgil every evening. As for sermon-writing, I have hitherto got off with credit, and I hope I shall keep up my reputation. We have had the first meeting of our debating society the other day, when a vote of censure was moved for upon Wilberforce, but he getting up said, " Mr. President, I beg to second the motion." By this means he escaped. The kindness which Mr. Preston shows me is very great. He always assists me in what I cannot do, and takes me to walk out with him every now and then. My room is a delightful snug little chamber, which nobody can enter, as there is a trick about opening the door. I sit like a king, with my writing-desk before me ; for, (would you believe it ?) there is a writing-desk 3C LIFE AND LETTERS OF OH. I. in my chest of drawers ; my books on one side, my box of papers on the other, with my arm-chair and my candle ; for every boy has a candlestick, snuffers, and extinguisher of his own. Being pressed for room, I will conclude what I have to say to-morrow, and ever remain, Your affectionate son, THOMAS B. MACAULAY. The youth who on this occasion gave proof of his parentage by his readiness and humour was Wilberforce's eldest son. A fortnight later on, the subject chosen for discussion was " whether Lord Wellington or Maryborough was the greatest general. A very warm debate is expected." Shelford : April 20, 1813. My dear Mama, Pursuant to my promise I resume my pen to write to you with the greatest pleasure. Since I wrote to you yesterday, I have enjoyed myself more than I have ever done since I came to Shelford. Mr. Hodson called about twelve o'clock yesterday morning with a pony for me, and took me with him to Cambridge. How surprised and delighted was I to learn that I was to take a bed at Queen's College in Dean Milner's apartments ! Wilberforce arrived soon after, and I spent the day very agreeably, the Dean amusing me with the greatest kindness. I slept there, and came home on horseback to-day just in time for dinner. The Dean has invited me to come again, and Mr. Preston has given his consent The books which I am at present employed in reading to myself are, in English, Plutarch's Lives, and Milner's Ecclesiastical History ; in French, Fe"nelon's Dialogues of the Dead. I shall send you back the volumes of Madame de Genlis's petits romans as soon as possible, and I should be very much obliged for one or two more of them. Everything now seems to feel the influence of spring. The trees are all out The lilacs are in bloom. The days are long, and I feel that I should be happy were it not that I want home. Even yesterday, when I felt more real satisfaction than I have done for almost three months, I could not help feeling a sort of uneasiness, which indeed I have always felt more or less since I have been here, and which is the only thing that hinders me from being perfectly happy. This day two months will put a period to my uneasiness. " Fly fast the hours, and dawn th' expected morn." Every night when I lie down I reflect that another day is cut off from the tiresome time of absence. Your affectiorate son, THOMAS B. MACAULAY. LORD MACAULAY. 3 1 Shelford: April 26, 1813. My dear Papa, Since I have given you a detail of weekly duties, I hope you will be pleased to be informed of my Sunday's occupations. It is quite a day of rest here, and I really look to it with pleasure through the whole of the week. After break- fast we learn a chapter in the Greek Testament, that is with the aid of our Bibles, and without doing it with a dictionary like other lessons. We then go to church. We dine almost as soon as we come back, and we are left to ourselves till after- noon church. During this time I employ myself in reading, and Mr. Preston lends me any books for which I ask him, so that I am nearly as well off in this respect as at home, except for one thing, which, though I believe it is useful, is not very pleasant. I can only ask for one book at a time, and cannot touch another till I have read it through. We then go to church, and after we come back I read as before till tea-time. After tea we write out the sermon. I cannot help thinking that Mr. Preston uses all imaginable means to make us forget it, for he gives us a glass of wine each on Sunday, and on Sunday only, the very day when we want to have all our faculties awake : and some do literally go to sleep during the sermon, and look rather silly when they wake I, however, have not fallen into this disaster. Your affectionate son, THOMAS B. MACAULAY. The constant allusions to home politics and to the progress of the Continental struggle, which occur throughout Zachary Macaulay's correspondence with his son, prove how freely, and on what an equal footing, the parent and child already conversed on questions of public interest. The following letter is curious as a specimen of the eagerness with which the boy habitually flung himself into the subjects which occupied his father's thoughts. The renewal of the East India Company's charter was just then under the consideration of Parliament, and the whole energies of the Evangelical party were exerted in order to signalise the occasion by securing our Eastern dominions as a field for the spread of Christianity. Petitions against the continued ex- clusion of missionaries were in course of circulation throughout the island, the drafts of which had been prepared by Mr. Macaulay. Shelford : May 8, 1813. My dear Papa, As on Monday it will be out of my power to write, since the examination subjects are to be given out then, I write to-day instead to answer your kind and long letter. 32 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. l. I am very much pleased that the nation seems to take such interest in the introduction of Christianity into India. My Scotch blood begins to boil at the mention of the 1,750 names that went up from a single country parish. Ask Mama and Selina if they do not now admit my argument with regard to the superior advantages of the Scotch over the English peasantry. As to my examination preparations, I will if you please give you a sketch of my plan. On Monday, the day on which the examination subjects are given out, I shall begin. My first performance will be my verses and my declamation. I shall then translate the Greek and Latin. The first time of going over I shall mark the passages which puzzle me, and then return to them again. But I shall have also to rub up my Mathematics, (by the bye, I begin the second book of Euclid to-day,) and to study whatever History may be appointed for the examination. I shall not be able to avoid trembling, whether I know my subjects or not. I am however intimidated at nothing but Greek. Mathematics suit my taste, although, before I came, I declaimed against them, and asserted that, when I went to College, it should not be to Cambridge. I am occupied with the hope of lecturing Mama and Selina upon Mathematics, as I used to do upon Heraldry, and to change Or, and Argent, and Azure, and Gules, for squares, and points, and circles, and angles, and triangles, and rectangles, and rhom- boids, and in a word "all the pomp and circumstance" of Euclid. When I come home I shall, if my purse is sufficient, bring a couple of rabbits for Selina and Jane. Your affectionate son, THOMAS B. MACAULAY. It will be seen that this passing fondness for mathematics soon changed into bitter disgust. Clapham : May 28, 1813. My dear Tom, I am very happy to hear that you have so far advanced in your different prize exercises, and with such little fatigue . I know you write with great ease to yourself, and would rather write ten poems than prune one : but remember that excellence is not attained at first. All your pieces are much mended after a little reflection, and therefore take some solitary walks, and think over each separate thing. Spare no time or trouble to render each piece as perfect as you can, and then leave the event without one anxious thought. I have always admired a saying of one of the old heathen philosophers. When a friend was condoling with him that he so well deserved of the gods, and yet that they did not shower their favours on 1 800-1 8. LORD MACAULAY. 33 him, as on some others less worthy, he answered, " I will, how- ever, continue to deserve well of them ." So do you, my dearest. Do your best because it is the will of God you should improve every faculty to the utmost now, and strengthen the powers of your mind by exercise, and then in future you will be better enabled to glorify God with all your powers and talents, be they of a more humble, or higher order, and you shall not fail to be received into everlasting habitations, with the applauding voice of your Saviour, " Well done, good and faithful servant" You see how ambitious your mother is. She must have the wisdom of her son acknowledged before Angels, and an assembled world. My wishes can soar no higher, and they can be content with nothing less for any of my children. The first time I saw your face, I repeated those beautiful lines of Watts' cradle hymn, Mayst thou live to know and fear Him, Trust and love Him all thy days Then go dwell for ever near Him, See His face, and sing His praise : and this is the substance of all my prayers for you. In less than a month you and I shall, I trust, be rambling over the Common, which now looks quite beautiful I am ever, my dear Tom, Your affectionate mother, SELINA MACAULAY. The commencement of the second half-year at school, per- haps the darkest season of a boy's existence, was marked by an unusually severe and prolonged attack of home-sickness. It would be cruel to insert the first letter written after the return to Shelford from the summer holidays. That which follows it is melancholy enough. Shelford : August 14, 1813. My dear Mama, I must confess that I have been a little disappointed at not receiving a letter from home to-day. I hope, however, for one to-morrow. My spirits are far more depressed by leaving home than they were last half-year. Everything brings home to my recollection. Everything I read, or see, or hear, brings it to my mind. You told me I should be happy when I once came here, but not an hour passes in which I do not shed tears at thinking of home. Every hope, however unlikely to be realised, affords me some small conscx lation. The morning on which I went, you told me that possibly I might come home before the holidays. If you can D 34 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH I. confirm this hope, believe me when I assure you that there is nothing which I would not give for one instant's sight of home. Tell me in your next, expressly, if you can, whether or no there is any likelihood of my coming home before the holidays. If I could gain Papa's leave, I should select my birthday on October 25 as the time which I should wish to spend at that home which absence renders still dearer to me. I think I see you sitting by Papa just after his dinner, reading my letter, and turning to him, with an inquisitive glance, at the end of the paragraph. I think too that I see his expressive shake of the head at it. O, may I be mistaken ! You cannot conceive what an alteration a favourable answer would produce in me. If your approbation of my request depends upon my advancing in study, I will work like a cart-horse. If you should refuse it, you will deprive me of the most pleasing illusion which I ever experienced in my life. Pray do not fail to write speedily. Your dutiful and affectionate son, T. B. MACAULAY. His father answered him in a letter of strong religious complexion, full of feeling, and even of beauty, but too long for reproduction in a biography that is not his own. Mr. Macaulay's deep anxiety for his son's welfare sometimes induced him to lend too ready an ear to busybodies, who in- formed him of failings in the boy which would have been treated more lightly, and perhaps more wisely, by a less devoted father. In the early months of 1814 he writes as follows, after hearing the tale of some guest of Mr. Preston whom Tom had no doubt contradicted at table in presence of the assembled household. London : March 4, 1814. My dear Tom, In taking up my pen this morning a passage in Cowper almost involuntarily occurred to me. You will find it at length in his " Conversation." Ye powers who rule the Tongue, if such there are, And make colloquial happiness your care, Preserve me from the thing I dread and hate, A duel in the form of a debate. Vociferated logic kills me quite. A noisy man is always in the right." You know how much such a quotation as this would fall in with my notions, averse as I am to loud and noisy tones, and self-confident, overwhelming, and yet perhaps very unsound ar- guments. And you will remember how anxiously I dwelt upon l8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 35 this point while you were at home. I have been in hopes that this half-year would witness a great change in you in this respect. My hopes, however, have been a little damped by something which I heard last week through a friend, who seemed to have received an impression that you had gained a high distinction among the young gentlemen at Shelford by the loudness and vehemence of your tones. Now, my dear Tom, you cannot doubt that this gives me pain ; and it does so not so much on account of the thing itself, as because I consider it a pretty infallible test of the mind within. I do long and pray most earnestly that the ornament of a meek and quiet spirit may be substituted for vehemence and self-confidence, and that you may be as much distinguished for the former as ever you have been for the latter. It is a school in which I am not ambitious that any child of mine should take a high degree. If the people of Shelford be as bad as you represent them in your letters, what are they but an epitome of the world at large ? Are they ungrateful to you for your kindnesses ? Are they foolish, and wicked, and wayward in the use of their faculties ? What is all this but what we ourselves are guilty of every day ? Consider how much in our case the guilt of such conduct is aggravated by our superior knowledge. We shall not have ignorance to plead in its extenuation, as many of the people of Shelford may have. Now, instead of railing at the people of Shelford, I think the best thing which you and your schoolfellows could do would be to try to reform them. You can buy and distribute useful and striking tracts, as well as Testaments, among such as can read. The cheap Repository and Religious Tract Society will furnish tracts suited to all descriptions of persons : and for those who cannot read why should you not institute a Sunday school to be taught by yourselves, and in which appropriate rewards being given for good behaviour, not only at school but through the week, great effects of a moral kind might soon be produced ? I have ex- hausted my paper, and must answer the rest of your letter in a few days. In the meantime, I am ever your most affectionate father, ZACHARY MACAULAY. A father's prayers are seldom fulfilled to the letter. Many years were to elapse before the son ceased to talk loudly and with confidence ; and the literature that he was destined to distribute through the world was of another order from that which Mr. Mscaulay here suggests. The answer, which is addressed to 36 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. i. the mother, affords a proof that the boy could already hold his own. The allusions to the Christian Observer, of which his father was editor, and to Dr. Herbert Marsh, with whom the ablest pens of Clapham were at that moment engaged in hot and embittered controversy, are thrown in with an artist's hand. Shelford : April n, 1814. My dear Mama, The news is glorious indeed. Peace ! Peace with a Bourbon, with a descendant of Henri Quatre, with a prince who is bound to us by all the ties of gratitude. I have some hopes that it will be a lasting peace ; that the troubles of the last twenty years may make kings and nations wiser. I cannot conceive a greater punishment to Buonaparte than that which the allies have inflicted on him. How can his ambitious mind support it ? All his great projects and schemes, which once made every throne in Europe tremble, are buried in the solitude of an Italian isle. How miraculously every- thing has been conducted ! We almost seem to hear the Almighty saying to the fallen tyrant, " For this cause have I raised thee up, that I might show in thee My power." As I am in very great haste with this letter, I shall have but little time to write. I am sorry to hear that some nameless friend of Papa's denounced my voice as remarkably loud. I have accordingly resolved to speak in a moderate key except on the undermentioned special occasions. Imprimis, when I am speaking at the same time with three others. Secondly, when I am praising the Christian Observer. Thirdly, when I am praising Mr. Preston or his sisters I may be allowed to speak in my loudest voice, that they may hear me. I saw to-day that greatest of churchmen, that pillar of Orthodoxy, that true friend to the Liturgy, that mortal enemy to the Bible Society, Herbert Marsh, D.D., Professor of Divinity on Lady Margaret's foundation. I stood looking at him for about ten minutes, and shall always continue to main- tain that he is a very ill-favoured gentleman as far as outward appearance is concerned. I am going this week to spend a day or two at Dean Milner's, where I hope, nothing unforeseen preventing, to see you in about two months' time. Ever your affectionate son, T. B. MACAULAY. In the course of the year 1814 Mr. Preston removed his establishment to Aspenden Hall near Buntingford, in Hertford- shire : a large old-fashioned mansion, standing amidst extensive shrubberies, and a pleasant undulating domain sprinkled with !Soo-i8. LORD MACAULAV. 37 fine timber. The house has been rebuilt within the last twenty years, and nothing remains of it except the dark oak panelling of the hall in which the scholars made their recitations on the annual speech day. The very pretty church, which stands hard by within the grounds, was undergoing restoration in 1873 ; and by this time the only existing portion of the former internal fittings is the family pew, in which the boys sat on drowsy summer afternoons, doing what they could to keep their im- pressions of the second sermon distinct from their reminiscences of the morning. Here Macaulay spent four most industrious years, doing less and less in the class-room as time went on, but enjoying the rare advantage of studying Greek and Latin by the side of such a scholar as Maiden. The two companions were equally matched in age and classical attainments, and at the university maintained a rivalry so generous as hardly to deserve the name. Each of the pupils had his own chamber, which the others were forbidden to enter under the penalty of a shilling fine. This prohibition was in general not very strictly observed ; but the tutor had taken the precaution of placing Macaulay in a room next his own ; a proximity which rendered the position of an intruder so exceptionally dangerous that even Maiden could not remember having once passed his friend's threshold during the whole of their stay at Aspenden. In this seclusion, removed from the delight of family inter- course, (the only attraction strong enough to draw him from his books,) the boy read widely, unceasingly, more than rapidly. The secret of his immense acquirements lay in two invaluable gifts of nature, an unerring memory, and the capacity for taking in at a glance the contents of a printed page. During the first part of his life he remembered whatever caught his fancy without going through the process of consciously getting it by heart. As a child, during one of the numerous seasons when the social duties devolved upon Mr. Macaulay, he ac- companied his father on an afternoon call, and found on a table the Lay of the Last Minstrel, which he had never before met with. He kept himself quiet with his prize while the elders were talking, and, on his return home, sat down upon his mother's bed, and repeated to her as many cantos as she had the patience or the strength to listen to. At one period of his life he was known to say that, if by some miracle of Vandalism all copies of Paradise Lost and the Pilgrim's Progress were destroyed off the face of the earth, he would undertake to re- produce them both from recollection whenever a revival of learning came. In 1813, while waiting in a Cambridge coffee- room for a postchaise which was to take him to his school, he 38 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. picked up a county newspaper containing two such specimens of provincial poetical talent as in those days might be read in the corner of any weekly journal. One piece was headed " Reflec- tions of an Exile ; " while the other was a trumpery parody on the Welsh ballad " Ar hyd y nos," referring to some local anecdote of an ostler whose nose had been bitten off by a filly. He looked them once through, and never gave them a thought for forty years, at the end of which time he repeated them both without missing, or, as far as he knew, changing, a single word. * As he grew older, this wonderful power became impaired so far that getting by rote the compositions of others was no longer an involuntary process. He has noted in his Lucan the several occasions on which he committed to memory his favourite passages of an author whom he regarded as unrivalled among rhetoricians ; and the dates refer to 1836, when he had just turned the middle point of life. During his last years, at his dressing-table in the morning, he would learn by heart one or another of the little idylls in which Martial expatiates on the 1 Sir William Stirling Maxwell says, in a letter with which he has honoured me: "Of his extraordinary memory 1 remember Lord Jeffrey telling me ah instance. They had had a difference about a quotation from Paradise Lost, and made a wager about it ; the wager being a copy of the book, which, on reference to the passage, it was found Jeffrey had won. The bet was made just before, and paid immediately after, the Easter vacation. On putting the volume into Jeffrey's hand, your uncle said, ' I don't think you will find me tripping again. I knew it, I thought, pretty well before; but I am sure I know it now.' Jeffrey proceeded to examine him, putting him on at a variety of the heaviest passages the battle of the angels, the dialogues of Adam and the archangels, and found him ready to declaim them all, till he begged him to stop. He asked him how he had acquired such a command of the poem, and had for answer : ' I had him in the country, and I read it twice over, and I don't think that I shall ever forget it again. 1 At the same time he told Jeffrey that he believed he could repeat everything of his own he had ever printed, and nearly all he had ever written, 'except, perhaps, some of my college exercises.' ' ' I myself had an opportunity of seeing and hearing a remarkable proof of your uncle's hold upon the most insignificant verbiage that chance had poured into his ear. I was staying with him at Bowood, in the winter of 1852. Lord Elphinstone, who had been many years before Governor of Madras, was telling one morning at breakfast of a certain native barber there, who was famous, in his time, for English doggrel of his own making, with which he was wont to regale his customers. 'Of course,' said Lord Elphinstone, ' I don't remember any of it ; but it was very funny, and used to be repeated in society. ' Macaulay, who was sitting a good way off, immediately said : ' I remember being shaved by the fellow, and he recited a quantity of verse to me during the operation, and here is some of it ; ' and then he went off in a very queer doggrel about the exploits of Bonaparte, of which I recollect the recurring refrain ' But when he saw the British boys, He up and ran away. 1 It is hardly conceivable that he had ever had occasion to recall that poem since the day when he escaped from under the poet's razor." I8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 39 enjoyments of a Spanish country-house, or a villa-farm in the environs of Rome ; those delicious morsels of verse which, (considering the sense that modern ideas attach to the name,) it is an injustice to class under the head of epigrams. Macaulay's extraordinary faculty of assimilating printed matter at first sight remained the same through life. To the end he read books more quickly than other people skimmed them, and skimmed them as fast as anyone else could turn the leaves. " He seemed to read through the skin," said one who had often watched the operation . And this speed was not in his case obtained at the expense of accuracy. Anything which had once appeared in type, from the highest effort of genius down to the most detestable trash that ever consumed ink and paper manufactured for better things, had in his eyes an autho- rity which led him to look upon misquotation as a species of minor sacrilege. With these endowments, sharpened by an insatiable curiosity, from his fourteenth year onward he was permitted to roam almost at will over the whole expanse of literature. He com- posed little beyond his school exercises, which themselves bear signs of having been written in a perfunctory manner. At this period he had evidently no heart in anything but his reading. Before leaving Shelford for Aspenden he had already invoked the epic muse for the last time. " Arms and the man I sing, who strove in vain To save green Erin from a foreign reign." The man was Roderic, king of Connaught, whom he got tired of singing before he had well completed two books of the poem . Thenceforward he appears never to have struck his lyre, except in the first enthusiasm aroused by the intelligence of some favourable turn of fortune on the Continent. The flight of Napoleon from Russia was celebrated in a " Pindaric Ode " duly distributed into strophes and antistrophes ; and, when the allies entered Paris, the school put his services into requisition to petition for a holiday in honour of the event. He addressed his tutor in a short poem, which begins with a few sonorous and effective couplets, grows more and more like the parody on Fitzgerald in "Rejected Addresses," and ends in a peroration of which the intention is unquestionably mock-heroic : " Oh, by the glorious posture of affairs, By the enormous price that Omnium bears, By princely Bourbon's late recovered Crown, And by Miss Fanny's safe return from town. Oh, do not thou, and thou alone, refuse To show thy pleasure at this glorious news ! " 4 o LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. i. Touched by the mention of his sister, Mr . Preston yielded : and young Macaulay never turned another verse except at the bidding of his schoolmaster, until, on the eve of his departure for Cambridge, he wrote between three and four hundred lines of a drama, entitled " Don Fernando," marked by force and fertility of diction, but somewhat too artificial to be worthy of publication under a name such as his. Much about the same time he communicated to Maiden the commencement of a burlesque poem on the story of Anthony Babington ; who, by the part that he took in the plots against the life of Queen Elizabeth, had given the family a connection with English history which, however questionable, was in Macaulay's view better than none. " Each, says the proverb, has his taste. 'Tis true. Marsh loves a controversy ; Coates a play ; Bennet a felon ; Lewis Way a Jew ; The Jew the silver spoons of Lewis Way. The Gipsy Poetry, to own the truth, Has been my love through childhood and in youth." It is perhaps as well that the project to all appearance stopped with the first stanza, which in its turn was probably written for the sake of a single line. The young man had a better use for his time than to spend it in producing frigid imitations of Beppo. He was not unpopular among his fellow-pupils, who regarded him with pride and admiration, tempered by the compassion which his utter inability to play at any sort of game would have excited in every school, private or public alike. He troubled himself very little about the opinion of those by whom he was surrounded at Aspenden. It required the crowd and the stir of a university to call forth the social qualities which he possessed in so large a measure. The tone of his corre- spondence during these years sufficiency indicates that he lived almost exclusively among books. His letters, which had hitherto been very natural and pretty, began to smack of the library, and please less than those written in early boyhood. His pen was overcharged with the metaphors and phrases of other men ; and it was not till maturing powers had enabled him to master and arrange the vast masses of literature which filled his memory that his native force could display itself freely through the medium of a style which was all his own. In 1815 he began a formal literary correspondence, after the taste of the previous century, with Mr. Hudson, a gentleman in the Examiner's Office of the East India House. I8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 41 Aspenden Hall : August 22, 1815. Dear Sir, The Spectator observes, I believe in his first paper, that we can never read an author with much zest unless we are acquainted with his situation. I feel the same in my epistolary correspondence ; and, supposing that in this respect we may be alike, I will just tell you my condition. Imagine a house in the middle of pretty large grounds, surrounded by palings. These I never pass. You may therefore suppose that I resemble the Hermit of Parnell. " As yet by books and swains the world he knew, Nor knew if books and swains report it true." If you substitute newspapers and visitors for books and swains, you may form an idea of what I know of the present state of things. Write to me as one who is ignorant of every event except political occurrences. These I learn regularly : but if Lord Byron were to publish melodies or romances, or Scott metrical tales without number, I should never see them, or perhaps hear of them, till Christmas. Retirement of this kind, though it precludes me from studying the works of the hour, is very favourable for the employment of " holding high converse with the mighty dead." I know not whether " peeping at the world through the loopholes of retreat " be the best way of forming us for engag- ing in its busy and active scenes. I am sure it is not a way to my taste. Poets may talk of the beauties of nature, the enjoy- ments of a country life, and rural innocence : but there is another kind of life which, though unsung by bards, is yet to rne infinitely superior to the dull uniformity of country life. London is the place for me. Its smoky atmosphere, and its muddy river, charm me more than the pure air of Hertford- shire, and the crystal currents of the river Rib. Nothing is equal to the splendid varieties of London life, " the fine flow of London talk," and the dazzling brilliancy of London spectacles. Such are my sentiments, and, if ever I publish poetry, it shall not be pastoral. Nature is the last goddess to whom my devoirs shall be paid. Yours most faithfully, THOMAS B. MACAULAY. This votary of city life was still two months short of com- pleting his fifteenth year ! Aspenden Hall : August 23, 1815. My dear Mama, You perceive already in so large a sheet, and so small a hand, the promise of a long, a very long, letter; 42 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. longer, as I intend it, than all the letters which you send in a half-year together. I have again begun my life of sterile mono- tony, unvarying labour, the dull return of dull exercises in dull uniformity of tediousness. But do not think that I complain. My mind to me a kingdom is, Such perfect joy therein I find As doth exceed all other bliss That God or nature hath assigned. Assure yourself that I am philosopher enough to be happy, I meant to say not particularly unhappy, in solitude ; but man is an animal made for society. I was gifted with reason, not to speculate in Aspenden Park, but to interchange ideas with some person who can understand me. This is what I miss at Aspenden. There are several here who possess both taste and reading ; who can criticise Lord Byron and Southey with much tact and " savoir du me'tier." But here it is not the fashion to think. Hear what I have read since I came here. Hear and wonder ! I have in the first place read Boccacio's Decameron, a tale of a hundred cantos. He is a wonderful writer. Whether he tells in humorous or familiar strains the follies of the silly Calandrino, or the witty pranks of Buffalmacco and Bruno, or sings in loftier numbers Dames, knights, and arms, and love, the feats that spring From courteous minds and generous faith, or lashes with a noble severity and fearless independence the vices of the monks and the priestcraft of the established religion, he is always elegant, amusing, and, what pleases and surprises most in a writer of so unpolished an age, strikingly delicate and chastised. I prefer him infinitely to Chaucer. If you wish for a good specimen of Boccacio, as soon as you have finished my letter, (which will come, I suppose, by dinner-time,) send Jane up to the library for Dryden's poems, and you will find among them several translations from Boccacio, particularly one en- titled "Theodore and Honoria." But, truly admirable as the bard of Florence is, I must not permit myself to give him more than his due share of my letter. I have likewise read Gil Bias, with unbounded admiration of the abilities of Le Sage. Maiden and I have read Thalaba together, and are proceeding to the Curse of Kehama. Do not think, however, that I am neglecting more important studies than either Southey or Boccacio. I have read the greater part of the History of James I. and Mrs. Montague's essay on Shakspeare, and a great deal of Gibbon. I never devoured so l8oo i8. LORD MACAULAY. 43 many books in a fortnight. John Smith, Bob Hankinson, and I, went over the Hebrew Melodies together. I certainly think far better of them than we used to do at Clapham. Papa may laugh, and indeed he did laugh me out of my taste at Clapham ; but I think that there is a great deal of beauty in the first melody, "She walks in beauty," though indeed who it is that walks in beauty is not very exactly defined. My next letter shall contain a production of my muse, entitled "An Inscription for the Column of Waterloo," which is to be shown to Mr. Preston to-morrow. What he may think of it I do not know. But I am like my favourite Cicero about my own productions. It is all one to me what others think of them. I never like them a bit less for being disliked by the rest of mankind. Mr. Preston has desired me to bring him up this evening two or three subjects for a Declamation. Those which I have selected are as follows : ist, a speech in the character of Lord Coningsby, impeaching the Earl of Oxford ; 2nd, an essay on the utility of standing armies ; 3rd, an essay on the policy of Great Britain with regard to continental possessions. I conclude with send- ing my love to Papa, Selina, Jane, John, ("but he is not there," as Fingal pathetically says, when in enumerating his sons who should accompany him to the chase he inadvertently mentions the dead Ryno,) Henry, Fanny, Hannah, Margaret, and Charles. Valete. T. B. MACAULAY. This exhaustive enumeration of his brothers and sisters invites attention to that home where he reigned supreme. Lady Trevelyan thus describes their life at Clapham : " I think that my father's strictness was a good counterpoise to the perfect worship of your uncle by the rest of the family. To us he was an object of passionate love and devotion. To us he could do no wrong. His unruffled sweetness of temper, his unfailing flow of spirits, his amusing talk, all made his presence so de- lightful that his wishes and his tastes were our law. He hated strangers ; and his notion of perfect happiness was to see us all working round him while he read aloud a novel, and then to walk all together on the Common, or, if it rained, to have a frightfully noisy game of hide-and-seek. I have often won- dered how our mother could ever have endured our noise in her little house. My earliest recollections speak of the intense happiness of the holidays, beginning with finding him in Papa's room in the morning ; the awe at the idea of his having reached home in the dark after we were in bed, and the Saturnalia which at once set in ; no lessons ; nothing but fun and merri- 44 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. i. ment for the whole six weeks. In the year 1816 we were at Brighton for the summer holidays, and he read to us Sir Charles Grandison. It was always a habit in our family to read aloud every evening. Among the books selected I can recall Cla- rendon, Burnet, Shakspeare, (a great treat when my mother took the volume,) Miss Edgeworth, Mackenzie's Lounger and Mirror, and, as a standing dish, the Quarterly and the Edin- burgh Reviews. Poets too, especially Scott and Crabbe, were constantly chosen. Poetry and novels, except during Tom's holidays, were forbidden in the daytime, and stigmatised as ' drinking drams in the morning. ' " Morning or evening, Mr. Macaulay disapproved of novel- reading ; but, too indulgent to insist on having his own way in any but essential matters, he lived to see himself the head of a family in which novels were more read, and better remembered, than in any household of the United Kingdom. The first warning of the troubles that were in store for him was an anonymous letter addressed to him as editor of the Christian Observer, defending works of fiction, and eulogising Fielding and Smollett. This he incautiously inserted in his periodical, and brought down upon himself the most violent objurgations from scandalised contributors, one of whom informed the public that he had committed the obnoxious number to the flames, and should thenceforward cease to take in the Magazine. The editor replied with becoming spirit ; although by that time he was aware that the communication, the insertion of which in an unguarded moment had betrayed him into a controversy for which he had so little heart, had proceeded from the pen of his son. Such was young Macaulay's first appearance in print, if we except the index to the thirteenth volume of the Christian Observer, which he drew up during his Christmas holidays of 1814. The place where he performed his earliest literary work can be identified with tolerable certainty. He enjoyed the eldest son's privilege of a separate bedchamber ; and there, at the front window on the top story, furthest from the Common and nearest to London, we can fancy him sitting, apart from the crowded play-room, keeping himself warm as best he might, and travelling steadily through the blameless pages the contents of which it was his task to classify for the convenience of posterity. Lord Macaulay used to remark that Thackeray introduced too much of the Dissenting element into his picture of Clapham in the opening chapters of "The Newcomes." The leading people of the place, with the exception of Mr. William Smith, the Unitarian member of Parliament, were one and all staunch l8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 4$ Churchmen ; though they readily worked in concert with those religious communities which held in the main the same views, and pursued the same objects, as themselves. Old John Thornton, the earliest of the Evangelical magnates, when he went on his annual tour to the South Coast or the Scotch mountains, would take with him some Independent or Wesleyan minister who was in need of a holiday ; and his followers in the next generation had the most powerful motives for main- taining the alliance which he had inaugurated. They could not neglect such doughty auxiliaries in the memorable wal which they waged against cruelty, ignorance, and irreligion, and in their less momentous skirmishes with the votaries of the stage, the racecourse, and the card-table. Without the aid of nonconformist sympathy, and money, and oratory, and organi- sation, their operations would have been doomed to certain failure. The cordial relations entertained with the members of other denominations by those among whom his youth was passed did much to indoctrinate Macaulay with a lively and genuine interest in sectarian theology. He possessed a minute acquaintance, very rare among men of letters, with the origin and growth of the various forms of faith and practice which have divided the allegiance of his countrymen ; not the least important of his qualifications for writing the history of an epoch when the national mind gave itself to religious contro- versy even more largely than has been its wont. The method of education in vogue among the Clapham families was simple, without being severe. In the spacious gardens, and the commodious houses of an architecture already dating a century back, which surrounded the Common, there was plenty of freedom, and good fellowship, and reasonable enjoyment for young and old alike. Here again Thackeray has not done justice to a society that united the mental culture, and the intellectual activity, which are developed by the neigh- bourhood of a great capital, with the wholesome quiet and the homely ways of country life. Hobson and Brian Newcome are not fair specimens of the effect of Clapham influences upon the second generation. There can have been nothing vulgar, and little that was narrow, in a training which produced Samuel Wilberforce, and Sir James Stephen, and Charles and Robert Grant, and Lord Macaulay. The plan on which children were brought up in the chosen home of the Low Church party, during its golden age, will bear comparison with systems about which, in their day, the world was supposed never to tire of hearing, although their ultimate results have been small indeed. 46 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. It is easy to trace whence the great bishop and the great writer derived their immense industry. Working came as naturally as walking to sons who could not remember a time when their fathers idled. " Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Babing- ton have never appeared downstairs lately, except to take a hasty dinner, and for half an hour after we have supped. The slave-trade now occupies them nine hours daily. Mr. Babing- ton told me last night that he had fourteen hundred folio pages to read, to detect the contradictions, and to collect the answers which corroborate Mr. Wilberforce's assertions in his speeches. These, with more than two thousand pages to be abridged, must be done within a fortnight, and they talk of sitting up one night in every week to accomplish it. The two friends begin to look very ill, but they are in excellent spirits, and at this moment I hear them laughing at some absurd questions in the examination." Passages such as this are scattered broadcast through the correspondence of Wilberforce and his friends. Fortitude, and diligence, and self-control, and all that makes men good and great, cannot be purchased from professional educators. Charity is not the only quality which begins at home. It is throwing away money to spend a thousand a year on the teaching of three boys, if they are to return from school only to find the older members of their family intent on amusing themselves at any cost of time and trouble, or sacri- ficing self-respect in ignoble efforts to struggle into a social grade above their own. The child will never place his aims high, and pursue them steadily, unless the parent has taught him what energy, and elevation of purpose, mean not less by example than by precept In that company of indefatigable workers none equalled the labours of Zachary Macaulay. Even now, when he has been in his grave for more than the third of a century, it seems almost an act of disloyalty to record the public services of a man who thought that he had done less than nothing if his exertions met with praise, or even with recognition. The nature and value of those services may be estimated from the terms in which a very competent judge, who knew how to weigh his words, spoke of the part which Mr. Macaulay played in one only of his numerous enterprises, the suppression of slavery and the slave-trade. " That God had called him into being to wage war with this gigantic evil became his immutable conviction. During forty successive years he was ever burdened with this thought. It was the subject of his visions by day and of his dreams by night. To give them reality he laboured as men labour for the honours of a profession or for the sub- I8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 47 sistence of their children. In that service he sacrificed all that a man may lawfully sacrifice health, fortune, repose, favour, and celebrity. He died a poor man, though wealth was within his reach. He devoted himself to the severest toil, amidst allurements to luxuriate in the delights of domestic and social intercourse, such as few indeed have encountered. He silently permitted some to usurp his hardly-earned honours, that no selfish controversy might desecrate their common cause. He made no effort to obtain the praises of the world, though he had talents to command, and a temper peculiarly disposed to enjoy them. He drew upon himself the poisoned shafts of calumny, and, while feeling their sting as generous spirits only can feel it, never turned a single step aside from his path to propitiate or to crush the slanderers." Zachary Macaulay was no mere man of action. It is diffi- cult to understand when it was that he had time to pick up his knowledge of general literature ; or how he made room for it in a mind so crammed with facts and statistics relating to questions of the day that when Wilberforce was at a loss for a piece of information he used to say, " Let us look it out in Macaulay." His private papers, which are one long register of unbroken toil, do nothing to clear up the problem. Highly cultivated, however, he certainly was, and his society was in request with many who cared little for the objects which to him were everything. That he should have been esteemed and regarded by Lord Brougham, Francis Homer, and Sir James Mackintosh, seems natural enough ; but there is something surprising in finding him in friendly and frequent intercourse with some of his most distinguished French contemporaries. Chateaubriand, Sismondi, the Due de Broglie, Madame de Stael, and Dumont, the interpreter of Bentham, corresponded with him freely in their own language, which he wrote to admiration. The gratification that his foreign acquaintance felt at the sight of his letters would have been unalloyed but for the pamphlets and blue-books by which they were too often accompanied. It is not difficult to imagine the feelings of a Parisian on receiving two quarto volumes, with the postage only in part pre-paid, containing the proceedings of a Committee on Apprenticeship in the West Indies, and including the twelve or fifteen thousand questions and answers on which the Report was founded. It would be hard to meet with a more perfect sample of the national politeness than the passage in which M. Dumont acknowledges one of the less formidable of these unwelcome gifts. " Mon cher Ami, Je ne laisserai pas partir Mr. Inglis sans le charger de quelques lignes pour vous, afin de vous 48 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. i. remercier du Christian Observer que vous avez eu la bonte de m'envoyer. Vous savez que j'ai a great taste for it ; mais il faut vous avouer une triste verite, c'est que je manque absolu- ment de loisir pour le lire. Ne m'en envoyez plus ; car je me sens peine d'avoir sous les yeux de si bonnes choses, dont je n'ai pas le temps de me nourrir." "In the year 1817," Lady Trevelyan writes, "my parents made a tour in Scotland with your uncle. Brougham gave them a letter to Jeffrey, who hospitably entertained them ; but your uncle said that Jeffrey was not at all at his ease, and was apparently so terrified at my father's religious reputation that he seemed afraid to utter a joke. Your uncle complained griev- ously that they travelled from manse to manse, and always came in for very long prayers and expositions. 1 I think, with all the love and reverence with which your uncle regarded his father's memory, there mingled a shade of bitterness that he had not met quite the encouragement and appreciation from him which he received from others. But such a son as he was ! Never a disrespectful word or look ; always anxious to please and amuse ; and at last he was the entire stay and support of his father's declining years. " Your uncle was of opinion that the course pursued by his father towards him during his youth was not judicious. But here I am inclined to disagree with him. There was no want of proof of the estimation in which his father held him, corre- sponding with him from a very early age as with a man, con- versing with him freely, and writing of him most fondly. But, in the desire to keep down any conceit, there was certainly in my father a great outward show of repression and depreciation. Then the faults of your uncle were peculiarly those that my father had no patience with. Himself precise in his arrange- ments, writing a beautiful hand, particular about neatness, very accurate and calm, detesting strong expressions, and remarkably self-controlled ; while his eager impetuous boy, careless of his dress, always forgetting to wash his hands and brush his hair, writing an execrable hand, and folding his letters with a great blotch for a seal, was a constant care and irritation. Many letters to your uncle have I read on these subjects. Sometimes a specimen of the proper way of folding a letter is sent him, (those were the sad days before envelopes were known,) and he 1 Macaulay writes in his journal of August 3, 1859 : "We passed my old acquaintance, Dumbarton Castle. I remembered my first visit to Dumbarton, and the old minister, who insisted on our eating a bit of cake with him, and said a grace over it which might have been prologue to a dinner of the Fish- mongers' Company, 01 the Grocers' Company." 1 800-1 8. LORD MA CAUL AY. 49 is desired to repeat the experiment till he succeeds. General Macaulay's fastidious nature led him to take my father's line regarding your uncle, and my youthful soul was often vexed by the constant reprimands for venial transgressions. But the great sin was the idle reading, which was a thorn in my father's side that never was extracted. In truth, he really acknowledged to the full your uncle's abilities, and felt that if he could only add his own morale, his unwearied industry, his power of con- centrating his energies on the work in hand, his patient pains- taking calmness, to the genius and fervour which his son possessed, then a being might be formed who could regenerate the world. Often in later years I have heard my father, after expressing an earnest desire for some object, exclaim, ' If I had only Tom's power of speech ! ' But he should have remem- bered that all gifts are not given to one, and that perhaps such a union as he coveted is even impossible. Parents must be content to see their children walk in their own path, too happy if through any road they attain the same end, the living for the glory of God and the good of man." From a marvellously early date in Macaulay's life public affairs divided his thoughts with literature, and, as he grew to manhood, began more and more to divide his aspirations. His father's house was much used as a centre of consultation by members of Parliament who lived in the suburbs on the Surrey side of London ; and the boy could hardly have heard more incessant, and assuredly not more edifying, political talk if he had been brought up in Downing Street. The future advocate and interpreter of Whig principles was not reared in the Whig faith. Attached friends of Pitt, who in personal conduct, and habits of life, certainly came nearer to their standard than his great rival, and warmly in favour of a war which, to their imagination, never entirely lost its early character of an internecine contest with atheism. the Evangelicals in the House of Commons for the most part acted with the Tories. But it may be doubted whether, in the long run, their party would not have been better without them. By the zeal, 1 the 1 Macaulay, writing to one of his sisters in 1844, says : "I think Stephen's article on the Clapham Sect the best thing he ever did. I do not think with you that the Claphamites were men too obscure for such delineation. The truth is that from that little knot of men emanated all the Bible Societies, and almost all the Missionary Societies, in the world. The whole organisation of the Evangelical party was their work. The share which they had in providing means for the education of the people was great. They were really the destroyers of the slave-trade, and of slavery. Many of those whom Stephen describes were public men of the greatest weight. Lord Teignmouth governed India at C'alcutta. Grant governed India in Leadenhall Street. Stephen's father was Perceval's right-hand man in the House of Commons. It is need- E 50 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. I. munificence, the laborious activity, with which they pursued their religious and semi-religious enterprises, they did more to teach the world how to get rid of existing institutions than by their votes and speeches at Westminster they contributed to preserve them. With their May meetings, and African Institu- tions, and Anti-slavery Reporters, and their subscriptions of tens of thousands of pounds, and their petitions bristling with hundreds of thousands of signatures, and all the machinery for informing opinion and bringing it to bear on ministers and legislators which they did so much to perfect and even to invent, they can be regarded as nothing short of the pioneers and fuglemen of that system of popular agitation which forms a leading feature in our internal history during the past half- century. At an epoch when the Cabinet which they supported was so averse to manifestations of political sentiment that a Reformer who spoke his mind in England was seldom long out of prison, and in Scotland ran a very serious risk of trans- portation, Toryism sat oddly enough on men who spent their days in the committee-room and their evenings on the plat- form, and each of whom belonged to more Associations com- bined for the purpose of influencing Parliament than he could count on the fingers of both his hands. There was something incongruous in their position ; and as time went on they began to perceive the incongruity. They gradually learned that measures dear to philanthropy might be expected to result from the advent to power of their opponents ; while their own chief too often failed them at a pinch out of what appeared to them an excessive, and humiliating, deference to interests powerfully represented on the benches behind him. Their eyes were first opened by Pitt's change of attitude with regard to the object that was next all their hearts. There is something almost pathetic in the contrast between two entries in Wilberforce's diary, of which the first has become classical, but the second is not so generally known. In 1787, referring to the movement against the slave-trade, he says : " Pitt recom- less to speak of Wilberforce. As to Simeon, if you knew what his authority and influence were, and how they extended from Cambridge to the most remote corners of England, you would allow that his real sway in the Church was far greater than that of any primate. Thornton, to my surprise, thinks the passage about my father unfriendly. I defended Stephen. The truth is that he asked my permission to draw a portrait of my father for the Edinburgh Review. I told him that I had only to beg that he would not give it the air of a puff : a thing which, for myself and for my friends, I dread far more than any attack. My influence over the Review is so well known that a mere eulogy of my father appearing in that work would only call forth derision. I therefore am really glad that Stephen has introduced into his sketch some little characteristic traits which in themselves, were not beauties." l8oo-i8. LORD MACAULAY. 51 mended me to undertake its conduct, as a subject suited to my character and talents. At length, I well remember, after a conversation in the open air at the root of an old tree at Hoi- wood, just above the vale of Keston, I resolved to give notice on a fit occasion in the House of Commons of my intention to bring the subject forward." Twelve years later Mr. Henry Thornton had brought in a bill for confining the trade within certain limits upon the coast of Africa. "Upon the second reading of this bill," writes Wilberforce, " Pitt coolly put off the debate when I had manifested a design of answering P.'s speech, and so left misrepresentations without a word. William Smith's anger ; Henry Thornton's coolness ; deep impression on me, but conquered, I hope, in a Christian way." Besides instructing their successors in the art of carrying on a popular movement, Wilberforce and his followers had a lesson to teach, the value of which not so many perhaps will be dis- posed to question. In public life, as in private, they habitually had the fear of God before their eyes. A mere handful as to number, and in average talent very much on a level with the mass of their colleagues ; counting in their ranks no orator, or minister, or boroughmonger ; they commanded the ear of the House, and exerted on its proceedings an influence, the secret of which those who have studied the Parliamentary history of the period find it only too easy to understand. To refrain from gambling and ball-giving, to go much to church and never to the theatre, was not more at variance with the social customs of the day than it was the exception in the political world to meet with men who looked to the facts of the case and not to the wishes of the minister, and who before going into the lobby required to be obliged with a reason instead of with a job. Confidence and respect, and (what in the House of Commons is their unvarying accompaniment) power, were gradually, and to a great extent involuntarily, accorded to this group of members. They were not addicted to crotchets, nor to the obtrusive and unseasonable assertion of conscientious scruples. The occasions on which they made proof of independence and impartiality were such as justified, and dignified, their temporary renunciation of party ties. They interfered with decisive effect in the debates on the great scandals of Lord Melville and the Duke of York, and in more than one financial or commercial controversy that deeply con- cerned the national interests, of which the question of the retaining the Orders in Council was a conspicuous instance. A boy who, like young Macaulay, was admitted to the intimacy of politicians such as these, and was accustomed to hear matters 52 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH I. of state discussed exclusively from a public point of view with- out any afterthought of ambition, or jealousy, or self-seeking, could hardly fail to grow up a patriotic and disinterested man. " What is far better and more important than all is this, that I believe Macaulay to be incorruptible. You might lay ribbons, stars, garters, wealth, titles before him in vain. He has an honest genuine love of his country, and the world would not bribe him to neglect her interests." Thus said Sydney Smith, who of all his real friends was the least inclined to over- praise him. The memory of Thornton and Babington, and the other worthies of their day and set, is growing dim, and their names already mean little in our ears. Part of their work was so thoroughly done that the world, as its wont is, has long ago taken the credit of that work to itself. Others of their under- takings, in weaker hands than theirs, seem out of date among the ideas and beliefs which now are prevalent. At Clapham, as elsewhere, the old order is changing, and not always in a direction which to them would be acceptable or even tolerable. What was once the home of Zachary Macaulay stands almost within the swing of the bell of a stately and elegant Roman Catholic chapel ; and the pleasant mansion of Lord Teign- mouth, the cradle of the Bible Society, is now a religious house of the Redemptorist Order. But in one shape or another honest performance always lives, and the gains that accrued from the labours of these men are still on the right side of the national ledger. Among the most permanent of those gains is their undoubted share in the improvement of our political integrity by direct, and still more by indirect, example. It would be ungrateful to forget in how large a measure it is due to them that one, whose judgments upon the statesmen of many ages and countries have been delivered to an audience vast beyond all precedent, should have framed his decisions in accordance with the dictates of honour and humanity, of ardent public spirit and lofty public virtue. 1818-24. LORD MACAULAY. 53 CHAPTER II. 1818-1824. Macaulay goes to the University His love for Trinity College His contemporaries at Cambridge Charles Austin The Union Debating Society University studies, successes, and failures The Mathematical Tripos The Trinity Fellowship William the Third Letters Prize poems Peterloo Novel-reading The Queen's Trial Macaulay's feeling towards his mother A Reading-party Hoaxing an editor Macaulay takes pupils. IN October 1818 Macaulay went into residence at Trinity College, Cambridge. Mr. Henry Sykes Thornton, the eldest son of the member for Southward, was his companion through- out his university career. The young men lived in the same lodgings, and began by reading with the same tutor : a plan which promised well, because, in addition to what was his own by right, each had the benefit of the period of instruction paid for by the other. But two hours were much the same as one to Macaulay, in whose eyes algebra and geometry were so much additional material for lively and interminable argument. Thornton reluctantly broke through the arrangement, and eventually stood highest among the Trinity wranglers of his year : an elevation which he could hardly have attained if he had pursued his studies in company with one who regarded every successive mathematical proposition as an open question. A Parliamentary election took place while the two friends were still quartered together in Jesus Lane. A tumult in the neigh- bouring street announced that the citizens were expressing their sentiments by the only channel which was open to them before the days of Reform ; and Macaulay, to whom any excitement of a political nature was absolutely irresistible, dragged Thornton to the scene of action, and found the mob breaking the windows of the Hoop hotel, the head-quarters of the successful candidates. His ardour was cooled by receiving a dead cat full in the face. The man who was responsible for the animal came up and apologised very civilly, assuring him that there was no town and gown feeling in the matter, and that the 54 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. H cat had been meant for Mr. Adeane. " I wish," replied Mac- aulay, " that you had meant it for me, and hit Mr. Adeane." After no long while he removed within the walls of Trinity, and resided first in the centre rooms of Bishop's Hostel, and subsequently in the Old Court, between the Gate and the Chapel. The door, which once bore his name, is on the groundfloor, to the left hand as you face the staircase. In more recent years, undergraduates who are accustomed to be out after lawful hours have claimed a right of way through the window which looks towards the town : to the great annoy- ance of any occupant who is too good-natured to refuse the accommodation to others, and too steady to need it himself. This power of surreptitious entry had not been discovered in Macaulay's days ; and, indeed, he would have cared very little for the privilege of spending his time outside walls which con- tained within them as many books as even he could read, and more friends than even he could talk to. Wanting nothing beyond what his college had to give, he revelled in the posses- sion of leisure and liberty, in the almost complete command of his own time, in the power of passing at choice from the most perfect solitude to the most agreeable company. He keenly appreciated a society which cherishes all that is genuine, and is only too out-spoken in its abhorrence of pretension and display : a society in which a man lives with those whom he likes, and with those only ; choosing his comrades for their own sake, and so indifferent to the external distinctions of wealth and position that no one who has entered fully into the spirit of college life can ever unlearn its priceless lesson of manliness and simplicity. Of all his places of sojourn during his joyous 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 mediasval 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 dignity that in his later days he was known to covet was an honorary fellow- ship, which would have allowed him again to look through his window upon the college grass-plots, and to sleep within sound of the splashing of the fountain ; again to breakfast on com- mons, 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 1818-24. LORD MACAUI.AY. 55 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. He was fortunate in his contemporaries. Among his inti- mate friends were the two Coleridges Derwent, the son, and Henry Nelson, who was destined to be the son-in-law of the poet : and how exceptional that destiny was the readers of Sara Coleridge's letters are now aware. Hyde Villiers, whom an untimely death alone prevented from taking an equal place in a trio of distinguished brothers, was of his year, though not of his college. ' In the year below were the young men who now bear the titles of Lord Grey, Lord Belper, and Lord Romilly; 2 and after the same interval came Moultrie, who in his "Dream of Life," with a fidelity which he himself pronounced to have been obtained at some sacrifice of grace, has told us how the heroes of his time looked and lived, and Charles Villiers, who still delights our generation by showing us how they talked. Then there was Praed, fresh from editing the Etonian, as a product of collective boyish effort unique in its literary excel- lence and variety; and Sidney Walker, Praed's gifted school- fellow, whose promise was blighted by premature decay of powers; and Charles Austin, whose fame would now be more in proportion to his extraordinary abilities, had not his unpa- ralleled success as an advocate tempted him before his day to retire from the toils of a career of whose rewards he already had 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 experi- ence of the world at home and abroad, Austin was indeed a king among his fellows. 1 Lord Clarendon, and his brothers, were all Johnians. 2 This paragraph was written in the summer of 1874. Three of Macaulay's old college friends, Lord Romilly, Moultrie, and Charles Austin, died, in the hard winter that followed, within a few days of each other. *6 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. n. " 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, com- bined 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 tale-bearers who met with more encourage- ment than they deserved, created some consternation in the family circle ; while the reading set at Cambridge was duly scandalised at the influence which one, whose classical attain- ments 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. ' 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 1 It was at this period of his career that Macaulay said to the late Mr. Hampden Gurney : ' ' Gurney, I have been a Tory ; I am a Radical ; but I never will be a Whig." 1818-24. LORD MA CAUL AY. 57 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 Words- worth'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 gene- rous 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 Lans- downe at Bowood, years after they had left Cambridge, 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 round 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. One repartee survives, thrown off in the heat of discussion, but exquisitely perfect in all its parts. Acknowledged without dissent to be the best applied quotation that ever was made within five miles of the Fitzwilliam Museum, it is unfortunately too strictly clas- sical for reproduction in these pages. 58 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. il. We are more easily consoled for the loss of the eloquence which then flowed so full and free in the debates of the Cambridge Union. In 1820 that Society was emerging from a period of tribulation and repression. The authorities of the university, who, as old constituents of Mr. Pitt and warm sup- porters of Lord Liverpool, had never been very much inclined to countenance the practice of political discussion among the undergraduates, set their faces against it more than ever at an epoch when the temper of the time increased the tendency of young men to run into extremes of partisanship. At length a compromise was extorted from the reluctant hands of the Vice- Chancellor, and the Club was allowed to take into consideration public affairs of a date anterior to the century. It required less ingenuity than the leaders of the Union had at their command to hit upon a method of dealing with the present under the guise of the past. Motions were framed that reflected upon the existing Government under cover of a censure on the Cabinets of the previous generation. Resolutions which called upon the meeting to declare that the boon of Catholic Emanci- pation should have been granted in the year 1795, or that our Commercial Policy previous to 1800 should have been founded on the basis of Free Trade, were clearly susceptible of great latitude of treatment. And, again, in its character of a reading club, the Society, when assembled for the conduct of private business, was at liberty to review the political creed of the journals of the day in order to decide which of them it should take in, and which it should discontinue. The Examiner news- paper was the flag of many a hard-fought battle ; the Morning Chronicle was voted in and out of the rooms half-a-dozen times within a single twelvemonth ; while a series of impassioned speeches on the burning question of interference in behalf of Greek Independence were occasioned by a proposition of Maiden's "that / 'EXXrjviKt) sidered as annulled by that notification. His language trans- lated into plain English is this : " I must write about this French Revolution, and I will write about it If you have told Macaulay to do it, you may tell him to let it alone. If he has written an article, he may throw it behind the grate. He would not himself have the assurance to compare his own claims with mine. I am a man who act a prominent part in the world : he is nobody. If he must be reviewing, there is my speech about the West Indies. Set him to write a puff on that What have people like him to do, except to eulogise people like me ? " No man likes to be reminded of his inferi- ority in such a way, and there are some particular circumstances in this case which render the admonition more unpleasant than it would otherwise be. I know that Brougham dislikes me ; and I have not the slightest doubt that he feels great pleasure in taking this subject out of my hands, and at having made me understand, as I do most clearly understand, how far my ser- vices are rated below his. I do not blame you in the least. I do not see how you could have acted otherwise. But, on the other hand, I do not see why I should make any efforts or sacrifices for a Review which lies under an intolerable dictation. What- ever my writings may be worth, it is not for want of strong soli- citations, and tempting offers, from other quarters that I have continued to send them to the Edinburgh Review. I adhered to the connection solely because I took pride and pleasure in it. It has now become a source of humiliation and mortification. 1830-32. LORD MAC A UL AY. 145 I again repeat, my dear Sir, that I do not blame you in the least. This, however, only makes matters worse. If you had used me ill, I might complain, and might hope to be better treated another time. Unhappily you are in a situation in which it is proper for you to do what it would be improper in me to endure. What has happened now may happen next quarter, and must happen before long, unless I altogether refrain from writing for the Review. I hope you will forgive me if I say that I feel what has passed too strongly to be inclined to expose myself to a recurrence of the same vexations. Yours most truly T. B. MACAULAY. A few soft words induced Macaulay to reconsider his threat of withdrawing from the Review ; but, even before Mr. Napier's answer reached him, the feeling of personal annoyance had already been effaced by a greater sorrow. A letter arrived, announcing that his sister Jane had died suddenly and most unexpectedly. She was found in the morning lying as though still asleep, having passed away so peacefully as not to disturb a sister who had spent the night in the next room, with a door open between them. Mrs. Macaulay never recovered from this shock. Her health gave way, and she lived into the coming year only so long as to enable her to rejoice in the first of her son's Parliamentary successes. Paris : September 26. My dear Father, This news has broken my heart. I am fit neither to go nor to stay. I can do nothing but sit down in my room, and think of poor dear Jane's kindness and affection. When I am calmer, I will let you know my intentions. There will be neither use nor pleasure in remaining here. My present purpose, as far as I can form one, is to set off in two or three days for England ; and in the meantime to see nobody, if I can help it, but Dumont, who has been very kind to me. Love to all, to all who are left me to love. We must love each other better. T. B. M. London : March 30, 1831 Dear Ellis, I have little news for you, except what you will learn from the papers as well as from me. It is clear that the Reform Bill must pass, either in this or in another Parlia- ment. The majority of one does not appear to me, as it does to you, by any means inauspicious. We should perhaps have had a better plea for a dissolution if the majority had been the -L 146 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IV. other way. But surely a dissolution under such circumstances would have been a most alarming thing. If there should be a dissolution now, there will not be that ferocity in the public mind which there would have been if the House of Commons had refused to entertain the Bill at all. I confess that, till we had a majority, I was half inclined to tremble at the storm which we had raised. At present I think that we are abso- lutely certain of victory, and of victory without commotion. Such a scene as the division of last Tuesday I never saw, and never expect to see again. If I should live fifty years, the impression of it will be as fresh and sharp in my mind as if it had just taken place. It was like seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver taking the mace from the table ; a sight to be seen only once, and never to be forgotten. The crowd overflowed the House in every part. When the strangers were cleared out, and the doors locked, we had six hundred and eight members present, more by fifty-five than ever were in a division before. The Ayes and Noes were like two volleys of cannon from opposite sides of a field of battle. When the opposition went out into the lobby, an operation which took up twenty minutes or more, we spread ourselves over the benches on both sides of the House: for there were many of us who had not been able to find a seat during the evening. l When the doors were shut we began to speculate on our numbers. Everybody was desponding. "We have lost it. We are only two hundred and eighty at most. I do not think we are two hundred and fifty. They are three hundred. Alderman Thompson has counted them. He says they are two hundred and ninety-nine." This was the talk on our benches. I wonder that men who have been long in Parliament do not acquire a better coup d'oeil for numbers. The House, when only the Ayes were in it, looked to me a very fair House, much fuller than it generally is even on debates of considerable interest. I had no hope, however, of three hundred. As the tellers passed along our lowest row on the left hand side the interest was in- supportable, two hundred and ninety-one, two hundred and ninety-two, we were all standing up and stretching forward, telling with the tellers. At three hundred there was a short cry of joy, at three hundred and two another, suppressed however in a moment: for we did not yet know what the hostile force might be. We knew, however, that we could not be severely beaten. The doors were thrown open, and in they came. Each 1 "The practice in the Commons, until 1836, was to send one party forth into the lobby, the other remaining in the House." Sir T. Erskine May s " Parlia- mentary Practice." 1830-32. LORD MAC A UL AY. 147 of them, as he entered, brought some different report of their numbers. It must have been impossible, as you may conceive, in the lobby, crowded as they were, to form any exact estimate. First we heard that they were three hundred and three; then that number rose to three hundred and ten ; then went down to three hundred and seven. Alexander Barry told me that he had counted, and that they were three hundred and four. We were all breathless with anxiety, when Charles Wood, who stood near the door, jumped up on a bench and cried out, " They are only three hundred and one." We set up a shout that you might have heard to Charing Cross, waving our hats, stamping against the floor, and clapping our hands. The tellers scarcely got through the crowd: for the House was thronged up to the table, and all the floor was fluctuating with heads like the pit of a theatre. But you might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then again the shouts broke out, and many of us shed tears. I could scarcely refrain. And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul; and Herries looked like Judas taking his necktie off for the last operation. We shook hands, and clapped each other on the back, and went out laughing, crying, and huzzaing into the lobby. And no sooner were the outer doors opened than another shout answered that within the House. All the pas- sages, and the stairs into the waiting-rooms, were thronged by people who had waited till four in the morning to know the issue. We passed through a narrow lane between two thick masses of them ; and all the way down they were shouting and waving their hats, till we got into the open air. I called a cabriolet, and the first thing the driver asked was, " Is the Bill carried?" "Yes, by one." "Thank God for it, Sir." And away I rode to Gray's Inn, and so ended a scene which will probably never be equalled till the reformed Parliament wants reforming ; and that I hope will not be till the days of our grandchildren, till that truly orthodox and apostolical person Dr. Francis Ellis is an archbishop of eighty. As for me, I am for the present a sort of lion. My speech has set me in the front rank, if I can keep there ; and it has not been my luck hitherto to lose ground when I have once got it. Sheil and I are on very civil terms. He talks largely concern- ing Demosthenes and Burke. He made, I must say, an ex- cellent speech ; too florid and queer, but decidedly successful. Why did not Price speak ? If he was afraid, it was not without reason : for a more terrible audience there is not in the world. I wish that Praed had known to whom he was speak- ing. But, with all his talent, he has no tact, and he has fared L2 r48 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. iv. accordingly. Tierney used to say that he never rose in the House without feeling his knees tremble under him : and I am sure that no man who has not some of that feeling will ever succeed there. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. London : May 27, 1831. My dear Hannah, Let me see if I can write a letter a la Richardson : a little less prolix it must be, or it will exceed my ounce. By the bye, I wonder that Uncle Selby never grudged the postage of Miss Byron's letters. According to the nearest calculation that I can make, her correspondence must have enriched the post office of Ashby Canons by something more than the whole annual interest of her fifteen thousand pounds. I reached Lansdowne House by a quarter to eleven, and passed through the large suite of rooms to the great Sculpture Gallery. There were seated and standing perhaps three hundred people, listening to the performers, or talking to each other. The room is the handsomest and largest, I am told, in any private house in London. I enclose our musical bill of fare. Fanny, I suppose, will be able to expound it better than I. The singers were more showily dressed than the auditors, and seemed quite at home. As to the company, there was just everybody in London (except that little million and a half that you wot of,) the Chancellor, and the First Lord of the Admi- ralty, and Sydney Smith, and Lord Mansfield, and all the Barings and the Fitzclarences, and a hideous Russian spy, whose face I see everywhere, with a star on his coat. During the interval between the delights of "I tuoi frequenti," and the ecstasies of " Se tu m'ami," I contrived to squeeze up to Lord Lansdowne. I was shaking hands with Sir James Macdonald, when I heard a command behind us : " Sir James, introduce me to Mr. Macaulay:" and we turned, and there sate a large bold-looking woman, with the remains of a fine person, and the air of Queen Elizabeth. " Macaulay," said Sir James, " let me present you to Lady Holland." Then was her ladyship gracious beyond description, and asked me to dine and take a bed at Holland House next Tuesday. I accepted the dinner, but declined the bed, and I have since repented that I so declined it. But I probably shall have an opportunity of retracting on Tuesday. To-night I go to another musical party at Marshall's, the late M.P. for Yorkshire. Everybody is talking of Paganini and 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 149 his violin. The man seems to be a miracle. The newspapers say that long streamy flakes of music fall from his string, in- terspersed with luminous points of sound which ascend the air and appear like stars. This eloquence is quite beyond me. Ever yours T. B. M. London : May 28, 1831. My dear Hannah, More gaieties and music-parties ; not so fertile of adventures as that memorable masquerade whence Harriet Byron was carried away ; but still I hope that the nar- rative of what passed there will gratify "the venerable circle." Yesterday I dressed, called a cab, and was whisked away to Hill Street. I found old Marshall's house a very fine one. He ought indeed to have a fine one ; for he has, I believe, at least thirty thousand a year. The carpet was taken up, and chairs were set out in rows, as if we had been at a religious meeting. Then we had flute-playing by the first flute-player in England, and pianoforte-strumming by the first pianoforte-strummer in England, and singing by all the first singers in England, and Signor Rubini's incomparable tenor, and Signer Curionrs in- comparable counter-tenor, and Pasta's incomparable expression. You who know how airs much inferior to these take my soul, and lap it in Elysium, will form some faint conception of my transport. Sharp beckoned me to sit by him in the back row. These old fellows are so selfish. " Always," said he, " establish yourself in the middle of the row against the wall : for, if you sit in the front or next the edges, you will be forced to give up your seat to the ladies who are standing." I had the gal- lantry to surrender mine to a damsel who had stood for a quarter of an hour ; and I lounged into the ante-rooms, where I found Samuel Rogers. Rogers and I sate together on a bench in one of the passages, and had a good deal of very pleasant conversation. He was, as indeed he has always been to me, extremely kind, and told me that, if it were in his power, he would contrive to be at Holland House with me, to give me an insight into its ways. He is the great oracle of that circle. He has seen the King's letter to Lord Grey, respecting the Garter ; or at least has authentic information about it. It is a happy stroke of policy, and will, they say, decide many waver- ing votes in the House of Lords. The King, it seems, requests Lord Grey to take the order, as a mark of royal confidence in him " at so critical a time : " significant words, I think. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. i5o LIFE AND LET^TEJRS OF CH. iv. To Hannah More Macaulay. London : May 30, 1831. Well, my dear, I have been to Holland House. I took a glass coach, and arrived, through a fine avenue of elms, at the great entrance towards seven o'clock. The house is delight- ful ; the very perfection of the old Elizabethan style ; a con- siderable number of yery large and very comfortable rooms, rich with antique carving and gilding, but carpeted and fur- nished with all the skill of the best modern upholsterers. The library is a very long room, as long, I should think, as the gallery at Rothley Temple, with little cabinets for study branching out of it. warmly and snugly fitted up, and looking out on very beautiful grounds. The collection of books is not, like Lord Spencer's, curious ; but it contains almost everything that one ever wished to read. I found nobody there when I arrived but Lord Russell, the son of the Marquess of Tavi- stock. We are old House of Commons friends : so we had some very pleasant talk, and in a little while in came Allen, who is warden of Dulwich College, and who lives almost entirely at Holland House. He is certainly a man of vast information and great conversational powers. Some other gentlemen dropped in, and we chatted till Lady Holland made her appearance. Lord Holland dined by himself on account of his gout. We sat down to dinner in a fine long room, the wainscot of which is rich with gilded coronets, roses, and portcullises. There were Lord Albemarle, Lord Alvanley, Lord Russell, Lord Mahon, a violent Tory, but a very agreeable companion, and a very good scholar. There was Cradock, a fine fellow who was the Duke of Wellington's aide-de-camp in 1815, and some other people whose names I did not catch. What however is more to the purpose, there was a most excellent dinner. I have always heard that Holland House is famous for its good cheer, and certainly the reputation is not unmerited. After dinner Lord Holland was wheeled in, and placed very near me. He was extremely amusing and good-natured. In the drawing-room I had a long talk with Lady Holland about the antiquities of the house, and about the purity of the English language, wherein she thinks herself a critic. I hap- pened, in speaking about the Reform Bill, to say that I wished that it had been possible to form a few commercial consti- tuencies, if the word constituency were admissible. " I am glad you put that in," said her ladyship. " I was just going to give it you. It is an odious word. Then there is talented, and influential, and gentlemanly. I never could break Sheridan of 1830-32., LORD MACAULAY. 151 gentlemanly, though he allowed it to be wrong." We talked about the word talents and its history. I said that it had first appeared in theological writing, that it was a metaphor taken from the parable in the New Testament, and that it had gra- dually passed from the vocabulary of divinity into common use. I challenged her to find it in any classical writer on general subjects before the Restoration, or even before the year 1700. I believe that I might safely have gone down later. She seemed surprised by this theory, never having, so far as I could judge, heard of the parable of the talents. I did not tell her, though I might have done so, that a person who professes to be a critic in the delicacies of the English language ought to have the Bible at his fingers' ends. She is certainly a woman of considerable talents and great literary acquirements. To me she was excessively gracious ; yet there is a haughtiness in her courtesy which, even after all that I had heard of her, surprised me. The centurion did not keep his soldiers in better order than she keeps her guests. It is to one " Go," and he goeth ; and to another " Do this," and it is done. "Ring the bell, Mr. Macaulay." "Lay down that screen, Lord Russell; you will spoil it." "Mr. Allen, take a candle and show Mr. Cradock the picture of Buonaparte." Lord Holland is, on the other hand, all kindness, simplicity, and vivacity. He talked very well both on politics and on literature. He asked me in a very friendly manner about my father's health, and begged to be remembered to him. When my coach came, Lady Holland made me promise that I would on the first fine morning walk out to breakfast with them, and see the grounds ; and, after drinking a glass of very good iced lemonade, I took my leave, much amused. and pleased. The house certainly deserves its reputation for plea- santness, and her ladyship used me, I believe, as well as it is her way to use anybody. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. Court of Commissioners, Basinghall Street : May 31, 1831. My dear Sister, How delighted I am that you like my letters, and how obliged by yours ! But I have little more than my thanks to give for your last. I have nothing to tell about great people to-day. I heard no fine music yesterday, saw nobody above the rank of a baronet, and was shut up in my own room reading and writing all the morning. This day 1$2 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. iv. seems likely to pass in much the same way, except that I have some bankruptcy business to do, and a couple of sovereigns to receive. So here I am, with three of the ugliest attorneys that ever deserved to be transported sitting opposite to me ; a dis- consolate-looking bankrupt, his hands in his empty pockets, standing behind ; a lady scolding for her money, and refusing to be comforted because it is not ; and a surly butcher-like looking creditor, growling like a house-dog, and saying, as plain as looks can say : " If I sign your certificate, blow me, that's all." Among these fair and interesting forms, on a piece of official paper, with a pen and with ink found at the expense of the public, am I writing to Nancy. These dirty courts, filled with Jew money-lenders, sheriffs' officers, attorneys' runners, and a crowd of people who live by giving sham bail and taking false oaths, are not by any means such good subjects for a lady's correspondent as the Sculpture Gallery at Lansdowne House, or the conservatory at Holland House, or the notes of Pasta, or the talk of Rogers. But we cannot be always fine. When my Richardsonian epistles are published, there must be dull as well as amusing letters among them ; and this letter is, I think, as good as those sermons of Sir Charles to Geronymo which Miss Byron hypocritically asked for, or as the greater part of that stupid last volume. We shall soon have more attractive matter. I shall walk out to breakfast at Holland House ; and I am to dine with Sir George Philips, and with his son the member for Steyning, who have the best of company ; and I am going to the fancy ball of the Jew. He met me in the street, and implored me to come. " You need not dress more than for an evening party. You had better come. You will be delighted. It will be so very pretty." I thought of Dr. Johnson and the herdsman with his "See, such pretty goats." 1 However, I told my honest Hebrew that I would come. I may perhaps, like the Ben- jamites, steal away some Israelite damsel in the middle of her dancing. But the noise all round me is becoming louder, and a baker in a white coat is bellowing for the book to prove a debt of 1 See Boswell's Tour to the Hebrides, Sept. i, 1773. "The Doctor was prevailed with to mount one of Vass's grays. As he rode upon it downhill, it did not go well, and he grumbled. I walked on a little before, but was exces- sively entertained with the method taken to keep him in good humour. Hay led the horse's head, talking to Dr. Johnson as much as he could : and, (having heard him, in the forenoon, express a pastoral pleasure on seeing the goats browsing, ) just when the Doctor was uttering his displeasure, the fellow cried, with a very Highland accent, 'See, such pretty goats 1' Then he whistled whu t and made them jump." 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 153 nine pounds fourteen shillings and fourpence. So I must finish my letter and fall to business. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaiday. London : June i, 1831. My dear Sister, My last letter was a dull one. I mean this to be very amusing. My last was about Basinghall Street, attorneys, and bankrupts. But for this, take it dramatically in the German style. Fine morning. Scene, the great entrance of Holland House. Enter MACAULAY and Two FOOTMEN in livery. First Footman. Sir, may I venture to demand your name ? Macaulay. Macaulay, and thereto I add M.P. And that addition, even in these proud halls, May well ensure the bearer some respect. Second Footman. And art thou come to breakfast with our Lord? Macaulay. I am : for so his hospitable will, And hers the peerless dame ye serve hath bade. First Footman. Ascend the stair, and thou above shalt find, On snow-white linen spread, the luscious meal. (Exit MACAULAY upstairs^ In plain English prose, I went this morning to breakfast at Holland House. The day was fine, and I arrived at twenty minutes after ten. After I had lounged a short time in the dining-room, I heard a gruff good-natured voice asking, " Where is Mr. Macaulay ? Where have you put him ? " and in his arm- chair Lord Holland was wheeled in. He took me round the apartments, he riding and I walking. He gave me the history of the most remarkable portraits in the library, where there is, by the bye, one of the few bad pieces of Lawrence that I have seen a head of Charles James Fox, an ignominious failure. Lord Holland said that it was the worst ever painted of so eminent a man by so eminent an artist. There is a very fine head of Machiavelli, and another of Earl Grey, a very different sort of man. I observed a portrait of Lady Holland painted some thirty years ago. I could have cried to see the change. She must have been a most beautiful woman. She still looks, how- ever, as if she had been handsome, and shows in one respect great taste and sense. She does not rouge at all ; and her costume is not youthful, so that she looks as well in the morn- ing as in the evening. We came back to the dining-room. Our 154 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. iv. breakfast party consisted of my Lord and Lady, myself, Lord Russell, and Luttrell. You must have heard of Luttrell. I met him once at Rogers's ; and I have seen him, I think, in other places. He is a famous wit, the most popular, I think, of all the professed wits, a man who has lived in the highest circles, a scholar, and no contemptible poet. He wrote a little volume of verse entitled " Advice to Julia," not first rate, but neat, lively, piquant, and showing the most consummate know- ledge of fashionable life. We breakfasted on very good coffee, and very good tea, and very good eggs, butter kept in the midst of ice, and hot rolls. Lady Holland told us her dreams ; how she had dreamed that a mad dog bit her foot, and how she set off to Brodie, and lost her way in St. Martin's Lane, and could not find him. She hoped, she said, the dream would not come true. I said that I had had a dream which admitted of no such hope ; for I had dreamed that I heard Pollock speak in the House of Commons, that the speech was very long, and that he was coughed down. This dream of mine diverted them much. After breakfast Lady Holland offered to conduct me to her own drawing-room, or, rather, commanded my attendance. A very beautiful room it is, opening on a terrace, and wainscoted with miniature paintings interesting from their merit, and in- teresting from their history. Among them I remarked a great many, thirty, I should think, which even I, who am no great connoisseur, saw at once could come from no hand but Stot- hard's. They were all on subjects from Lord Byron's poems. "Yes," said she ; "poor Lord Byron sent them to me a short time before the separation. I sent them back, and told him that, if he gave them away, he ought to give them to Lady Byron. But he said that he would not, and that if I did not take them, the bailiffs would, and that they would be lost in the wreck." Her ladyship then honoured me so far as to conduct me through her dressing-room into the great family bedchamber to show me a very fine picture by Reynolds of Fox, when a boy, birdsnesting. She then consigned me to Luttrell, asking him to show me the grounds. Through the grounds we went, and very pretty I thought them. In the Dutch garden is a fine bronze bust of Napoleon, which Lord Holland put up in 1817, while Napoleon was a prisoner at St. Helena. The inscription was selected by his lordship, and is remarkably happy. It is from Homer's Odyssey. I will translate it, as well as I can extempore, into a measure which gives a better idea of Homer's manner than Pope's sing- song couplet. 1830-32. LORD MAC A OLA y. 155 For not, be sure, within the grave Is hid that prince, the wise, the brave ; But in an islet's narrow bound, With the great Ocean roaring round, The captive of a foeman base He pines to view his native place. There is a seat near the spot which is called Rogers's seat. The poet loves, it seems, to sit there. A very elegant inscription by Lord Holland is placed over it. " Here Rogers sate ; and here for ever dwell With me those pleasures which he sang so well." Very neat and condensed, I think. Another inscription by Luttrell hangs there. Luttrell adjured me with mock pathos to spare his blushes ; but I am author enough to know what the blushes of authors mean. So I read the lines, and very pretty and polished they were, but too many to be remembered from one reading. Having gone round the grounds I took my leave, very much pleased with the place. Lord Holland is extremely kind. But that is of course ; for he is kindness itself. Her ladyship too, which is by no means of course, is all graciousness and civility. But, for all this, I would much rather be quietly walking with you : and the great use of going to these fine places is to learn how happy it is possible to be without them. Indeed, I care so little for them that I certainly should not have gone to-day, but that I thought that I should be able to find materials for a letter which you might like. Farewell. T. B. MACAULAY. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : June 3, 1831. My dear Sister, I cannot tell you how delighted I am to find that my letters amuse you. But sometimes I must be dull like my neighbours. I paid no visits yesterday, and have no news to relate to-day. I am sitting again in Basinghall Street ; and Basil Montagu is haranguing about Lord Verulam, and the way of inoculating one's mind with truth ; and all this a propos of a lying bankrupt's balance-sheet. ! Send me some gossip, my love. Tell me how you go on with German. What novel have you commenced ? Or, rather, how many dozen have you finished? Recommend me one. 1 "Those who are acquainted with the Courts in which Mr. Montagu practises with so much ability and success, will know how often he enlivens the IS* LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. iv. What say you to " Destiny " ? Is the " Young Duke " worth reading ? and what do you think of " Laurie Todd " ? I am writing about Lord Byron so pathetically that I make Margaret cry, but so slowly that I am afraid I shall make Napier wait. Rogers, like a civil gentleman, told me last week to write no more reviews, and to publish separate works; adding, what for him is a very rare thing, a compliment : " You may do anything, Mr. Macaulay." See how vain and insincere human nature is ! I have been put into so good a temper with Rogers that I have paid him, what is as rare with me as with him, a very handsome compliment in my review. 1 It is not undeserved ; but I confess that I cannot understand the popu- larity of his poetry. It is pleasant and flowing enough ; less monotonous than most of the imitations of Pope and Gold- smith ; and calls up many agreeable images and recollections. But that such men as Lord Granville, Lord Holland, Hobhouse, Lord Byron, and others of high rank in intellect, should place Rogers, as they do, above Southey, Moore, and even Scott himself, is what I cannot conceive. But this comes of being in the highest society of London. What Lady Jane Granville called the Patronage of Fashion can do as much for a middling poet as for a plain girl like Miss Arabella Falconer. 2 But I must stop. This rambling talk has been scrawled in the middle of haranguing, squabbling, swearing, and crying. Since I began it I have taxed four bills, taken forty depositions, and rated several perjured witnesses. Ever yours T. B. M. discussion of a point of law by citing some weighty aphorism, or some brilliant illustration, from the De Augmentis or the Novum Organum." Macaulay's Review of Basil Montagu's Edition of Bacon. 1 "Well do we remember to have heard a most correct judge of poetry revile Mr. Rogers for the incorrectness of that most sweet and graceful passage : 'Such grief was ours, it seems but yesterday, When in thy prime, wishing so much to stay, 'Twas thine, Maria, thine without a sigh At midnight in a sister's arms to die. Oh ! thou wast lovely ; lovely was thy frame, And pure thy spirit as from heaven it came : And, when recalled to join the blest above, Thou diedst a victim to exceeding love Nursing the young to health. In happier hours, When idle Fancy wove luxuriant flowers, Once in thy mirth thou badst me write on thee ; And now I write what thou shah never see.' Macaulay's Essay on Byron. 1 Lady Jane, and Miss Arabella, appear in Miss Edgeworth's " Patronage." 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY, 157 To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. London : June 7, 1831. Yesterday I dined at Marshall's, and was almost consoled for not meeting Ramohun Roy by a very pleasant party. The great sight was the two wits, Rogers and Sydney Smith. Singly I have often seen them : but to see them both together was a novelty, and a novelty not the less curious because their mutual hostility is well known, and the hard hits which they have given to each other are in everybody's mouth. They were very civil, however. But I was struck by the truth of what Matthew Bramble, a person of whom you probably never heard, says in Smollett's Humphrey Clinker : that one wit in a company, like a knuckle of ham in soup, gives a flavour : but two are too many. Rogers and Sydney Smith would not come into conflict. If one had possession of the company, the other was silent ; and, as you may conceive, the one who had possession of the company was always Sydney Smith, and the one who was silent was always Rogers. Sometimes, however, the company divided, and each of them had a small congregation. I had a good deal of talk with both of them ; for, in whatever they may disagree, they agree in always treating me with very marked kindness. I had a good deal of pleasant conversation with Rogers. He was telling me of the curiosity and interest which attached to the persons of Sir Walter Scott and Lord Byron. When Sir Walter Scott dined at a gentleman's in London some time ago, all the servant-maids in the house asked leave to stand in the passage and see him pass. He was, as you may conceive, greatly flattered. About Lord Byron, whom he knew well, he told me some curious anecdotes. When Lord Byron passed through Florence, Rogers was there. They had a good deal of con- versation, and Rogers accompanied him to his carriage. The inn had fifty windows in front. All the windows were crowded with women, mostly English women, to catch a glance at their favourite poet. Among them were some at whose houses he had often been in England, and with whom he had lived on friendly terms. He would not notice them, or return their salutations. Rogers was the only person that he spoke to. The worst thing that I know about Lord Byron is the very unfavourable impression which he made on men, who certainly were not inclined to judge him harshly, and who, as far as I know, were never personally ill-used by him. Sharp and Rogers both speak of him as an unpleasant, affected, splenetic person. IJ8 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. iv. I have heard hundreds and thousands of people who never saw him rant about him : but I never heard a single expression of fondness for him fall from the lips of any of those who knew him well. Yet, even now, after the lapse of five-and- twenty years, there are those who cannot talk for a quarter of an hour about Charles Fox without tears. Sydney Smith leaves London on the 2oth, the day before Parliament meets for business. I advised him to stay, and see something of his friends who would be crowding to London. " My flock ! " said this good shepherd. " My dear Sir, re- member my flock ! The hungry sheep look up and are not fed." I could say nothing to such an argument ; but I could not help thinking that, if Mr. Daniel Wilson had said such a thing, it would infallibly have appeared in his funeral sermon, and in his Life by Baptist Noel. But in poor Sydney's mouth it sounded like a joke. He begged me to come and see him at Combe Florey. "There I am, Sir, the priest of the Flowery Valley, in a delightful parsonage, about which I care a good deal, and a delightful country, about which I do not care a straw." I told him that my meeting him was some com- pensation for missing Ramohun Roy. Sydney broke forth : "Compensation! Do you mean to insult me? A beneficed clergyman, an orthodox clergyman, a nobleman's chaplain, to be no more than compensation for a Brahmin ; and a heretic Brahmin too, a fellow who has lost his own religion and can't find another ; a vile heterodox dog, who, as I am credibly in- formed eats beef-steaks in private ! A man who has lost his caste ! who ought to have melted lead poured down his nostrils, if the good old Vedas were in force as they ought to be." These are some Boswelliana of Sydney ; not very clerical, you will say, but indescribably amusing to the hearers, whatever the readers may think of them. Nothing can present a more striking contrast to his rapid, loud, laughing utterance, and his rector-like amplitude and rubicundity, than the low, slow, emphatic tone, and the corpse-like face of Rogers. There is as great a difference in what they say as in the voice and look with which they say it The conversation of Rogers is re- markably polished and artificial. What he says seems to have been long meditated, and might be published with little cor- rection. Sydney talks from the impulse of the moment, and his fun is quite inexhaustible. Ever yours T. B. M. 1830-32. LORD MA CAUL AY. 159 To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : June 8, 1831. My dear Sister, Yesterday night I went to the Jew's. I had indeed no excuse for forgetting the invitation : for, about a week after I had received the green varnished billet, and answered it, came another in the self-same words, and addressed to Mr. Macaulay, Jun r . I thought that my answer had mis- carried ; so down I sate, and composed a second epistle to the Hebrews. I afterwards found that the second invitation was meant for Charles. I set off a little after ten, having attired myself simply as for a dinner-party. The house is a very fine one. The door was guarded by peace-officers, and besieged by starers. My host met me in a superb court-dress, with his sword at his side. There was a most sumptuous-looking Persian, covered with gold lace. Then there was an Italian bravo with a long beard. Two old gentlemen, who ought to have been wiser, were fools enough to come in splendid Turkish costumes at which every- body laughed. The fancy-dresses were worn almost exclusively by the young people. The ladies for the most part contented themselves with a few flowers and ribands oddly disposed. There was, however, a beautiful Mary Queen of Scots, who looked as well as dressed the character perfectly ; an angel of a Jewess in a Highland plaid ; and an old woman, or rather a woman, for through her disguise it was impossible to ascertain her age, in the absurdest costume of the last century. These good people soon began their quadrilles and galopades, and were enlivened by all the noise that twelve fiddlers could make for their lives. You must not suppose the company was made up of these mummers. There was Dr. Lardner, and Long, the Greek Pro- fessor in the London University, and Sheil, and Strutt, and Romilly, and Owen the philanthropist. Owen laid hold on Sheil, and gave him a lecture on Co-operation which lasted for half an hour. At last Sheil made his escape. Then Owen seized Mrs. Sheil, a good Catholic, and a very agreeable woman, and began to prove to her that there could be no such thing as moral responsibility. I had fled at the first sound of his discourse, and was talking with Strutt and Romilly, when behold ! I saw Owen leave Mrs. Sheil and come towards us. So I cried out " Sauve qui peut ! " and we ran off. But before we had got five feet from where we were standing, who should meet us face to face but Old Basil Montagu ? " Nay, 160 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IV. then," said I, " the game is up. The Prussians are on our rear. If we are to be bored to death there is no help for it." Basil seized Romilly ; Owen took possession of Strutt ; and I was blessing myself on ray escape, when the only human being worthy to make a third with such a pair, J , caught me by the arm, and begged to have a quarter of an hour's conversation with me. While I was suffering under J , a smart impudent- looking young dog, dressed like a sailor in a blue jacket and check shirt, marched up, and asked a Jewish-looking damsel near me to dance with him. I thought that I had seen the fellow before ; and, after a little looking, I perceived that it was Charles ; and most knowingly, I assure you, did he perform a quadrille with Miss Hilpah Manasses. If I were to tell you all that I saw I should exceed my ounce. There was Martin the painter, and Procter, alias Barry Cornwall, the poet or poetaster. I did not see one Peer, or one star, except a foreign order or two, which I generally con- sider as an intimation to look to my pockets. A German knight is a dangerous neighbour in a crowd. ' After seeing a galopade very prettily danced by the Israelitish women, I went downstairs, reclaimed my hat, and walked into the dining-room. There, with some difficulty, I squeezed myself between a Turk and a Bernese peasant, and obtained an ice, a macaroon, and a glass of wine. Charles was there, very active in his attendance on his fair Hilpah. I bade him good night. " What ! " said young Hopeful, "are you going yet ? " It was near one o'clock ; but this joyous tar seemed to think it impossible that anybody could dream of leaving such delightful enjoyments till day- break. I left him staying Hilpah with flagons, and walked quietly home. But it was some time before I could get to sleep. The sound of fiddles was in mine ears ; and gaudy dresses, and black hair, and Jewish noses, were fluctuating up and down before mine eyes. There is a fancy ball for you. If Charles writes a history of it, tell me which of us does it best Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaiday. London : June 10, 1831. My dear Sister, I am at Basinghall Street, and I snatch this quarter of an hour, the only quarter of an hour which I am likely to secure during the day, to write to you. I will not 1 Macaulay ended by being a German knight himself. 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 161 omit writing two days running, because, if my letters give you half the pleasure which your letters give me, you will, I am sure, miss them. I have not, however, much to tell. I have been very busy with my article on Moore's Life of Byron. I never wrote anything with less heart. I do not like the book : I do not like the hero ; I have said the most I could for him, and yet I shall be abused for speaking as coldly of him as I have done. I dined the day before yesterday at Sir George Philips's with Sotheby, Morier the author of " Hadji Baba," and Sir James Mackintosh. Morier began to quote Latin before the ladies had left the room, and quoted it by no means to the purpose. After their departure he fell to repeating Virgil, choosing passages which everybody else knows and does not repeat. He, though he tried to repeat them, did not know them, and could not get on without my prompting. Sotheby was full of his translation of Homer's Iliad, some specimens of which he has already published. It is a complete failure ; more literal than that of Pope, but still tainted with the deep radical vice of Pope's version, a thoroughly modern and arti- ficial manner. It bears the same kind of relation to the Iliad that Robertson's narrative bears to the story of Joseph in the book of Genesis. There is a pretty allegory in Homer I think in the last book, but I forget precisely where about two vessels, the one filled with blessings and the other with sorrow, which stand, says the poet, on the right and left hand of Jupiter's throne, and from which he dispenses good and evil at his pleasure among men. What word to use for these vessels has long posed the translators of Homer. Pope, who loves to be fine, calls them urns. Cowper, who loves to be coarse, calls them casks ; a translation more improper than Pope's ; for a cask is, in our general understanding, a wooden vessel ; and the Greek word means an earthen vessel. There is a curious letter of Cowper's to one of his female correspondents about this unfor- tunate word. She begged that Jupiter might be allowed a more elegant piece of furniture for his throne than a cask. But Cowper was peremptory. I mentioned this incidentally when we were talking about translations. This set Sotheby off. " I," said he, " have translated it vase. I hope that meets your ideas. Don't you think vase will do ? Does it satisfy you ? " I told him, sincerely enough, that it satisfied me ; for I must be most unreasonable to be dissatisfied at anything that he chooses to put in a book which I never shall read. Mackintosh was very M 162 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. iv. agreeable ; and, as usually happens when I meet him, I learned something from him. l The great topic now in London is not, as you perhaps fancy, Reform, but Cholera. There is a great panic ; as great a panic as I remember, particularly in the City. Rice shakes his head, and says that this is the most serious thing that has happened in his time ; and assuredly, if the disease were to rage in London as it has lately raged in Riga, it would be diffi- cult to imagine anything more horrible. I, however, feel no uneasiness. In the first place I have a strong leaning towards the doctrines of the anti-contagionists. In the next place I repose a great confidence in the excellent food and the cleanli- ness of the English. I have this instant received your letter of yesterday with the enclosed proof-sheets. Your criticism is to a certain extent just : but you have not considered the whole sentence together. Depressed is in itself better than weighed down : but " the op- pressive privileges which had depressed industry " would be a horrible cacophony. I hope that word convinces you. I have often observed that a fine Greek compound is an excellent substitute for a reason. I met Rogers at the Athenaeum. He begged me to break- fast with him, and name my day, and promised that he tvould procure me as agreeable a party as he could find in London. Very kind of the old man, is it not ? and, if you knew how Rogers is thought of, you would think it as great a compliment as could be paid to a Duke. Have you seen what the author of the " Young Duke " says about me : how rabid I am, and how certain I am to rat ? Ever yours T. B. M. Macaulay's account of the allusion to himself in the " Young Duke " is perfectly accurate ; and yet, when read as a whole, the passage in question does not appear to have been ill-naturedly meant. 2 It is much what any young literary man outside the House of Commons might write of another who 1 Macaulay wrote to one of his nieces in September 1859 : " I am glad that Mackintosh's Life interests you. I knew him well ; and a kind friend he was to me when I was a young fellow, fighting my way uphill." 2 " I hear that Mr. Babington Macaulay is to be returned. If he speaks half as well as he writes, the House will be in fashion again. I fear that he is one of those who, like the individual whom he has most studied, will give up to a party what was meant for mankind. At any rate, he must get rid of his rabidity. He writes now on all subjects as if he certainly intended to be (i renegade, and was determined to make the contrast complete." The Young Duke, book v. chap. vi. 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 163 had only been inside that House for a few weeks ; and it was probably forgotten by the author within twenty- four hours after the ink was dry. It is to be hoped that the commentators of the future will not treat it as an authoritative record of Mr. Disraeli's estimate of Lord Macaulay's political character. To Hannah M, Macaulay, London : June 25, 1831. My dear Sister, There was, as you will see, no debate on Lord John Russell's motion. The Reform Bill is to be brought in, read once, and printed, without discussion. The contest will be on the second reading, and will be protracted, I should think, through the whole of the week after next : next week it will be, when you read this letter. I breakfasted with Rogers yesterday. There was nobody there but Moore. We were all on the most friendly and familiar terms possible ; and Moore, who is, Rogers tells me, excessively pleased with my review of his book, showed me very marked attention. I was forced to go away early on account of bank- rupt business ; but Rogers said that we must have the talk out ; so we are to meet at his house again to breakfast. What a delightful house it is ! It looks out on the Green Park just at the most pleasant point. The furniture has been selected with a delicacy of taste quite unique. Its value does not depend on fashion, but must be the same while the fine arts are held in any esteem. In the drawing-room, for example, the chimney- pieces are carved by Flaxman into the most beautiful Grecian forms. The book-case is painted by Stothard, in his very best manner, with groups from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Boccacio. The pictures are not numerous ; but every one is excellent In the dining-room there are also some beautiful paintings. But the three most remarkable objects in that room are, I think, a cast of Pope taken after death by Roubiliac ; a noble model in terra-cotta by Michael Angelo, from which he after- wards made one of his finest statues, that of Lorenzo de' Medici ; and, lastly, a mahogany table on which stands an antique vase. When Chantrey dined with Rogers some time ago he took particular notice of the vase, and the table on which it stands, and asked Rogers who made the table. "A common carpen- ter," said Rogers. "Do you remember the making of it?" said Chantrey. " Certainly," said Rogers, in some surprise. " I was in the room while it was finished with the chisel, and gave the workman directions about placing it. "Yes," said M 2 164 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IV. Chantrey, " I was the carpenter. I remember the room well, and all the circumstances." A curious story, I think, and honourable both to the talent which raised Chantrey, and to the magnanimity which kept him from being ashamed of what he had been. Ever yours affectionately T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : June 29, 1831. My dear Sister, We are not yet in the full tide of Parlia- mentary business. Next week the debates will be warm and long. I should not wonder if we had a discussion of five nights. I shall probably take a part in it I have breakfasted again with Rogers. The party was a remarkable one, Lord John Russell, Tom Moore, Tom Campbell, and Luttrell. We were all very lively. An odd incident took place after breakfast, while we were standing at the window and looking into the Green Park. Somebody was talking about diners-out. " Ay," said Campbell " Ye diners-out from whom we guard our spoons." Tom Moore asked where the line was. " Don't you know ? " said Campbell. " Not I," said Moore. " Surely," said Camp- bell, " it is your own." " I never saw it in my life," said Moore. " It is in one of your best things in the Times," said Campbell. Moore denied it Hereupon I put in my claim, and told them that it was mine. Do you remember it ? It is in some lines called the Political Georgics, which I sent to the Times about three years ago. They made me repeat the lines, and were vociferous in praise of them. Tom Moore then said, oddly enough : " There is another poem in the Times that I should like to know the author of ; A Parson's Account of his Journey to the Cambridge Election." I laid claim to that also. " That is curious," said Moore. " I begged Barnes to tell me who wrote it He said that he had received it from Cambridge, and touched it up himself, and pretended that all the best strokes were his. I believed that he was lying, because I never knew him to make a good joke in his life. And now the murder is out." They asked me whether I had put anything else in the Times. Nothing, I said, except the Sortes Virgilianae, which Lord John remembered well. I never mentioned the Cam- bridge Journey, or the Georgics, to any but my own family : and I was therefore, as you may conceive, not a little flattered to 1830-32. LORD MA CAUL AY. 165 hear in one day Moore praising one of them, and Campbell praising the other. I find that my article on Byron is very popular ; one among a thousand proofs of the bad taste of the public. I am to review Croker's edition of Bozzy. It is wretchedly ill done. The notes are poorly written, and shamefully inaccurate. There is, however, much curious information in it. The whole of the Tour to the Hebrides is incorporated with the Life. So are most of Mrs. Thrale's anecdotes, and much of Sir John Hawkins's lumbering book. The whole makes five large volumes. There is a most laughable sketch of Bozzy, taken by Sir T. Lawrence when young. I never saw a character so thoroughly hit off. I intend the book for you, when I have finished my criticism on it. You are, next to myself, the best read Boswellite that I know. The lady whom Johnson abused for flattering him ' was certainly, according to Croker, Hannah More. Another ill-natured sentence about a Bath lady 2 whom Johnson called " empty-headed " is also applied to your god- mother. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : July 6, 1831. My dear Sister, I have been so busy during the last two or three days that I have found no time to write to you. I have now good news for you. I spoke yesterday night with a success beyond my utmost expectations. I am half ashamed to tell you the compliments which I have received : but you well know that it is not from vanity, but to give you pleasure, that I tell you what is said about me. Lord Althorp told me twice that it was the best speech he had ever heard ; Graham, and Stanley, and Lord John Russell spoke of it in the same way ; and O'Connell followed me out of the house to pay me the most enthusiastic compliments. I delivered my speech much more slowly than any that I have before made, and it is in consequence better reported than its predecessors, though not well. I send you several papers. You will see some civil things in the leading articles of some of them. My greatest pleasure, in the midst of all this praise, is to think of the pleasure which my success will give to my father and my sisters. It is happy for me that ambition has in my mind been softened into 1 See Boswell's Life of Johnson, April 15, 1778. 2 " He would not allow me to praise a lady then at Rath ; observing, ' She does not gain upon me, sir; I think her empty-headed.'" 1 66 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. iv. a kind of domestic feeling, and that affection has at least as much to do as vanity with my wish to distinguish myself. This I owe to my dear mother, and to the interest which she always took in my childish successes. From my earliest years, the gratification of those whom I love has been associated with the gratification of my own thirst for fame, until the two have become inseparably joined in my mind. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : July 8, 1831. My dear Sister, Do you want to hear all the compliments that are paid to me ? I shall never end, if I stuff my letters with them : for I meet nobody who does not give me joy. Baring tells me that I ought never to speak again. Howick sent a note to me yesterday to say that his father wished very much to be introduced to me, and asked me to dine with them yesterday, as, by great good luck, there was nothing to do in the House of Commons. At seven I went to Downing Street, where Earl Grey's official residence stands. It is a noble house. There are two splendid drawing-rooms, which overlook St James's Park. Into these I was shown. The servant told me that Lord Grey was still at the House of Lords, and that her Ladyship had just gone to dress. Howick had not mentioned the hour in his note. I sate down, and turned over two large portfolios of political caricatures. Earl Grey's own face was in every print I was very much diverted. I had seen some of them before ; but many were new to me, and their merit is extraordinary. They were the caricatures of that remarkably able artist who calls himself H. B. In about half an hour Lady Georgiana Grey, and the Countess, made their appearance. We had some pleasant talk, and they made many apologies. The Earl, they said, was unexpectedly delayed by a question which had arisen in the Lords. Lady Holland arrived soon after, and gave me a most gracious reception ; shook my hand very warmly, and told me, in her imperial decisive manner, that she had talked with all the principal men on our side about my speech, that they all agreed that it was the best that had been made since the death of Fox, and that it was more like Fox's speaking than anybody's else. Then she told me that I was too much worked, that I must go out of town, and absolutely insisted on my going to Holland House to dine, and take a bed, en the next day on which there is no Parliamentary business. At eight we went to dinner. Lord Howick took his father's place, 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 167 and we feasted very luxuriously. At nine Lord Grey came from the House with Lord Durham, Lord Holland, and the Duke of Richmond. They dined on the remains of our dinner with great expedition, as they had to go to a Cabinet Council at ten. Of course I had scarcely any talk with Lord Grey. He was, however, extremely polite to me ; and so were his colleagues. I liked the ways of the family. I picked up some news from these Cabinet Ministers. There is to be a Coronation on quite a new plan : no banquet in West- minster Hall, no feudal services, no champion, no procession from the Abbey to the Hall, and back again. But there is to be a service in the Abbey. All the Peers are to come in state and in their robes, and the King is to take the oaths, and be crowned and anointed in their presence. The spectacle will be finer than usual to the multitude out of doors. The few hundreds who could obtain admittance to the Hall will be the only losers. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay, London : July u, 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 cir- cumstances. 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 ven- geance 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 1 68 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. iv. 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 con- versation, however, soon makes you forget his ugliness and in- firmities. There is a poignancy without effort in all that 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 a redire. Le Cardinal trompait ; mais il ne mentait pas. Or, M. de Metternich ment toujours, et ne trompe jamais." He mentioned M. de St. Aulaire, now one of the most distin- guished public men of France. I said : " M. de Saint- Aulaire est beau-pere de M. le due de Cazes, n'est-ce pas?" " Non, monsieur," said Talleyrand; "Ton disait, il y a douze ans, que M. de Saint- Aulaire etoit beau-pere de M. de Cazes ; Ton dit maintenant que M. de Cazes est gendre de M. de Saint-Aulaire." l It was not easy to describe the change in the relative positions of two men more tersely and more sharply ; and these remarks were made in the lowest tone, and without the slightest change of muscle, just as if he had been remarking that the day was fine. He added: "M. de Saint-Aulaire a beaucoup d'esprit. Mais il est devot, et, ce qui pis est, devot honteux. II va se cacher dans quelque hameau pour faire ses Paques." This was a curious remark from a Bishop. He told several stories about the political men of France : not of any great value in them- selves ; but his way of telling them was beyond all praise, concise, pointed, and delicately satirical. When he had de- parted, I could not help breaking out into admiration of his talent for relating anecdotes. Lady Holland said that he had been considered for nearly forty years as the best teller of a story in Europe, and that there was certainly nobody like him in that respect. When the Prince was gone, we went to bed. In the morn- ing Lord John Russell drove me back to London in his cabriolet, much amused with what I had seen and heard. But I must stop. Ever yours T. B. M. 1 This saying remained in Macaulay's mind. He quotes it on the margin of his Aulus Gellius, as an illustration of the passage in the nineteenth book in which Julius Caesar is described, absurdly enough, as "perpetuus ille dictator, Cneii Pompeii socer." 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 169 To Hannah M, Macaulay. Basinghall Street : July 15, 1831. My dear Sister, The rage of faction at the present moment exceeds anything that has been known in our day. Indeed I doubt whether, at the time of Mr. Pitt's first becoming Premier, at the time of Sir Robert Walpole's fall, or even during the desperate struggles between the Whigs and Tories at the close of Anne's reign, the fury of party was so fearfully violent Lord Mahon said to me yesterday that friendships of long standing were everywhere giving way, and that the schism between the reformers and the anti-reformers was spreading from the House of Commons into every private circle. Lord Mahon himself is an exception. He and I are on excellent terms. But Praed and I become colder every day. The scene of Tuesday night beggars description. I left the House at about three, in consequence of some expressions of Lord Althorp's which indicated that the Ministry was inclined to yield on the question of going into Committee on the Bill. I afterwards much regretted that I had gone away ; not that my presence was necessary ; but because I should have liked to have sate through so tremendous a storm. Towards eight in the morning the Speaker was almost fainting. The Minis- terial members, however, were as true as steel. They furnished the Ministry with the resolution which it wanted " If the noble Lord yields," said one of our men, " all is lost." Old Sir Thomas Baring sent for his razor, and Benett, the member for Wiltshire, for his night-cap ; and they were both resolved to spend the whole day in the House rather than give way. If the Opposition had not yielded, in two hours half London would have been in Old Palace Yard. Since Tuesday the Tories have been rather cowed. But their demeanour, though less outrageous than at the beginning of the week, indicates what would in any other time be called extreme violence. I have not been once in bed till three in the morning since last Sunday. To-morrow we have a holiday. I dine at Lansdowne House. Next week I dine with Littleton, the member for Staffordshire, and his handsome wife. He told me that I should meet two men whom I am curious to see, Lord Plunket and the Marquess Wellesley : let alone the Chancellor, who is not a novelty to me. Ever yours T. B. M. 170 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IV. To Hannah M. Maeattlav. London : July 25, 1831. My dear Sister, On Saturday- evening I went to Holland House. There I found the Dutch Ambassador, M. do Weissembourg, 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 eye- brows, 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 confine- ment 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. Perhaps I may write again to-morrow. Ever yours T. B. M: 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 171 To Hannah M. Macaulay. Library of the House of Commons July 26, 1831. My dear Sister, Here I am seated, waiting for the debate on the borough of St. Germains with a very quiet party, Lord Milton, Lord Tavistock, and George Lamb. But, instead of telling you in dramatic form ] my conversations with Cabinet Ministers, I shall, I think, go back two or three days, and complete the narrative which I left imperfect in my epistle of yesterday. At half after seven on Sunday I was set down at Littleton's palace, for such it is, in Grosvenor Place . It really is a noble house : four superb drawing-rooms on the first floor, hung round with some excellent pictures a Hobbema, (the finest by that artist in the world, it is said,) and Lawrence's charming portrait of Mrs. Littleton. The beautiful original, by the bye, did not make her appearance. We were a party of gentlemen. But such gentlemen ! Listen, and be proud of your connection with one who is admitted to eat and drink in the same room with beings so exalted. There were two Chancellors, Lord Brougham and Lord Plunket There was Earl Gower ; Lord St. Vincent ; Lord Seaford ; Lord Duncannon ; Lord Ebring- ton ; Sir James Graham ; Sir John Newport ; the two Secreta- ries of the Treasury, Rice and Ellice ; George Lamb ; Denison ; and half a dozen more Lords and distinguished Commoners, not to mention Littleton himself. Till last year he lived in Portman Square. When he changed his residence his servants gave him warning. They could not, they said, consent to go into such an unheard-of part of the world as Grosvenor Place. I can only say that I have never been in a finer house than 1 This refers to a passage in a former letter, likewise written from the Library of the House. " ' Macaulay ! ' Who calls Macaulay ? Sir James Graham. What can he have to say to me ? Take it dramatically : Sir J. G. Macaulay ! Macaulay. What? Sir J. G. Whom are you writing to, that you laugh so much over your letter ? Macaulay. To my constituents at Calne, to be sure. They expect news of the Reform Bill every day. Sir y. G. Well, writing to constituents is less of a plague to you than to most people, to judge by your face. Macaulay. How do you know that I am not writing a billet doux to a lady ? Sir y. G. You look more like it, by Jove ! Cut la r Ferguson, M.P. for Kirkcudbright. Let ladies and constituents alone, and come into the House. We are going on to the case of the borough of Great Redwin immediately." 172 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. iv. Littleton's, Lansdowne House excepted, and perhaps Lord Milton's, which is also in Grosvenor Place. He gave me a dinner of dinners. I talked with Denison, and with nobody else. I have found out that the real use of conversational powers is to put them forth in tete-a-tete. A man is flattered by your talking your best to him alone. Ten to one he is piqued by your overpowering him before a company. Denison was agreeable enough. I heard only one word from Lord Plunket, who was remarkably silent. He spoke of Doctor Thorpe, and said that, having heard the Doctor in Dublin, he should like to hear him again in London. " Nothing easier," quoth Littleton ; his chapel is only two doors off ; and he will be just mounting the pulpit." "No," said Lord Plunket ; "I can't lose my dinner." An excellent saying, though one which a less able man than Lord Plunket might have uttered. At midnight I walked away with George Lamb, and went where for a ducat? "To bed," says Miss Hannah. Nay, my sister, not so ; but to Brooks's. There I found Sir James Macdonald ; Lord Duncannon, who had left Littleton's just before us ; and many other Whigs and ornaments of human nature. As Macdonald and I were rising to depart we saw Rogers, and I went to shake hands with him. You cannot think how kind the old man was to me. He shook my hand over and over, and told me that Lord Plunket longed to see me in a quiet way. and that he would arrange a breakfast party in a day or two for that purpose. Away I went from Brooks's but whither? "To bed now, I am sure," says little Anne. No, but on a walk with Sir James Macdonald to the end of Sloane Street, talking about the Ministry, the Reform Bill, and the East India question. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. House of Commons Smoking Room : Saturday. My dear Sister, The newspapers will have explained the reason of our sitting to-day. At three this morning I left the House. At two this afternoon I have returned to it, with the thermometer at boiling heat, and four hundred and fifty people stowed together like negroes in the pious John Newton's slave- ship. I have accordingly left Sir Francis Burdett on his legs, and repaired to the smoking-room ; a large, wainscoted, un- carpeted place, with tables covered with green baize and writing materials. On a full night it is generally thronged towards twelve o'clock with smokers. It is then a perfect cloud 1830 32. LORD MACAULAY. 173 of fume. There have I seen, (tell it not to the West Indians,) Buxton blowing fire out of his mouth. My father will not believe it. At present, however, all the doors and windows are open, and the room is pure enough from tobacco to suit my father himself. Get Blackwood's new number. There is a description of me in it. What do you think he says that I am ? "A little, splay-footed, ugly, dumpling of a fellow, with a mouth from ear to ear." Conceive how such a charge must affect a man so enamoured of his own beauty as I am. I said a few words the other night. They were merely in reply, and quite unpremeditated, and were not ill received. I feel that much practice will be necessary to make me a good debater on points of detail ; but my friends tell me that I have raised my reputation by showing that I was quite equal to the work of extemporaneous reply. My manner, they say, is cold and wants care. I feel this myself. Nothing but strong ex- citement, and a great occasion, overcomes a certain reserve and mauvaise honte which I have in public speaking ; not a mauvaise honte which in the least confuses me, or makes me hesitate for a word, but which keeps me from putting any fervour into my tone or my action. This is perhaps in some respects an advantage ; for, when I do warm, I am the most vehement speaker in the House, and nothing strikes an audi- ence so much as the animation of an orator who is generally cold. I ought to tell you that Peel was very civil, and cheered me loudly ; and that impudent leering Croker congratulated the House on the proof which I had given of my readiness. He was afraid, he said, that I had been silent so long on account of the many allusions which had been made to Calne. Now that I had risen again he hoped that they should hear me oftea See whether I do not dust that varlet's jacket for him in the next number of the Blue and Yellow. I detest him more than cold boiled veal. 1 After the debate I walked about the streets with Bulwer till near three o'clock. I spoke to him about his novels with perfect sincerity, praising warmly, and criticising freely. He 1 "By the bye," Macaulay writes elsewhere, "you never saw such a scene as Croker's oration on Friday night. He abused Lord John Russell ; he abused Lord Althorp ; he abused the Lord Advocate, and we took no notice ; never once groaned or cried ' No ! ' But he began to praise Lord Fitzwilliam ; ' a venerable nobleman, an excellent and amiable nobleman,' and so forth ; and we all broke out together with ' Question ! ' ' No, no ! ' ' This is too bad ! ' ' Don't, don't ! ' He then called Canning his right honourable friend. ' Your friend ! damn your impudent face I ' said the member who sate next me." 174 L7FE AND LETTERS OF CH. IV. took the praise as a greedy boy takes apple-pie, and the criticism as a good dutiful boy takes senna-tea He has one eminent merit, that of being a most enthusiastic admirer of mine ; so that I may be the hero of a novel yet, under the name of Delamere or Mortimer. Only think what an honour ! Bulwer is to be editor of the New Monthly Magazine. He begged me very earnestly to give him something for it I would make no promises ; for I am already over head and ears in literary engagements. But I may possibly now and then send him some trifle or other. At all events I shall expect him to puff me well. I do not see why I should not have my puffers as well as my neighbours. I am glad that you have read Madame de StaeTs Allemagne. The book is a foolish one in some respects ; but it abounds with information, and shows great mental power. She was certainly the first woman of her age ; Miss Edgeworth, I think, the second ; and Miss Austen the third. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : August 29, 1831. My dear Sister, Here I am again settled, sitting up in the House of Commons till three o'clock five days in the week, and getting an indigestion at great dinners the remaining two. I dined on Saturday with Lord Altherp, and yesterday with Sir James Graham. Both of them gave me exactly the same dinner ; and, though I am not generally copious on the repasts which my hosts provide for me, I must tell you, for the honour of official hospitality, how our Ministers regale their supporters. Turtle, turbot, venison, and grouse, formed part of both en- tertainments. Lord Althorp was extremely pleasant at the head of his own table. We were a small party ; Lord Ebrington, Hawkins, Captain Spencer, Stanley, and two or three more. We all of us congratulated Lord Althorp on his good health and spirits. He told us that he never took exercise now ; that from his getting up, till four o'clock, he was engaged in the business of his office ; that at four he dined, went down to the House at five, and never stirred till the House rose, which is always after midnight ; that he then went home, took a basin of arrow-root with a glass of sherry in it, and went to bed, where he always dropped asleep in three minutes. " During the week," said he, " which followed my taking office, I did not close my eyes for anxiety. Since that time I have never been awake a quarter of 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 175 an hour after taking off my clothes." Stanley laughed at Lord Althorp's arrow-root, and recommended his own supper, cold meat and warm negus ; a supper which I will certainly begin to take when I feel a desire to pass the night with a sen- sation as if I was swallowing a nutmeg-grater every third minute. We talked about timidity in speaking. Lord Althorp said that he had only just got over his apprehensions. " I was as much afraid," he said, "last year as when first I came into Parliament. But now I am forced to speak so often that I am quite hardened. Last Thursday I was up forty times." I was not much surprised at this in Lord Althorp, as he is certainly one of the most modest men in existence. But I was surprised to hear Stanley say that he never rose without great uneasiness . " My throat and lips," he said, " when I am going to speak, are as dry as those of a man who is going to be hanged." Nothing can be more composed and cool than Stanley's manner. His fault is on that side. A little hesitation at the beginning of a speech is graceful ; and many eminent speakers have practised it, merely in order to give the appearance of unpremeditated reply to prepared speeches ; but Stanley speaks like a man who never knew what fear, or even modesty, was. Tierney, it is remarkable, who was the most ready and fluent debater almost ever known, made a confession similar to Stanley's . He never spoke, he said, without feeling his knees knock together when he rose. My opinion of Lord Althorp is extremely high. In fact, his character is the only stay of the Ministry. I doubt whether any person has ever lived in England who, with no eloquence, no brilliant talents, no profound information, with nothing in short but plain good sense and an excellent heart, possessed so much influence both in and out of Parliament His temper is an absolute miracle. He has been worse used than any Minis- ter ever was in debate ; and he has never said one thing incon- sistent, I do not say with gentlemanlike courtesy, but with real benevolence. Lord North, perhaps, was his equal in suavity and good-nature ; but Lord North was not a man of strict principles. His administration was not only an administration hostile to liberty, but it was supported by vile and corrupt means, by direct bribery, I fear, in many cases. Lord Althorp has the temper of Lord North with the principles of Romilly. If he had the oratorical powers of either of those men, he might do anything. But his understanding, though just, is slow, and his elocution painfully defective. It is, however, only justice to him to say that he has done more serv :ce to the 1 76 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IV. Reform Bill even as a debater than all the other Ministers together, Stanley excepted. We are going, by we I mean the Members of Parliament who are for reform, as soon as the Bill is through the Com- mons, to give a grand dinner to -Lord Althorp and Lord John Russell, as a mark of our respect. Some people wished to have the other Cabinet Ministers included : but Grant and Palmerston are not in sufficiently high esteem among the Whigs to be honoured with such a compliment Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : September 9, 1831. My dear Sister, I scarcely know where to begin, or where to end, my story of the magnificence of yesterday. No pageant can be conceived more splendid. The newspapers will happily save me the trouble of relating minute particulars. I will therefore give you an account of my own proceedings, and mention what struck me most. I rose at six. The cannon awaked me ; and, as soon as I got up, I heard the bells pealing on every side from all the steeples in London. I put on my court-dress, and looked a perfect Lovelace in it. At seven the glass coach, which I had ordered for myself and some of my friends, came to the door. I called in Hill Street for William Marshall, M.P. for Beverley, and in Cork Street for Strutt the Member for Derby, and Hawkins the Member for Tavistock. Our party being complete, we drove through crowds of people, and ranks of horseguards in cuirasses and helmets, to West- minster Hall, which we reached as the clock struck eight. The House of Commons was crowded, and the whole assembly was in uniform. After prayers we went out in order by lot, the Speaker going last. My county, Wiltshire, was among the first drawn ; so I got an excellent place in the Abbey, next to Lord Mahon, who is a very great favourite of mine, and a very amusing companion, though a bitter Tory. Our gallery was immediately over the great altar. The whole vast avenue of lofty pillars was directly in front of us. At eleven the guns fired, the organ struck up, and the pro- cession entered. I never saw so magnificent a scene. All down that immense vista of gloomy arches there was one blaze of scarlet and gold. First came heralds in coats stiff with embroidered lions, unicorns, and harps ; then nobles bearing the regalia, with pages in rich dresses carrying their coronets on cushions ; then the Dean and Prebendaries of Westminster 1830-32. LORD MA CAUL AY. 177 in copes of cloth of gold ; then a crowd of beautiful girls and women, or at least of girls and women who at a distance looked altogether beautiful, attending on the Queen. Her train of purple velvet and ermine was borne by six of these fair creatures. All the great officers of state in full robes, the Duke of Wel- lington with his Marshal's staff, the Duke of Devonshire with his white rod, Lord Grey with the Sword of State, and the Chancellor with his seals, came in procession. Then all the Royal Dukes with their trains borne behind them, and last the King leaning on two Bishops. I do not, I dare say, give you the precise order. In fact, it was impossible to discern any order. The whole abbey was one blaze of gorgeous dresses, mingled with lovely faces. The Queen behaved admirably, with wonderful grace and dignity. The King very awkwardly. The Duke of Devon- shire looked as if he came to be crowned instead of his master. I never saw so princely a manner and air. The Chancellor looked like Mephistopheles behind Margaret in the church. The ceremony was much too long, and some parts of it were carelessly performed. The Archbishop mumbled. The Bishop of London preached, well enough indeed, but not so effectively as the occasion required ; and, above all, the bearing of the King made the foolish parts of the ritual appear monstrously ridiculous, and deprived many of the better parts of their proper effect. Persons who were at a distance perhaps did not feel this ; but I was near enough to see every turn of his finger, and every glance of his eye. The moment of the crowning was extremely fine. When the Archbishop placed the crown on the head of the King, the trumpets sounded, and the whole audience cried out " God save the King." All the Peers and Peeresses put on their coronets, and the blaze of splendour through the Abbey seemed to be doubled. The King was then conducted to the raised throne, where the Peers succes- sively did him homage, each of them kissing his cheek, and touching the crown. Some of them were cheered, which I thought indecorous in such a place, and on such an occasion. The Tories cheered the Duke of Wellington ; and our people, in revenge, cheered Lord Grey and Brougham. You will think this a very dull letter for so great a subject : but I have only had time to scrawl these lines in order to catch the post. I have not a minute to read them over. I lost yesterday, and have been forced to work to-day. Half my article on Boswell went to Edinburgh the day before yesterday. I have, though I say it who should not say it, beaten Croker N ryS LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IV. black and blue. 1 Impudent as he is, I think he must be ashamed of the pickle in which I leave him. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : September 13, 1831. My dear Sister, I am in high spirits at the thought of soon seeing you all in London, and being again one of a family, and of a family which I love so much. It is well that one has something to love in private life ; for the aspect of public affairs is very menacing ; fearful, I think, beyond what people in general imagine. Three weeks, however, will probably settle the whole, and bring to an issue the question, Reform or Re- volution. One or the other I am certain that we must and shall have. I assure you that the violence of the people, the bigotry of the Lords, and the stupidity and weakness of the Ministers, alarm me so much that even my rest is disturbed by vexation and uneasy forebodings ; not for myself ; for I may gain, and cannot lose ; but for this noble country, which seems likely to be ruined without the miserable consolation of being ruined by great men. All seems fair as yet, and will seem fair for a fortnight longer. But I know the danger from informa- tion more accurate and certain than, I believe, anybody not in power possesses ; and I perceive, what our men in power do not perceive, how terrible the danger is. I called on Lord Lansdowne on Sunday. He told me distinctly that he expected the Bill to be lost in the Lords, and that, if it were lost, the Ministers must go out. I told him, with as much strength of expression as was suited to the nature of our connection, and to his age and rank, that, if the Ministers receded before the Lords, and hesitated to make Peers, they and the Whig party were lost ; that nothing remained but an insolent oligarchy on the one side, and an infuriated people on 1 Mr. Carlyle reviewed Croker's book in "Eraser's Magazine," a few months after the appearance of Macaulay 's article in the " Edinburgh." The two critics seem to have arrived at much the same conclusion as to the merits of the work. ' ' In fine, '' writes Mr. Carlyle, ' ' what ideas Mr. Croker entertains of a literary whole, and the thing called Book, and how the very Printer's Devils did not rise in mutiny against such a conglomeration as this, and refuse to print it, may remain a problem It is our painful duty to declare, aloud, if that be necessary, that his gift, as weighed against the hard money which the booksellers demand for giving it you, is (in our judgment) very much the lighter. No portion, accordingly, of our small floating capital has been embarked in the business, or ever shall be. Indeed, were we in the market for such a thing, there is simply no edition of Boswell to which this last would seem preferable." 1830-32. LORD MA CAUL AY. 179 the other ; and that Lord Grey and his colleagues would be- come as odious and more contemptible than Peel and the Duke of Wellington. Why did they not think of all this earlier? Why put their hand to the plough, and look back ? Why begin to build without counting the cost of finishing ? Why raise the public appetite, and then baulk it ? I told him that the House of Commons would address the King against a Tory Ministry. I feel assured that it would do so. I feel assured that, if those who are bidden will not come, the highways and hedges will be ransacked to get together a reforming Cabinet. To one thing my mind is made up. If nobody else will move an address to the Crown against a Tory Ministry, I will. Ever yours T. B. M. London : October 17, 1831. My dear Ellis, I should have written to you before, but that I mislaid your letter and forgot your direction. When shall you be in London? Of course you do not mean to sacrifice your professional business to the work of numbering the gates, and telling the towers, of boroughs in Wales. 1 You will come back, I suppose, with your head full of ten pound householders instead of i/pwe e, and of Caermarthen and Denbigh instead of Carians and Pelasgians. Is it true, by the bye, that the Commissioners are whipped on the boundaries of the boroughs by the beadles, in order that they may not forget the precise line which they have drawn ? I deny it wherever I go, and assure people that some of my friends who are in the Com- mission would not submit to such degradation. You must have been hard-worked indeed, and soundly whipped too, if you have suffered as much for the Reform Bill as we who debated it. I believe that there are fifty members of the House of Commons who have done irreparable injury to their health by attendance on the discussions of this session. I have got through pretty well, but I look forward, I confess, with great dismay to the thought of recommencing ; particularly as Wetherell's cursed lungs seem to be in as good condition as ever. I have every reason to be gratified by the manner in which my speeches have been received. To say the truth, the station which I now hold in the House is such that I should not be inclined to quit it for any place which was not of considerable importance. What you saw about my having a place was a 1 Mr. Ellis was one of the Commissioners appointed to arrange the boundaries of Parliamentary boroughs in connection with the Reform Bill. N 2 iSo LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IV. blunder of a stupid reporter's. Croker was taunting the Government with leaving me to fight their battle, and to rally their followers ; and said that the honourable and learned member for Calne, though only a practising barrister in title, seemed to be in reality the most efficient member of the Government. By the bye, my article on Croker has not only smashed his book, but has hit the Westminster Review inci- dentally. The Utilitarians took on themselves to praise the accuracy of the most inaccurate writer that ever lived, and gave as an instance of it a note in which, as I have shown, he makes a mistake of twenty years and more. John Mill is in a rage, and says that they are in a worse scrape than Croker ; John Murray says that it is a damned nuisance : and Croker looks across the House of Commons at me with a leer of hatred, which I repay with a gracious smile of pity. I am ashamed to have said so much about myself. But you asked for news about me. No request is so certain to be granted, or so certain to be a curse to him who makes it as that which you have made to me. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. London : January 9, 1832. Dear Napier, I have been so much engaged by bankrupt business, as we are winding up the affairs of many estates, that I shall not be able to send off my article about Hampden till Thursday the i2th. It will be, I fear, more than forty pages Jong. As Pascal said of his eighteenth letter, I would have made it shorter if I could have kept it longer. You must indulge me, however ; for I seldom offend in that way. It is in part a narrative. This is a sort of composition which I have never yet attempted. You will tell me, I am sure with sincerity, how you think that I succeed in it. I have said as little about Lord Nugent's book as I decently could Ever yours T. B. M. London : January 19, 1832. Dear Napier, I will try the Life of Lord Burleigh, if you will tell Longman to send me the book. However bad the work may be, it will serve as a heading for an article on the times of Elizabeth. On the whole, I thought it best not to answer Croker. Almost all the little pamphlet which he pub- lished, (or rather printed, for I believe it is not for sale,) is made up of extracts from Blackwood : and I thought that a 1830-32. LORD MACAULAY. 181 contest with your grog-drinking, cock-fighting, cudgel-playing Professor of Moral Philosophy would be too degrading. I could have demolished every paragraph of the defence. Croker defended his OVTITHI i\ot ' by quoting a passage of Euripides which, as every scholar knows, is corrupt ; which is nonsense and false metre if read as he reads it ; and which Markland and Matthiae have set right by a most obvious correction. But, as nobody seems to have read his vindication, we can gain nothing by refuting it Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. 1 " Mr. Croker has favoured us with some Greek of his own. ' At the altar," fays Dr. Johnson, ' I recommended my <.' ' These letters,' says the editor, ' (which Dr. Strahan seems not to have understood, ) probably mean 0r>,Toi i\oi. departed friends' Johnson was not a first-rate Greek scholar; but he knew more Greek than most boys when they leave school ; and no schoolboy could venture to use the word flrijToi in the sense which Mr. Croker ascribes to it without imminent danger of a flogging." Macaulay's Review of Croker's Boswell. Macaulay's opinion of Doctor Johnson, as a man and an author, may best be studied in the Life which he contributed to the Encyclopedia Britan- nica a short while before he died. Matthew Arnold paid it as sincere a com- pliment as ever was paid by a great critic, for he asked leave to reprint it at Jength as an introduction to his own " Six Chief Lives from Johnson's Lives of the Poets," in front of which it now stands. "That Life," (so Mr. Arnold says in the Preface to his book,) " is a work which shows Macaulay at his very best; a work written when his style was matured, and when his resources were in all their fulness. The subject, too, was one which he knew thoroughly, and for which he felt cordial sympathy." When Mr. Arnold applied for permis- sion to use Macaulay's article, a permission which, as far as in me lay, was gladly given, he told me that he esteemed the piece to be the most admirable Example of literary biography in our language. LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. CHAPTER V, 1832-1834. Macaulay is invited to stand for Leeds The Reform Bill passes Macaulay appointed Commissioner of the Board of Control His life in office Letters to his sisters Contested election at Leeds Macaulay's bear- ing as a candidate Canvassing Fledges Intrusion of religion into politics- -Placemen in Parliament Liverpool Margaret Macaulay's marriage How it affected her brother He is returned for Leeds Becomes Secretary of the Board of Control Letters to Hannah Macaulay Session of 1832 Macaulay's Speech on the India Bill His regard for Lord Glenelg Letters to Hannah Macaulay The West Indian question Macaulay resigns Office He gains his point, and resumes his place Emancipation of the Slaves Death of Wil- berforce Macaulay is appointed Member of the Supreme Council of India Letters to Hannah Macaulay, Lord Lansdowne, and Mr. Napier Altercation between Lord Althorp and Mr. Shiel Macau- lay's appearance before the Committee of Investigation He sails for India. DURING the earlier half of the year 1832 the vessel of Reform was still labouring heavily ; but, long before she was through the breakers, men had begun to discount the treasures which she was bringing into port. The time was fast approaching when the country would be called upon to choose its first Reformed Parliament. As if the spectacle of what was doing at West- minster did not satisfy their appetite for political excitement, the Constituencies of the future could not refrain from antici- pating the fancied pleasures of an electoral struggle. Impatient to exercise their privileges, and to show that they had as good an eye for a man as those patrons of nomination seats whose discernment was being vaunted nightly in a dozen speeches from the Opposition benches of the House of Commons, the great cities were vying with each other to seek representatives worthy of the occasion and of themselves. The Whigs of Leeds, already provided with one candidate in a member of the great local firm of the Marshalls, resolved to seek for another among the distinguished politicians of their party. As early as October 1831 Macaulay had received a requisition from that 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 183 town, and had pledged himself to stand as soon as it had been elevated into a Parliamentary borough. The Tories, on their side, brought forward Mr. Michael Sadler, the very man on whose behalf the Duke of Newcastle had done " what he liked with his own " in Newark, and, at the last general election, had done it in vain. Sadler, smarting from the lash of the Edinburgh Review, infused into the contest an amount of personal bitterness that for his own sake might better have been spared ; and, during more than a twelvemonth to come, Mac- aulay lived the life of a candidate whose own hands are full of public work at a time when his opponent has nothing to do except to make himself disagreeable. But, having once under- taken to fight the battle of the Leeds Liberals, he fought it stoutly and cheerily ; and he would have been the last to claim it as a merit, that, with numerous opportunities of a safe and easy election at his disposal, he remained faithful to the sup- porters who had been so forward to honour him with their choice. The old system died hard ; but in May 1832 came its final agony. The Reform Bill had passed the Commons, and had been read a second time in the Upper House ; but the facilities which Committee affords for maiming and delaying a measure of great magnitude and intricacy proved too much for the self- control of the Lords. The King could not bring himself to adopt that wonderful expedient by which the unanimity of the three branches of our legislature may, in the last resort, be secured. Deceived by an utterly fallacious analogy, his Majesty began to be persuaded that the path of concession would lead him whither it had led Louis the Sixteenth ; and he resolved to halt on that path at the point where his Ministers advised him to force the hands of their lordships by creating peers. The supposed warnings of the French Revolution, which had been dinned into the ears of the country by every Tory orator from Peel to Sibthorpe, at last had produced their effect on the royal imagination. Earl Grey resigned, and the Duke of Wel- lington, with a loyalty which certainly did not stand in need of such an unlucky proof, came forward to meet the storm. But its violence was too much even for his courage and constancy. He could not get colleagues to assist him in the Cabinet, or supporters to vote with him in Parliament, or soldiers to fight for him in the streets ; and it was evident that in a few days his position would be such as could only be kept by fighting. The revolution had in truth commenced. At a meeting of the political unions on the slope of Newhall Hill at Birmingham a hundred thousand voices had sung the words : 184 LIFE AND LETTERS OP CH. V. God is our guide. No swords we draw. We kindle not war's battle fires. By union, justice, reason, law, We claim the birthright of our sires. But those very men were now binding themselves by a decla- ration that, unless the Bill passed, they would pay no taxes, nor purchase property distrained by the tax-gatherer. In thus renouncing the first obligation of a citizen they did in effect draw the sword, and they would have been cravens if they had left it in the scabbard. Lord Milton did something to enhance the claim of his historic house upon the national gratitude by giving practical effect to this audacious resolve ; and, after the lapse of two centuries, another Great Rebellion, more effectual than its predecessor, but so brief and bloodless that history does not recognise it as a rebellion at all, was inaugurated by the essentially English proceeding of a quiet country gentleman telling the Collector to call again. The crisis lasted just a week. The Duke had no mind for a succession of Peterloos, on a vaster scale, and with a different issue. He advised the King to recall his Ministers ; and his Majesty, in his turn, honoured the refractory lords with a most significant circular letter, respectful in form, but unmistakable in tenor. A hundred peers of the Opposition took the hint, and contrived to be absent whenever Reform was before the House. The Bill was read for a third time by a majority of five to one on the 4th of June ; a strange, and not very complimentary, method of celebrating old George the Third's birthday. On the 5th it received the last touches in the Commons ; and on the yth it became an Act, in very much the same shape, after such and so many vicissitudes, as it wore when Lord John Russell first presented it to Parliament. Macaulay, whose eloquence had signalised every stage of the conflict, and whose printed speeches are, of all its authentic records, the most familiar to readers of our own day, was not left without his reward. He was appointed one of the Com- missioners of the Board of Control, which, for three quarters of a century from 1784 onwards, represented the Crown in its relations to the East Indian directors. His duties, like those of every individual member of a Commission, were light or heavy as he chose to make them ; but his own feeling with regard to those duties must not be deduced from the playful allusions contained in letters dashed off, during the momentary leisure of an over-busy day, for the amusement of two girls who barely numbered forty years between them. His speeches and essays teem with expressions cf a far deeper than official 1832-34. LORD MACAULAV, 185 interest in India and her people ; and his minutes remain on record, to prove that he did not affect the sentiment for a literary or oratorical purpose. The attitude of his own mind with regard to our Eastern empire is depicted in the passage on Burke, in the essay on Warren Hastings, which commences with the words, " His knowledge of India ," and concludes with the sentence, " Oppression in Bengal was to him the same thing as oppression in the streets of London." That passage, unsurpassed as it is in force of language, and splendid fidelity of detail, by anything that Macaulay ever wrote or uttered, was inspired, as all who knew him could testify, by sincere and entire sympathy with that great statesman of whose humanity and breadth of view it is the merited, and not inadequate, panegyric. In Margaret Macaulay's journal there occurs more than one mention of her brother's occasional fits of contrition on the subject of his own idleness ; but these regrets and confessions must be taken for what they are worth, and for no more. He worked much harder than he gave himself credit for. His nature was such that whatever he did was done with all his heart, and all his power ; and he was constitutionally incap- able of doing it otherwise. He always under-estimated the tension and concentration of mind which he brought to bear upon his labours, as compared with that which men in general bestow on whatever business they may have in hand ; and, to- wards the close of life, this honourable self-deception no doubt led him to draw far too largely upon his failing strength, under the impression that there was nothing unduly severe in the efforts to which he continued to brace himself with ever in- creasing difficulty. During the eighteen months that he passed at the Board of Control he had no time for relaxation, and very little for the industry which he loved the best. Giving his days to India, and his nights to the inexorable demands of the Treasury Whip, he could devote a few hours to the Edinburgh Review only by rising at five when the rules of the House of Commons had allowed him to get to bed betimes on the previous evening. Yet, under these conditions, he contrived to provide Mr. Napier with the highly finished articles on Horace Walpole and Lord Chatham, and to gratify a political opponent, who was destined to be a life-long friend, by his kindly criticism and spirited summary of Lord Mahon's " History of the War of the Suc- cession in Spain." And, in the " Friendship's Offering " of 1833, one of those mawkish annual publications of the album species which were then in fashion, appeared his poem of the 186 LIFE AND LETTERS OF cri. V. Armada ; whose swinging couplets read as if somewhat out of place in the company of such productions as " The Mysterious Stranger, or the Bravo of Banff;" "Away to the Greenwood, a song ; " and " Lines on a Window that had been frozen," beginning with, " Pellucid pane, this morn on thee My fancy shaped both tower and tree." To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay Bath : June 10, 1832. My dear Sisters, Everything has gone wrong with me. The people at Calne fixed Wednesday for my re-election on taking office ; the very day on which I was to have been at a public dinner at Leeds. I shall therefore remain here till Wednesday morning, and read Indian politics in quiet I am already deep in Zemindars, Ryots, Polygars, Courts of Phoujdary, and Courts of Nizamut Adawlut. I can tell you which of the native Powers are subsidiary, and which independent, and read you lectures of an hour on our diplomatic transactions at the courts of Lucknow, Nagpore, Hydrabad, and Poonah. At Poonah, indeed, I need not tell you that there is no court ; for the Paishwa, as you are doubtless aware, was deposed by Lord Hastings in the Pindarree War. Am I not in fair training to be as great a bore as if I had myself been in India ? that is to say, as great a bore as the greatest. I am leading my watering-place life here ; reading, writing, and walking all day ; speaking to nobody but the waiter and the chambermaid ; solitary in a great crowd, and content with solitude. I shall be in London again on Thursday, and shall also be an M.P. From that day you may send your letters as freely as ever ; and pray do not be sparing of them. Do you read any novels at Liverpool ? I should fear that the good Quakers would twitch them out of your hands, and appoint their portion in the fire. Yet probably you have some safe place, some box, some drawer with a key, wherein a marble- covered book may lie for Nancy's Sunday reading. And, if you do not read novels, what do you read ? How does Schiller go on ? I have sadly neglected Calderon : but, whenever I have a month to spare, I shall carry my conquests far and deep into Spanish literature. Ever yours T. B. M. 1832-34. LORD MACAULAY. 187 To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. London : July 2, 1832. My dear Sisters, I am, I think, a better correspondent than you two put together. I will venture to say that I have written more letters, by a good many, than I have received, and this with India and the Edinburgh Review on my hands ; the Life of Mirabeau to be criticised ; the Rajah of Travancore to be kept in order ; and the bad money, which the Emperor of the Burmese has had the impudence to send us by way of tribute, to be exchanged for better. You have nothing to do but to be good, and write. Make no excuses, for your excuses are con- tradictory. If you see sights, describe them : for then you have subjects. If you stay at home, write : for then you have time. Remember that I never saw the cemetery or the rail- road. Be particular, above all, in your accounts of the Quakers. I enjoin this especially on Nancy ; for from Meg I have no hope of extracting a word of truth. I dined yesterday at Holland House : all Lords except myself. Lord Radnor, Lord Poltimore, Lord King, Lord Russell, and his uncle Lord John. Lady Holland was very gracious, praised my article on Burleigh to the skies, and told me, among other things, that she had talked on the preceding day for two hours with Charles Grant upon religion, and had found him very liberal and tolerant. It was, I suppose, the cholera which sent her Ladyship to the only saint in the Min- istry for ghostly counsel. Poor Macdonald's case was most undoubtedly cholera. It is said that Lord Amesbury also died of cholera, though no very strange explanation seems necessary to account for the death of a man of eighty-four. Yesterday it was rumoured that the three Miss Molyneuxes, of whom by the way there are only two, were all dead in the same way ; that the Bishop of Worcester and Lord Barham were no more ; and many other foolish stories. I do not believe there is the slightest ground for uneasiness ; though Lady Holland apparently con- siders the case so serious that she has taken her conscience out of Allen's keeping, and put it into the hands of Charles Grant. Here I end my letter ; a great deal too long already for so busy a man to write, and for such careless correspondents to receive. T. B. M, 188 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. London: July 6, 1832. Be you Foxes, be you Pitts, You must write to silly chits. Be you Tories, be you Whigs, You must write to sad young gigs. On whatever board you are Treasury, Admiralty, War, Customs, Stamps, Excise, Control, Write you must, upon my soul. So sings the judicious poet : and here I sit in my parlour, look- ing out on the Thames, and divided, like Garrick in Sir Joshua's picture, between Tragedy and Comedy ; a letter to you, and a bundle of papers about Hydrabad, and the firm of Palmer and Co., late bankers to the Nizam. Poor Sir Walter Scott is going back to Scotland by sea to- morrow. All hope is over ; and he has a restless wish to die at home. He is many thousand pounds worse than nothing. Last week he was thought to be so near his end that some people went, I understand, to sound Lord Althorp about a public funeral. Lord Althorp said, very like himself, that if public money was to be laid out, it would be better to give it to the family than to spend it in one day's show. The family, however, are said to be not ill off. I am delighted to hear of your proposed tour, but not so well pleased to be told that you expect to be bad correspondents during your stay at Welsh inns. Take pens and ink with you, if you think that you shall find none at the Bard's Head, or the Glendower Arms. But it will be too bad if you send me no letters during a tour which will furnish so many subjects. Why not keep a journal, and minute down in it all that you see and hear ? and remember that I charge you, as the venerable circle charged Miss Byron, to tell me of every person who "regards you with an eye of partiality." What can I say more ? as the Indians end their letters. Did not Lady Holland tell me of some good novels ? I remember : Henry Masterton, three volumes, an amusing story and a happy termination. Smuggle it in, next time that you go to Liverpool, from some circulating library ; and deposit it in a lock-up place out of the reach of them that are clothed in drab ; and read it together at the curling hour. My article on Mirabeau will be out in the forthcoming number. I am not a good judge of my own compositions, I fear ; but I think that it will be popular. A Yankee has written 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 189 to me to say that an edition of my works is about to be pub- lished in America with my life prefixed, and that he shall be obliged to me to tell him when I was born, whom I married, and so forth. I guess I must answer him slick right away. For, as the judicious poet observes, Though a New England man lolls back in his chair, With a pipe in his mouth, and his legs in the air, Yet surely an Old England man such as I To a kinsman by blood should be civil and spry. How I run on in quotation ! But, when I begin to cite the verses of our great writers, I never can stop. Stop I must, however. Yours T. B. M. To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. London : July 18, 1832. My dear Sisters, I have heard from Napier. He speaks rapturously of my article on Dumont, 1 but sends me no money. Allah blacken his face ! as the Persians say. He has not yet paid me for Burleigh. We are worked to death in the House of Commons, and we are henceforth to sit on Saturdays. This, indeed, is the only way to get through our business. On Saturday next we shall, I hope, rise before seven, as I am engaged to dine on that day with pretty, witty Mrs. . I fell in with her at Lady Grey's great crush, and found her very agreeable. Her husband is nothing in society. Rogers has some very good stories about their domestic happiness, stories confirming a theory of mine which, as I remember, made you very angry. When they first married, Mrs. treated her husband with great respect But, when his novel came out and failed com- pletely, she changed her conduct, and has, ever since that un- fortunate publication, henpecked the poor author unmercifully. And the case, says Rogers, is the harder, because it is suspected that she wrote part of the book herself. It is like the scene in Milton where Eve, after tempting Adam, abuses him for yielding to temptation. But do you not remember how I told you that much of the love of women depended on the eminence of men ? And do you not remember how, on behalf of your sex, you resented the imputation ? 1 Dumont' s " Life of Mirabeau." See the Miscellaneous Writings of Lord Macaulay. 190 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. As to the present state of affairs, abroad and at home, I cannot sum it up better than in these beautiful lines of the poet: Peel is preaching, and Croker is lying. The cholera's raging, the people are dying. When the House is the coolest, as I am alive, The thermometer stands at a hundred and five. We debate in a heat that seems likely to burn us, Much like the three children who sang in the furnace. The disorders at Paris have not ceased to plague us : Don Pedro, I hope, is ere this on the Tagus : In Ireland no tithe can be raised by a parson : Mr. Smithers is just hanged for murder and arson : Dr. Thorpe has retired from the Lock, and 'tis said That poor little Wilks will succeed in his stead. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. London : July 21, 1832. My dear Sisters, I am glad to find that there is no chance of Nancy's turning Quaker. She would, indeed, make a queer kind of female Friend. What the Yankees will say about me I neither know nor care. I told them the dates of my birth, and of my coming into Parliament. I told them also that I was educated at Cambridge. As to my early bon-mots, my crying for holidays, my walks to school through showers of cats and dogs, I have left all those for the " Life of the late Right Honourable Thomas Babington Macaulay, with large extracts from his correspond- ence, in two volumes, by the Very Rev. J. Macaulay, Dean of Durham, and Rector of Bishopsgate, with a superb portrait from the picture by Pickersgill in the possession of the Marquis of Lansdowne." As you like my verses, I will some day or other write you a whole rhyming letter. I wonder whether any man ever wrote doggrel so easily. I run it off just as fast as my pen can move, and that is faster by about three words in a minute than any other pen that I know. This comes of a schoolboy habit of writing verses all day long. Shall I tell you the news in rhyme ? I think I will send you a regular sing-song gazette. We gained a victory last night as great as e'er was known. We beat the Opposition upon the Russian loan. They hoped for a majority, and also for our places. We won the day by seventy-nine. You should have seen their faces. 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. I 9 t Old Croker, when the shout went down our rank, looked blue with rage. You'd have said he had the cholera in the spasmodic stage. Dawson was red with ire as if his face was smeared with berries ; But of all human visages the worst was that of Herries. Though not his friend, my tender heart I own could not but feel A little for the misery of poor Sir Robert Peel. But hang the dirty Tories ! and let them starve and pine ! Huzza for the majority of glorious seventy-nine ! Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. House of Commons Smoking-Room : July 23, 1832. My dear Sisters, I am writing here, at eleven at night, in this filthiest of all filthy atmospheres, and in the vilest of all vile company ; with the smell of tobacco in my nostrils, and the ugly, hypocritical face of Lieutenant before my eyes. There he sits writing opposite to me. To whom, for a ducat ? To some secretary of an Hibernian Bible Society ; or to some old woman who gives cheap tracts, instead of blankets, to the starving peasantry of Connemara ; or to some good Protestant Lord who bullies his Popish tenants. Reject not my letter, though it is redolent of cigars and genuine pigtail ; for this is the room The room, but I think I'll describe it in rhyme, That smells of tobacco and chloride of lime. The smell of tobacco was always the same : But the chloride was brought since the cholera came. But I must return to prose, and tell you all that has fallen out since I wrote last. I have been dining with the Listers at Knightsbridge. They are in a very nice house, next, or almost next, to that which the Wilberforces had. We had quite a family party. There were George Villiers, and Hyde Villiers, and Edward Villiers. Charles was not there. George and Hyde rank very high in my opinion. I liked their behaviour to their sister much. She seems to be the pet of the whole family : and it is natural that she should be so . Their manners are softened by her presence ; and any roughness and sharp- ness which they have in intercourse with men vanishes at once. They seem to love the very ground that she treads on ; and she is undoubtedly a charming woman, pretty, clever, lively, and polite. I was asked yesterday evening to go to Sir John Burke's, to 192 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. meet another heroine who was very curious to see me. Whom do you think ? Lady Morgan. I thought, however, that, if I went, I might not improbably figure in her next novel ; and, as I am not ambitious of such an honour, I kept away. If I could fall in with her at a great party, where I could see unseen and hear unheard, I should very much like to make observations on her : but I certainly will not, if I can help it, meet her face to face, lion to lioness. That confounded, chattering , has just got into an argument about the Church with an Irish papist who has seated himself at my elbow : and they keep such a din that I cannot tell what I am writing. There they go. The Lord Lieutenant the Bishop of Derry Magee O'Connell your Bible meetings your Agitation meetings the propagation of the Gospel Maynooth College the Seed of the Woman shall bruise the Serpent's head. My dear Lieutenant, you will not only bruise, but break, my head with your clatter. Mercy ! mercy ! How- ever, here I am at the end of my letter, and I shall leave the two demoniacs to tear each other to pieces. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. Library of the H. of C. July 30, 1832, ii o'clock at night. My dear Sisters, Here I am. Daniel Whittle Harvey is speaking : the House is thin : the subject is dull : and I have stolen away to write to you. Lushington is scribbling at my side. No sound is heard but the scratching of our pens, and the ticking of the clock. We are in a far better atmosphere than in the smoking-room, whence I wrote to you last week ; and the company is more decent, inasmuch as that naval officer, whom Nancy blames me for describing in just terms, is not present By the bye, you know doubtless the lines which are in the mouth of every member of Parliament, depicting the compara- tive merits of the two rooms. They are, I think, very happy. If thou goest into the Smoking-room Three plagues will thee befall, The chloride of lime, the tobacco smoke, And the Captain who's worst of all,- The canting Sea-captain, The prating Sea-captain, The Captain who's worst of alL 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 193 If thou goest into the Library Three good things will thee befall, Very good books, and very good air, And M*c**l*y, who's best of all,- The virtuous M*c**l*y, The prudent M*c**Py, M*c**l*y who's best of all. Oh, how I am worked ! I never see Fanny from Sunday to Sunday. All my civilities wait for that blessed day ; and I have so many scores of visits to pay that I can scarcely find time for any of that Sunday reading in which, like Nancy, I am in the habit of indulging. Yesterday, as soon as I was fixed in my best and had breakfasted, I paid a round of calls to all my friends who had the cholera. Then I walked to all the clubs of which I am a member, to see the newspapers. The first of these two works you will admit to be a work of mercy ; the second, in a political man, one of necessity. Then, like a good brother, I walked under a burning sun to Kensington to ask Fanny how she did, and stayed there two hours. Then I went to Knightsbridge to call on Mrs. Lister, and chatted with her till it was time to go and dine at the Athenaeum. Then I dined, and after dinner, like a good young man, I sate and read Bishop Heber's journal till bedtime. There is a Sunday for you ! I think that I excel in the diary line. I will keep a journal like the Bishop, that my memory may " Smell sweet, and blossom in the dust." Next Sunday I am to go to Lord Lansdowne's at Richmond, so that I hope to have something to tell you. But on second thoughts I will tell you nothing, nor ever will write to you again, nor ever speak to you again. I have no pleasure in writing to undutiful sisters. Why do you not send me longer letters ? But I am at the end of my paper, so that I have no more room to scold. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. London : August 14, 1832. My dear Sisters, Our work is over at last ; not, however, till it has half killed us all. 1 On Saturday we met, for the last 1 On the 8th August, 1832, Macaulay writes to Lord Mahon : " We are now strictly on duty. No furloughs even for a dinner engagement, or a sight of Taglioni's legs, can be obtained. It is very hard to keep forty members in the House. Sibthorpe and Leader are on the watch to count us out ; and from six till two we never venture further than the smoking-room without apprehen- O 194 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. time, I hope, on business. When the House rose, I set off for Holland House. We had a small party, but a very dis- tinguished one. Lord Grey, the Chancellor, Lord Palmerston, Luttrell, and myself were the only guests. Allen was of course at the end of the table, carving the dinner and sparring with my Lady. The dinner was not so good as usual ; for the French cook was ill ; and her Ladyship kept up a continued lamenta- tion during the whole repast. I should never have found out that everything was not as it should be but for her criticisms. The soup was too salt ; the cutlets were not exactly comme il faut ; and the pudding was hardly enough boiled. I was amused to hear from the splendid mistress of such a house the same sort of apologies which made when her cook forgot the joint, and sent up too small a dinner to table. I told Luttrell that it was a comfort to me to find that no rank was exempted from these afflictions. They talked about 's marriage. Lady Holland vehe- mently defended the match ; and, when Allen said that had caught a Tartar, she quite went off into one of her tan- trums : " She a Tartar ! Such a charming girl a Tartar ! He is a very happy man, and your language is insufferable : insuf- ferable, Mr. Allen." Lord Grey had all the trouble in the world to appease her. His influence, however, is very great. He prevailed on her to receive Allen again into favour, and to let Lord Holland have a slice of melon, for which he had been petitioning most piteously, but which she had steadily refused on account of his gout Lord Holland thanked Lord Grey for his intercession. " Ah, Lord Grey, I wish you were always here. It is a fine thing to be Prime Minister." This tattle is worth nothing, except to show how much the people whose names will fill the history of our times resemble, in all essential matters, the quiet folks who live in Mecklenburg Square and Brunswick Square. I slept in the room which was poor Mackintosh's. The next day, Sunday, - - came to dinner. He scarcely ever speaks in the society of Holland House. Rogers, who is the bitterest and most cynical observer of little traits of character that ever I knew, once said to me of him : " Observe that man. He never talks to men ; he never talks to girls ; but, when he can get into a circle of old tabbies, he is just in his sion. In spite of all our exertions, the end of the Session seems further and further off every day. If you would do me the favour of inviting Sibthorpe to Chevening Park you might be the means of saving my life, and that of thirty or forty more of us, who are forced to swallow the last dregs of the oratory of this Parliament ; and nauseous dregs they are." 1832-34- LORD MAC A UL AY. 195 element. He will sit clacking with an old woman for hours together. That always settles my opinion of a young fellow." I am delighted to find that you like my review on Mirabeau, though I am angry with Margaret for grumbling at my Scrip- tural allusions, and still more angry with Nancy for denying my insight into character. It is one of my strong points. If she knew how far I see into hers, she would be ready to hang herself. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay. London : August 16, 1832. My dear Sisters, We begin to see a hope of liberation. To-morrow, or on Saturday at furthest, we hope to finish our business. I did not reach home till four this morning, after a most fatiguing and yet rather amusing night. What passed will not find its way into the papers, as the gallery was locked during most of the time. So I will tell you the story. There is a bill before the House prohibiting those proces- sions of Orangemen which have excited a good deal of irritation in Ireland. This bill was committed yesterday night. Shaw, the Recorder of Dublin, an honest man enough, but a bitter Protestant fanatic, complained that it should be brought forward so late in the Session. Several of his friends, he said, had left London believing that the measure had been abandoned. It appeared, however, that Stanley and Lord Althorp had given fair notice of their intention ; so that, if the absent members had been mistaken, the fault was their own ; and the House was for going on. Shaw said warmly that he would resort to all the means of delay in his power, and moved that the chair- man should leave the chair. The motion was negatived by forty votes to two. Then the first clause was read. Shaw divided the House again on that clause. He was beaten by the same majority. He moved again that the chairman should leave the chair. He was beaten again. He divided on the second clause. He was beaten again. He then said that he was sensible that he was doing very wrong ; that his conduct was unhandsome and vexatious ; that he heartily begged our pardons ; but that he had said that he would delay the bill as far as the forms of the House would permit ; and that he must keep his word. Now came a discussion by which Nancy, if she had been in the ventilator, ' might have been greatly edified, touching the nature of vows ; whether a man's promise given 1 A circular ventilator, in the roof of the House of Commons, was the only Ladies' Gallery that existed in the year 1832. O 2 196 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. to himself, a promise from which nobody could reap any advantage, and which everybody wished him to violate, con- stituted an obligation. Jephtha's daughter was a case in point, and was cited by somebody sitting near me. Peregrine Courtenay on one side of the House, and Lord Palmerston on the other, attempted to enlighten the poor Orangeman on the question of casuistry. They might as well have preached to any madman out of St Luke's. " I feel," said the silly creature, " that I am doing wrong, and acting very unjustifiably. If gentlemen will forgive me, I will never do so again. But I must keep my word." We roared with laughter every time he repeated his apologies. The orders of the House do not enable any person absolutely to stop the progress of a bill in Committee, but they enable him to delay it grievously. We divided seventeen times, and between every division this vexatious Irishman made us a speech of apologies and self-condemnation. Of the two who had supported him at the beginning of his freak one soon sneaked away. The other, Sibthorpe, stayed to the last, not expressing remorse like Shaw, but glorying in the unaccom- modating temper he showed and in the delay which he pro- duced. At last the bill went through. Then Shaw rose ; congratulated himself that his vow was accomplished ; said that the only atonement he could make for conduct so unjustifiable was to vow that he would never make such a vow again ; promised to let the bill go through its future stages without any more divisions ; and contented himself with suggesting one or two alterations in the details. "I hint at these amendments," he said. " If the Secretary for Ireland approves of them, I hope he will not refrain from introducing them because they are brought forward by me. I am sensible that I have forfeited all claim to the favour of the House. I will not divide on any future stage of the bill." We were all heartily pleased with these events : for the truth was that the seventeen divisions occupied less time than a real hard debate would have done, and were in- finitely more amusing. The oddest part of the business is that Shaw's frank good-natured way of proceeding, absurd as it was, has made him popular. He was never so great a favourite with the House as after harassing it for two or three hours with the most frivolous opposition. This is a curious trait of the House of Commons. Perhaps you will find this long story, which I have not time to read over again, very stupid and unintelligible. But I have thought it my duty to set before you the evil consequences of making vows rashly, and adhering to them superstitiously ; for in truth, my Christian brethren, or rather my Christian sisters, let us consider &c. &c. &c. 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 19? But I reserve the sermon on promises, which I had intended to preach, for another occasion. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah and Margaret Macaulay London : August 17, 1832. My dear Sisters, I brought down my story of Holland House to dinner-time on Saturday evening. To resume my narrative, I slept there on Sunday night. On Monday morning, after breakfast, I walked to town with Luttrell, whom I found a delightful companion. Before we went, we sate and chatted with Lord Holland in the library for a quarter of an hour. He was very entertaining. He gave us an account of a visit which he paid long ago to the Court of Denmark ; and of King Christian, the madman, who was at last deprived of all real share in the government on account of his infirmity. " Such a Tom of Bedlam I never saw," said Lord Holland. " One day the Neapolitan Ambassador came to the levee, and made a profound bow to his Majesty. His Majesty bowed still lower. The Neapolitan bowed down his head almost to the ground ; when, behold ! the King clapped his hands on his Excellency's shoulders, and jumped over him like a boy playing at leap-frog. Another day the English Ambassador was sitting opposite the King at dinner. His Majesty asked him to take wine. The glasses were filled. The Ambassador bowed, and put the wine to his lips. The King grinned hideously and threw his wine into the face of one of the footmen. The other guests kept the most profound gravity : but the Englishman, who had but lately come to Copenhagen, though a practised diplomatist, could not help giving some signs of astonishment. The King immediately addressed him in French : ' Eh, mais, Monsieur 1'Envoye d'Angleterre, qu'avez-vous done ? Pourquoi riez- vous? Est-ce qu'il y ait quelque chose qui vous ait diverti? Faites-moi le plaisir de me 1'indiquer. J'aime beaucoup les ridicules.'" Parliament is up at last. We official men are now left alone at the West End of London, and are making up for our long confinement in the mornings by feasting together at night. On Wednesday I dined with Labouchere at his official residence in Somerset House. It is well that he is a bachelor : for he tells me that the ladies his neighbours make bitter complaints of the unfashionable situation in which they are cruelly obliged to reside gratis. Yesterday I dined with Will Brougham, and an official party, in Mount Street. We are going to establish a Clubj lg8 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. to be confined to members of the House of Commons in place under the present Government, who are to dine together weekly at Grillon's Hotel, and to settle the affairs of the State better, I hope, than our masters at their Cabinet dinners. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : September 20, 1832. My dear Sister, I am at home again from Leeds, where everything is going on as well as possible. I, and most of my friends, feel sanguine as to the result. About half my day was spent in speaking, and hearing other people speak ; in squeezing and being squeezed ; in shaking hands with people whom I never saw before, and whose faces and names I forget within a minute after being introduced to them. The rest was passed in conversation with my leading friends, who are very honest substantial manufacturers. They feed me on roast beef and Yorkshire pudding ; at night they put me into capital bedrooms ; and the only plague which they give me is that they are always begging me to mention some food or wine for which I have a fancy, or some article of comfort and convenience which I may wish them to procure. I travelled to town with a family of children who ate with- out intermission from Market Harborough, where they got into the coach, to the Peacock at Islington, where they got out of it. They breakfasted as if they had fasted all the preceding day. They dined as if they had never breakfasted. They ate on the road one large basket of sandwiches, another of fruit, and a boiled fowl : besides which there was not an orange-girl, an old man with cakes, or a boy with filberts, who came to the coach-side when we stopped to change horses, of whom they did not buy something. I am living here by myself with no society, or scarcely any, except my books. I read a play of Calderon before I breakfast ; then look over the newspaper ; frank letters ; scrawl a line or two to a foolish girl in Leicestershire ; and walk to my Office. There I stay till near five, examining claims of money-lenders on the native sovereigns of India, and reading Parliamentary papers. I am beginning to understand something about the Bank, and hope, when next I go to Rothley Temple, to be a match for the whole firm of Mansfield and Babington on ques- tions relating to their own business. When I leave the Board, I walk for two hours ; then I dine ; and I end the day quietly over a basin of tea and a novel. 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 199 On Saturday I go to Holland House, and stay there till Monday. Her Ladyship wants me to take up my quarters almost entirely there ; but I love my own chambers and in- dependence, and am neither qualified nor inclined to succeed Allen in his post. On Friday week, that is to-morrow week, I shall go for three days to Sir George Philips's, at Weston, in Warwickshire. He has written again in terms half complaining ; and, though I can ill spare time for the visit, yet, as he was very kind to me when his kindness was of some consequence to me, I cannot, and will not, refuse. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay London : September 25, 1832. My dear Sister, I went on Saturday to Holland House, and stayed there Sunday. It was legitimate Sabbath employ- ment, visiting the sick, which, as you well know, always stands first among the works of mercy enumerated in good books. My Lord was ill, and my Lady thought herself so. He was, during the greater part of the day, in bed. For a few hours he lay on his sofa, wrapped in flannels. I sate by him about twenty minutes, and was then ordered away. He was very weak and languid ; and, though the torture of the gout was over, was still in pain : but he retained all his courage, and all his sweetness of temper. I told his sister that I did not think that he was suffering much. " I hope not," said she ; " but it is impossible to judge by what he says ; for through the sharpest pain of the attack he never complained." I admire him more, I think, than any man whom I know. He is only fifty-seven, or fifty-eight. He is precisely the man to whom health would be particularly valuable : for he has the keenest zest for those pleasures which health would enable him to enjoy. He is, however, an invalid, and a cripple. He passes some weeks of every year in extreme torment. When he is in his best health he can only limp a hundred yards in a day. Yet he never says a cross word. The sight of him spreads good humour over the face of every one who comes near him. His sister, an excellent old maid as ever lived, and the favourite of all the young people of her acquaintance, says that it is quite a pleasure to nurse him. She was reading the "Inheri- tance " to him as he lay in bed, and he enjoyed it amazingly. She is a famous reader ; more quiet and less theatrical than most famous readers, and therefore the fitter for the bed-side of a sick man. Her Ladyship had fretted herself into being ill, 200 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. v. could eat nothing but the breast of a partridge, and was frightened out of her wits by hearing a dog howl. She was sure that this noise portended her death, or my Lord's. Towards the evening, however, she brightened up, and was in very good spirits. My visit was not very lively. They dined at four, and the company was, as you may suppose at this season, but scanty. Charles Greville, commonly called, heaven knows why, Punch Greville, came on the Saturday. Byng, named from his hair Poodle Byng, came on the Sunday. Allen, like the poor, we had with us always. I was grateful, however, for many pleasant evenings passed there when London was full, and Lord Holland out of bed. I therefore did my best to keep the house alive. I had the library and the delightful gardens to myself during most of the day, and I got through my visit very well News you have in the papers. Poor Scott is gone, and I cannot be sorry for it. A powerful mind in ruins is the most heart-breaking thing which it is possible to conceive. Ferdinand of Spain is gone too ; and, I fear, old Mr. Stephen is going fast. I am safe at Leeds. Poor Hyde Villiers is very ill. I am seriously alarmed about him. Kindest love to all Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. Weston House : September 29, 1832. My dear Sister, I came hither yesterday, and found a handsome house, pretty grounds, and a very kind host and hostess. The house is really very well planned. I do not know that I have ever seen so happy an imitation of the domestic architecture of Elizabeth's reign. The oriels, towers, terraces, and battlements are in the most perfect keeping ; and the building is as convenient within as it is picturesque without. A few weather-stains, or a few American creepers, and a little ivy, would make it perfect : and all that will come, I suppose, with time. The terrace is my favourite spot. I always liked " the trim gardens " of which Milton speaks, and thought that Brown and his imitators went too far in bringing forests and sheep-walks up to the very windows of drawing-rooms. I came through Oxford. It was as beautiful a day as the second day of our visit, and the High Street was in all its glory. But it made me quite sad to find myself there without you and Margaret. All my old Oxford associations are gone. Oxford, instead of being, as it used to be, the magnificent old city of the seventeenth century, still preserving its antique 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 201 character among the improvements of modern times, and ex- hibiting in the midst of upstart Birminghams and Manchesters the same aspect which it wore when Charles held his court at Christchurch, and Rupert led his cavalry over Magdalene Bridge, is now to me only the place where I was so happy with my little sisters. But I was restored to mirth, and even to indecorous mirth, by what happened after we had left the fine old place behind us. There was a young fellow of about five- and-twenty, mustachioed and smartly dressed, in the coach with me. He was not absolutely uneducated : for he was reading a novel, the Hungarian Brothers, the whole way. We rode, as I told you, through the High Street. The coach stopped to dine ; and this youth passed half an hour in the midst of that city of palaces. He looked about him with his mouth open, as he re-entered the coach, and all the while that we were driving away past the Ratcliffe Library, the Great Court of All Souls, Exeter, Lincoln, Trinity, Balliol, and St. John's. When we were about a mile on the road he spoke the first words that I had heard him utter. " That was a pretty town enough. Pray, sir, what is it called ? " I could not answer him for laughing ; but he seemed quite unconscious of his own absurdity. Ever yours T. B. M. During all the period covered by this correspondence the town of Leeds was alive with the agitation of a turbulent, but not very dubious, contest. Macaulay's relations with the electors whose votes he was courting are too characteristic to be omitted altogether from the story of his life ; though the style of his speeches and manifestoes is more likely to excite the admiring envy of modern members of Parliament, than to be taken as a model for their communications to their own constituents. This young politician, who depended on office for his bread, and on a seat in the House of Commons for office, adopted from the first an attitude of high and almost peremptory independence which would have sat well on a Prime Minister in his grand climacteric. The following letter, (some passages of which have been here omitted, and others slightly condensed,) is strongly marked in every line with the personal qualities of the writer. London : August 3, 1832. " My dear Sir, I am truly happy to find that the opinion of my friends at Leeds on the subject of canvassing agrees with that which I have long entertained. The practice of begging for votes 202 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. is, as it seems to me, absurd, pernicious, and altogether at variance with the true principles of representative government. The suffrage of an elector ought not to be asked, or to be given as a personal favour. It is as much for the interest of constituents to choose well, as it can be for the interest of a candidate to be chosen. To request an honest man to vote according to his conscience is super- fluous. To request him to vote against his conscience is an insult The practice of canvassing is quite reasonable under a system in which men are sent to Parliament to serve themselves. It is the height of absurdity under a system under which men are sent to Parliament to serve the public. While we had only a mock repre- sentation, it was natural enough that this practice should be carried to a great extent. I trust it will soon perish with the abuses from which it sprung. I trust that the great and intelligent body of people who have obtained the elective franchise will see that seats in the House of Commons ought not to be given, like rooms in an almshouse, to urgency of solicitation ; and that a man who sur- renders his vote to caresses and supplications forgets his duty as much as if he sold it for a bank-note. I hope to see the day when an Englishman will think it as great an affront to be courted and fawned upon in his capacity of elector as in his capacity of juryman. He would be shocked at the thought of finding an unjust verdict because the plaintiff or the defendant had been very civil and pressing; and, if he would reflect, he would, I think, be equally shocked at the thought of voting for a candidate for whose public character he felt no esteem, merely because that candidate had called upon him, and begged very hard, and had shaken his hand very warmly. My conduct is before the electors of Leeds. My opinions shall on all occasions be stated to them with perfect frank- ness. If they approve that conduct, if they concur in those opinions, they ought, not for my sake, but for their own, to choose me as their member. To be so chosen, I should indeed consider as a high and enviable honour; but I should think it no honour to be returned to Parliament by persons who, thinking me destitute of the requisite qualifications, had yet been wrought upon by cajolery and importunity to poll for me in despite of their better judgment. " I wish to add a few words touching a question which has lately been much canvassed ; I mean the question of pledges. In this letter, and in every letter which I have written to my friends at Leeds, I have plainly declared my opinions. But I think it, at this conjuncture, my duty to declare that I will give no pledges. I will not bind myself to make or to support any particular motion. I will state as shortly as I can some of the reasons which have in- duced me to form this determination. The great beauty of the representative system is, that it unites the advantages of popular control with the advantages arising from a division of labour. Just as a physician understands medicine better than an ordinary man, just as a shoemaker makes shoes better than an ordinary man, so a person whose life is passed in transacting affairs of State becomes a better statesman than an ordinary man. In politics, as well as 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 203 every other department of life, the public ought to have the means of checking those who serve it. If a man finds that he derives no benefit from the prescription of his physician, he calls in another. If his shoes do not fit him, he changes his shoemaker. But when he has called in a physician of whom he hears a good report, and whose general practice he believes to be judicious, it would be absurd in him to tie down that physician to order particular pills and particular draughts. While he continues to be the customer of a shoemaker, it would be absurd in him to sit by and mete every motion of that shoemaker's hand. And in the same manner, it would, I think, be absurd in him to require positive pledges, and to exact daily and hourly obedience, from his representative. My opinion is, that electors ought at first to choose cautiously ; then to confide liberally ; and, when the term for which they have selected their member has expired, to review his conduct equitably, and to pronounce on the whole taken together. " If the people of Leeds think proper to repose in me that con- fidence which is necessary to the proper discharge of the duties of a representative, I hope that I shall not abuse it. If it be their pleasure to fetter their members by positive promises, it is in their power to do so. I can only say that on such terms I cannot con- scientiously serve them. " 1 hope, and feel assured, that the sincerity with which I make this explicit declaration, will, if it deprive me of the votes of my friends at Leeds, secure to me what I value far more highly, their esteem. " Believe me ever, my dear Sir, " Your most faithful Servant, " T. B. MACAULAY." This frank announcement, taken by many as a slight, and by some as a downright challenge, produced remonstrances which, after the interval of a week, were answered by Macaulay in a second letter ; worth reprinting if it were only for the sake of his fine parody upon the popular cry which for two years past had been the watchword of Reformers. " I was perfectly aware that the avowal of my feelings on the subject of pledges was not likely to advance my interest at Leeds. I was perfectly aware that many of my most respectable friends were likely to differ from me : and therefore I thought it the more necessary to make, uninvited, an explicit declaration of my feelings. If ever there was a time when public men were in an especial measure bound to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, to the people, this is that time. Nothing is easier than for a candidate to avoid unpopular topics as long as possible, and, when they are forced on him, to take refuge in evasive and unmean- ing phrases. Nothing is easier than for him to give extravagant promises while an election is depending, and to forget them as soon as the return is made. I will take no such course. I do not 204 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. wish to obtain a single vote on false pretences. Under the old system I have never been the flatterer of the great. Under the new system I will not be the flatterer of the people. The truth, or what appears to me to be such, may sometimes be distasteful to those whose good opinion I most value. I shall nevertheless always abide by it, and trust to their good s'ense, to their second thoughts, to the force of reason, and the progress of time. If, after all, their decision should be unfavourable to me, I shall submit to that decision with fortitude and good humour. It is not necessary to my happiness that I should sit in Parliament ; but it is necessary to my happiness that I should possess, in Parliament or out of Parliament, the consciousness of having done what is right." Macaulay had his own ideas as to the limits within which constituents are justified in exerting their privilege of question- ing a candidate ; and, on the first occasion when those limits were exceeded, he made a notable example of the transgressor. During one of his public meetings, a voice was heard to exclaim from the crowd in the body of the hall : " An elector wishes to know the religious creed of Mr. Marshall and Mr. Macaulay." The last-named gentleman was on his legs in a moment. " Let that man stand up ! " he cried. " Let him stand on a form, where I can see him ! " The offender, who proved to be a Methodist preacher, was hoisted on to a bench by his indignant neighbours ; nerving himself even in that terrible moment by a lingering hope that he might yet be able to hold his own. But the unhappy man had not a chance against Macaulay, who harangued him as if he were the living embodiment of religious intolerance and illegitimate curiosity. " I have heard with the greatest shame and sorrow the question which has been pro- posed to me ; and with peculiar pain do I learn that this question was proposed by a minister of religion. I do most deeply regret that any person should think it necessary to make a meeting like this an arena for theological discussion. I will not be a party to turning this assembly to such a purpose. My answer is short, and in one word. Gentlemen, I am a Christian." At this declaration the delighted audience began to cheer; but Macaulay would have none of their applause. " This is no subject," he said, " for acclamation. I will say no more. No man shall speak of me as the person who, when this disgraceful inquisition was entered upon in an assembly of Englishmen, brought forward the most sacred subjects to be canvassed here, and be turned into a matter for hissing or for cheering. If on any future occasion it should happen that Mr. Carlile should favour any large meeting with his infidel attacks upon the Gospel, he shall not have it to say that I set the example. Gentlemen, I have done ; I tell you, I will say no more ; and if the person 1832-34. LORD MACAULAY. 205 who has thought fit to ask this question has the feelings worthy of a teacher of religion, he will not, I think, rejoice that he has called me forth." This ill-fated question had been prompted by a report, diligently spread through the town, that the Whig candidates were Unitarians ; a report which, even if correct, would pro- bably have done little to damage their electioneering prospects. There are few general remarks which so uniformly hold good as the observation that men are not willing to attend the religious worship of people who believe less than themselves, or to vote at elections for people who believe more than them- selves. While the congregations at a high Anglican service are in part composed of Low churchmen and Broad churchmen ; while Presbyterians and Wesleyans have no objection to a sound discourse from a divine of the Establishment ; it is seldom the case that any but Unitarians are seen inside a Uni- tarian chapel On the other hand, at the general election of 1874, when not a solitary Roman Catholic was returned through- out the length and breadth of the island of Great Britain, the Unitarians retained their long acknowledged pre-eminence as the most over- represented sect in the kingdom. While Macaulay was stern in his refusal to gratify his electors with the customary blandishments, he gave them plenty of excellent political instruction ; which he conveyed to them in rhetoric, not premeditated with the care that alone makes speeches readable after a lapse of years, but for this very reason all the more effective when the passion of the moment was pouring itself from his lips in a stream of faultless, but unstudied, sentences. A course of mobs, which turned Cobden into an orator, made of Macaulay a Parliamentary debater ; and the ear and eye of the House of Commons soon detected, in his replies from the Treasury bench, welcome signs of the in- valuable training that can be got nowhere except on the hustings and the platform. There is no better sample of Macaulay's extempore speaking than the first words which he addressed to his committee at Leeds after the Reform Bill had received the Royal assent " I find it difficult to express my gratification at seeing such an assembly convened at such a time. All the history of our own country, all the history of other countries, furnishes nothing parallel to it Look at the great events in our own former history, and in every one of them, which, for im- portance, we can venture to compare with the Reform Bill, we shall find something to disgrace and tarnish the achievement It was by the assistance of French arms and of Roman bulls that King John was harassed into giving the Great Charter. 206 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH.Y. In the times of Charles I., how much injustice, how much crime, how much bloodshed and misery, did it cost to assert the liberties of England ! But in this event, great and im- portant as it is in substance, I confess I think it still more important from the manner in which it has been achieved. Other countries have obtained deliverances equally signal and complete, but in no country has that deliverance been obtained with such perfect peace ; so entirely within the bounds of the Constitution ; with all the forms of law observed ; the govern- ment of the country proceeding in its regular course ; every man going forth unto his labour until the evening. France boasts of her three days of July, when her people rose, when barricades fenced the streets, and the entire population of the capital in arms successfully vindicated their liberties. They boast, and justly, of those three days of July ; but I will boast of our ten days of May. We, too, fought a battle, but it was with moral arms. We, too, placed an impassable barrier be- tween ourselves and military tyranny ; but we fenced ourselves only with moral barricades. Not one crime committed, not one acre confiscated, not one life lost, not one instance of outrage or attack on the authorities or the laws. Our victory has not left a single family in mourning. Not a tear, not a drop of blood, has sullied the pacific and blameless triumph of a great people. ' The Tories of Leeds, as a last resource, fell to denouncing Macaulay as a placeman : a stroke of superlative audacity in a party which, during eight-and-forty years, had been out of office for only fourteen months. It may well be imagined that he found plenty to say in his own defence. " The only charge which malice can prefer against me is that I am a placeman. Gentle- men, is it your wish that those persons who are thought worthy of the public confidence should never possess the confidence of the King ? Is it your wish that no men should be Ministers but those whom no populous places will take as their repre- sentatives ? By whom, I ask, has the Reform Bill been carried ? By Ministers. Who have raised Leeds into the situation to return members to Parliament ? It is by the strenuous efforts of a patriotic Ministry that that great result has been produced. I should think that the Reform Bill had done little for the people, if under it the service of the people was not consistent with the service of the Crown." Just before the general election Hyde Villiers died, and the Secretaryship to the Board of Control became vacant. Macaulay succeeded his old college friend in an office that gave him weighty responsibility, defined duties, and, as it 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 207 chanced, exceptional opportunities for distinction. About the same time, an event occurred which touched him more nearly than could any possible turn of fortune in the world of politics. His sisters Hannah and Margaret had for some months been almost domesticated among a pleasant nest of villas which lie in the southern suburb of Liverpool, on Dingle Bank : a spot whose natural beauty nothing can spoil, until in the fulness of time its inevitable destiny shall convert it into docks. The young ladies were the guests of Mr. John Cropper, who belonged to the Society of Friends, a circumstance which readers who have got thus far into the Macaulay correspon- dence will doubtless have discovered for themselves. Before the visit was over, Margaret became engaged to the brother of her host, Mr. Edward Cropper, a man in every respect worthy of the personal esteem and the commercial prosperity which have fallen to his lot. There are many who will be surprised at finding in Mac- aulay's letters, both now and hereafter, indications of certain traits in his disposition with which the world, knowing him only through his political actions and his published works, may perhaps be slow to credit him ; but which, taking his life as a whole, were predominant in their power to affect his happiness and give matter for his thoughts. Those who are least partial to him will allow that his was essentially a virile intellect. He wrote, he thought, he spoke, he acted, like a man. The public regarded him as an impersonation of vigour, vivacity, and self- reliance ; but his own family, together with one, and probably only one, of his friends, knew that his affections were only too tender, and his sensibilities only too acute. Others may well be loth to parade what he concealed ; but a portrait of Mac- aulay, from which these features were omitted, would be im- perfect to the extent of misrepresentation : and it must be acknowledged that, where he loved, he loved more entirely, and more exclusively, than was well for himself. It was im- provident in him to concentrate such intensity of feeling upon relations who, however deeply they were attached to him, could not always be in a position to requite him with the whole of their time, and the whole of their heart. He suffered much for that improvidence ; but he was too just and too kind to permit that others should suffer with him ; and it is not for one who obtained by inheritance a share of his inestimable affection to regret a weakness to which he considers himself by duty bound to refer. How keenly Macaulay felt the separation from his sister it is impossible to do more than indicate. He never again 208 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. recovered that tone of thorough boyishness, which had been produced by a long unbroken habit of gay and affectionate intimacy with those younger than himself ; indulged in without a suspicion on the part of any concerned that it was in its very nature transitory and precarious. . For the first time he was led to doubt whether his scheme of life was indeed a wise one ; or, rather, he began to be aware that he had never laid out any scheme of life at all. But with that unselfishness which was the key to his character and to much of his career, (resembling in its quality what we sometimes admire in a woman, rather than what we ever detect in a man,) he took successful pains to conceal his distress from those over whose happiness it otherwise could not have failed to cast a shadow. "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?" Fo Hannah M. Macaulay. Leeds : December 12, 1832. My dear Sister, The election here is going on as well as possible. To-day the poll stands thus : Marshall Macaulay Sadler 1,804 1,792 i,353 The probability is that Sadler will give up the contest. If he 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 209 persists, he will be completely beaten. The voters are under 4,000 in number; those who have already polled are 3,100; and about five hundred will not poll at all. Even if we were not to bring up another man, the probability is that we should win. On Sunday morning early I hope to be in London ; and I shall see you in the course of the day. I had written thus far when your letter was delivered to me. I am sitting in the midst of two hundred friends, all mad with exultation and party spirit, all glorying over the Tories, and thinking me the happiest man in the world. And it is all that I can do to hide my tears, and to command my voice, when it is necessary for me to reply to their congratulations. Dearest, dearest sister, you alone are now left to me. Whom have I on earth but thee ? But for you, in the midst of all these suc- cesses, I should wish that I were lying by poor Hyde Villiers. But I cannot go on. I am wanted to write an address to the electors : and I shall lay it on Sadler pretty heavily. By what strange fascination is it that ambition and resentment exercise such power over minds which ought to be superior to them ? I despise myself for feeling so bitterly towards this fellow as I do. But the separation from dear Margaret has jarred my whole temper. I am cried up here to the skies as the most affable and kind-hearted of men, while I feel a fierceness and restless- ness within me, quite new, and almost inexplicable. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : December 24, 1832. My dear Sister, I am much obliged to you for your letter, and am gratified by all its contents, except what you say about your own cough. As soon as you come back, you shall see Dr. Chambers, if you are not quite well. Do not oppose me in this : for I have set my heart on it. I dined on Saturday at Lord Essex's in Belgrave Square. But never was there such a take-in. I had been given to understand that his Lordship's cuisine was superintended by the first French artists, and that I should find there all the luxuries of the Almanach des Gour- mands. What a mistake ! His lordship is luxurious, indeed, but in quite a different way. He is a true Englishman. Not a dish on his table but what Sir Roger de Coverley, or Sir Hugh Tyrold, 1 might have set before his guests. A huge haunch of venison on the sideboard ; a magnificent piece of beef at the bottom of the table ; and before my Lord himself 1 The uncle of Miss Barney's Camilla. 2io LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. smoked, not a dindon aux truffes, but a fat roasted goose stuffed with sage and onions. I was disappointed, but very agreeably ; for my tastes are, I fear, incurably vulgar, as you may perceive by my fondness for Mrs. Meeke's novels. Our party consisted of Sharp ; Lubbock ; Watson, M.P. for Canterbury ; and Rich, the author of " What will the Lords do ? " who wishes to be M. P. for Knaresborough. Rogers was to have been of the party ; but his brother chose that very day to die upon, so that poor Sam had to absent himself. The Chancellor was also invited, but he had scampered off to pass his Christmas with his old mother in Westmoreland. We had some good talk, particularly about Junius's Letters. I learned some new facts which I will tell you when we meet. I am more and more inclined to believe that Francis was one of the people principally concerned. Ever yours T. B. M. On the 29th of January, 1833, commenced the first Session of the Reformed Parliament. The main incidents of that Session, so fruitful in great measures of public utility, belong to general history ; if indeed Clio herself is not fated to succumb beneath the stupendous undertaking of turning Hansard into a narrative imbued with human interest. O'Connell, criticising the King's speech at vast length, and passing in turns through every mood from the most exquisite pathos to downright and undisguised ferocity, at once plunged the House into a dis- cussion on Ireland, which alternately blazed and smouldered through four livelong nights. Sheil and Grattan spoke finely ; Peel and Stanley admirably ; Bulwer made the first of his suc- cesses, and Cobbett the second of his failures ; but the longest and the loudest cheers were those which greeted each of the glowing periods in which Macaulay, as the champion of the Whig party, met the great agitator face to face with high, but not intemperate, defiance. 1 In spite of this flattering reception, 1 "We are called base, and brutal, and bloody. Such are the epithets which the honourable and learned member for Dublin thinks it becoming to pour forth against the party to which he owes every political privilege that he enjoys. The time will come when history will do justice to the Whigs of England, and will faithfully relate how much they did and suffered for Ireland. I see on the benches near me men who might, by uttering one word against Catholic Emancipation. nay, by merely abstaining from uttering a word in favour of Catholic Emancipation, have been returned to this House without difficulty or expense, and who, rather than wrong their Irish fellow-subjects, were content to relinquish all the objects of their honourable ambition, and to retire into private life with conscience and fame untarnished. As to one eminent person, who seems to be regarded with especial malevolence by those 1832-34. LORD MAC A UL AY. 21 1 he seldom addressed the House. A subordinate member of a Government, with plenty to do in his own department, finds little temptation, and less encouragement, to play the debater. The difference of opinion between the two Houses concerning the Irish Church Temporalities Bill, which constituted the crisis of the year, was the one circumstance that excited in Macaulay's mind any very lively emotions ; but those emotions, being denied their full and free expression in the oratory of a partisan, found vent in the doleful prognostications of a de- spairing patriot which fill his letters throughout the months of June and July. His abstinence from the passing topics of Parliamentary controversy obtained for him a friendly, as well as an attentive, hearing from both sides of the House whenever he spoke on his own subjects ; and did much to smooth the progress of those immense and salutary reforms with which the Cabinet had resolved to accompany the renewal of the India Company's Charter. So rapid had been the march of events under that strange imperial system established in the East by the enterprise and valour of three generations of our countrymen, that each of the periodical revisions of that system was, in effect, a revolution. The legislation of 1813 destroyed the monopoly of the Indian trade. In 1833 the time had arrived when it was impossible any longer to maintain the monopoly of the China trade ; and the extinction of this remaining commercial privilege could not fail to bring upon the Company commercial ruin. Skill, and energy, and caution, however happily combined, would not enable rulers who were governing a population larger than that governed by Augustus, and making every decade conquests more extensive than the conquests of Trajan, to compete with private merchants in an open market. England, mindful of the inestimable debt which she owed to the great Company, did not intend to requite her benefactors by imposing on them a hopeless task. Justice and expediency could be reconciled by one course, and one only : that of buying up the assets and liabilities of the Company on terms the favourable character who ought never to mention his name without respect and gratitude, I will only say this, that the loudest clamour which 'he honourable and learned gentleman can excite against Lord Grey will be trifling when compared with the clamour which Lord Grey withstood in order to place the honourable and learned gentle- man where he now sits. Though a young member of the Whig party, I will venture to speak in the name of the whole body. I tell the honourable and learned gentleman, that the same spirit which sustained us in a just contest for him will sustain us in an equally just contest against him. Calumny, abuse, royal displeasure, popular fury, exclusion from office, exclusion from Parlia- ment, we were ready to endure them all, rather than that he should be less than a British subject. We never will suffer him to be more." P 2 212 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. of which should represent the sincerity of the national gratitude. Interest was to be paid from the Indian exchequer at the rate of ten guineas a year on every hundred pounds of stock ; the Company was relieved of its commercial attributes, and became a corporation charged with the function of ruling Hindoostan ; and its directors, as has been well observed, remained princes, but merchant princes no longer. The machinery required for carrying into effect this gigantic metamorphosis was embodied in a bill every one of whose pro- visions breathed the broad, the fearless, and the tolerant spirit with which Reform had inspired our counsels. The earlier Sections placed the whole property of the Company in trust for the Crown, and enacted that "from and after the 22nd day of April 1834 the exclusive right of trading with the dominions of the Emperor of China, and of trading in tea, shall cease." Then came Clauses which threw open the whole continent of India as a place of residence for all subjects of his Majesty ; which pronounced the doom of Slavery ; and which ordained that no native of the British territories in the East should " by reason only of his religion, place of birth, descent, or colour, be disabled from holding any place, office, or employment." The measure was introduced by Mr. Charles Grant, the Presi- dent of the Board of Control, and was read a second time on Wednesday the loth July. On that occasion Macaulay de- fended the bill in a thin House : a circumstance which may surprise those who are not aware that on a Wednesday, and with an Indian question on the paper, Cicero replying to Hor- tensius would hardly draw a quorum. Small as it was, the audience contained Lord John Russell, Peel, O'Connell, and other masters in the Parliamentary craft. Their unanimous judgment was summed up by Charles Grant, in words which every one who knows the House of Commons will recognise as being very different from the conventional verbiage of mutual senatorial flattery. "I must embrace the opportunity of ex- pressing, not what I felt, (for language could not express it,) but of making an attempt to convey to the House my sympathy with it in its admiration of the speech of my honourable and learned friend : a speech which, I will venture to assert, has never been exceeded within these walls for the development of statesmanlike policy and practical good sense. It exhibited all that is noble in oratory ; all that is sublime, I had almost said, in poetry ; all that is truly great, exalted, and virtuous in human nature. If the House at large felt a deep interest in this magnificent display, it may judge of what were my emo- tions when I perceived in the hands of rny honourable friend 1832-34. LORD MACAULAY. 213 the great principles which he expounded glowing with fresh colours, and arrayed in all the beauty of truth." There is no praise more gratefully treasured than that which is bestowed by a generous chief upon a subordinate with whom he is on the best of terms. Macaulay to the end entertained for Lord Glenelg that sentiment of loyalty which a man of honour and feeling will always cherish with regard to the statesman under whom he began his career as a servant of the Crown. 1 The Secretary repaid the President for his un- varying kindness and confidence by helping him to get the bill through committee with that absence of friction which is the pride and delight of official men. The vexed questions of Establishment and Endowment, (raised by the clauses appoint- ing bishops to Madras and Bombay, and balancing them with as many salaried Presbyterian chaplains,) increased the length of the debates and the number of the divisions ; but the Government carried every point by large majorities, and, with slight modifications in detail, and none in principle, the measure became law with the almost universal approbation both of Parliament and the country. To Hannah M. Macaulay. House of Commons . Monday night, half-past 12. My dear Sister, The papers will scarcely contain any ac- count of what passed yesterday in the House of Commons in the middle of the day. Grant and I fought a battle with Briscoe and O'Connell in defence of the Indian people, and won it by 38 to 6. It was a rascally claim of a dishonest agent of the Company against the employers whom he had cheated, and sold to their own tributaries. 2 The nephew of the original claimant has been pressing his case on the Board most vehe- mently. He is an attorney living in Russell Square, and very 1 The affinity between this sentiment, and that of the Quaestor towards his first Proconsul, so well described in the Orations against Verres, is one among the innumerable points of resemblance between the public life of ancient Rome and modern England. 3 In his great Indian speech Macaulay referred to this affair, in a passage, the first sentence of which has, by frequent quotation, been elevated into an apophthegm : "A broken head in Cold Bath Fields produces a greater sensa- tion than three pitched battles in India. A few weeks ago we had to decide on a claim brought by an individual against the revenues of India. If it had been an English question the walls would scarcely have held the members who would have flocked to the division. It was an Indian question ; and we could scarcely, by dint of supplication, make a House." 214 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. likely hears the word at St. John's Chapel. He hears it how- ever to very little purpose : for he lies as much as if he went to hear a " cauld clatter of morality " at the parish church. I remember that, when you were at Leamington two years ago, I used to fill my letters with accounts of the people with whom I dined. High life was new to me then ; and now it has grown so familiar that I should not, I fear, be able, as I formerly was, to select the striking circumstances. I have dined with sundry great folks since you left London, and I have attended a very splendid rout at Lord Grey's. I stole thither, at about eleven, from the House of Commons with Stewart Mackenzie. I do not mean to describe the beauty of the ladies, nor the brilliancy of stars and uniforms. I mean only to tell you one circumstance which struck, and even affected me. I was talking to Lady Charlotte Lindsay, the daughter of Lord North, a great favourite of mine, about the apartments and the furniture, when she said with a good deal of emotion : " This is an interesting visit to me. I have never been in this house for fifty years. It was here that I was born ; I left it a child when my father fell from power in 1782 ; and I have never crossed the threshold since." Then she told me how the rooms seemed dwindled to her ; how the staircase, which appeared to her in recollection to be the most spacious and magnificent that she had ever seen, had disappointed her. She longed, she said, to go over the garrets and rummage her old nursery. She told me how, in the No-Popery riots of 1780, she was taken out of bed at two o'clock in the morning. The mob threatened Lord North's house. There were soldiers at the windows, and an immense and furious crowd in Downing Street. She saw, she said, from her nursery the fires in different parts of London ; but she did not understand the danger ; and only exulted in being up at midnight. Then she was conveyed through the Park to the Horse Guards as the safest place ; and was laid, wrapped up in blankets, on the table in the guard- room in the midst of the officers. " And it was such fun," she said, " that I have ever after had rather a liking for insur- rections." I write in the midst of a crowd A debate on Slavery is going on in the Commons ; a debate on Portugal in the Lords. The door is slamming behind me every moment, and people are constantly going out and in. Here comes Vernon Smith. "Well, Vernon, what are they doing?" "Gladstone has just made a very good speech, and Howick is answering him." "Aye, but in the House of Lords?" " They will beat us by twenty, they say." "Well, I do not think it matters much." 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 215 " No ; nobody out of the House of Lords cares either for Don Pedro, or for Don Miguel." There is a conversation between two official men in the Library of the House of Commons on the night of the 3rd June 1833, reported word for word. To the historian three cen- turies hence this letter will be invaluable. To you, ungrateful as you are, it will seem worthless. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macau/ay. Smoking-Room of the House of Commons : June 6, 1833. My Darling, Why am I such a fool as to write to a gypsey at Liverpool, who fancies that none is so good as she if she sends one letter for my three ? A lazy chit whose fingers tire with penning a page in reply to a quire ! There, Miss, you read all the first sentence of my epistle, and never knew that you were reading verse. I have some gossip for you about the Edinburgh Review. Napier is in London, and has called on me several times. He has been with the publishers, who tell him that the sale is falling off ; and in many private parties, where he hears sad complaints. The universal cry is that the long dull articles are the ruin of the Review. As to myself, he assures me that my articles are the only things which keep the work up at all. Longman and his partners correspond with about five hundred booksellers in different parts of the king- dom. All these booksellers, I find, tell them that the Review sells, or does not sell, according as there are, or are not, articles by Mr. Macaulay. So, you see, I, like Mr. Darcy, 1 shall not care how proud I am. At all events, I cannot but be pleased to learn that, if I should be forced to depend on my pen for subsistence, I can command what price I choose. The House is sitting ; Peel is just down ; Lord Palmerston is speaking ; the heat is tremendous ; the crowd stifling ; and so here I am in the smoking-room, with three Repealers making chimneys of their mouths under my very nose. To think that this letter will bear to my Anna The exquisite scent of O'Connor's Havannah ! You know that the Lords have been foolish enough to pass a vote implying censure on the Ministers. 2 The Ministers do 1 The central male figure in " Pride and Prejudice." 3 On June 3rd, 1833, a vote of censure on the Portuguese policy of the Ministry was moved by the Duke of Wellington, and carried in the Lords by 2i6 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. not seem inclined to take it of them. The King has snubbed their Lordships properly ; and in about an hour, as I guess, (for it is near eleven), we shall have come to a Resolution in direct opposition to that agreed to by the Upper House. Nobody seems to care one straw for what the Peers say about any public matter. A Resolution of the Court of Common Council, or of a meeting at Freemasons' Hall, has often made a greater sensation than this declaration of a branch of the Legislature against the Executive Government. The institu- tion of the Peerage is evidently dying a natural death. I dined yesterday where, and on what, and at what price, I am ashamed to tell you. Such scandalous extravagance and gluttony I will not commit to writing. I blush when I think of it. You, however, are not wholly guiltless in this matter. My nameless offence was partly occasioned by Napier ; and I have a very strong reason for wishing to keep Napier in good hu- mour. He has promised to be at Edinburgh when I take a certain damsel thither ; to look out for very nice lodgings for us in Queen Street ; to show us everything and everybody ; and to see us as far as Dunkeld on our way northward, if we do go northward. In general I abhor visiting ; but at Edin- burgh we must see the people as well as the walls and windows; and Napier will be a capital guide. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : June 14, 1833. My dear Sister, I do not know what you may have been told. I may have grumbled, for aught I know, at not having more letters from you ; but, as to being angry, you ought to know by this time what sort of anger mine is when you are its object. You have seen the papers, I dare say, and you will perceive that I did not speak yesterday night. 1 The House was thin. The debate was languid. Grant's speech had done our work sufficiently for one night ; and both he and Lord Althorp advised me to reserve myself for the Second Reading. What have I to tell you ? I will look at my engagement book, to see where I am to dine. 79 votes to 69. On June 6th a counter-resolution was carried in the Commons by 361 votes to 98. The night of the First Reading of the India Bill. 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 217 Friday June 14 . Lord Grey. Saturday June 15 . Mr. Boddington. Sunday June 16 . Mr. S. Rice. Saturday June 22 . Sir R. Inglis. Thursday June 27 . The Earl of Ripon. Saturday June 29 . Lord Morpeth. Read, and envy, and pine, and die. And yet I would give a large slice of my quarter's salary, which is now nearly due, to be at the Dingle. I am sick of Lords with no brains in their heads, and Ladies with paint on their cheeks, and politics, and politicians, and that reeking furnace of a House. As the poet says, Oh ! rather would I see this day My little Nancy well and merry Than the blue riband of Earl Grey, Or the blue stockings of Miss Berry. Margaret tells us that you are better, and better, and better. I want to hear that you are well At all events our Scotch tour will set you up. I hope, for the sake of the tour, that we shall keep our places ; but I firmly believe that, before many days have passed, a desperate attempt will be made in the House of Lords to turn us out If we stand the shock, we shall be firmer than ever. I am not without anxiety as to the result : yet I believe that Lord Grey understands the position in which he is placed, and, as for the King, he will not forget his last blunder, I will answer for it, even if he should live to the age of his father. l But why plague ourselves about politics when we have so much pleasanter things to talk of? The Parson's Daughter : don't you like the Parson's Daughter ? What a wretch Har- bottle was ! And Lady Frances, what a sad worldly woman ! But Mrs. Harbottle, dear suffering angel ! and Emma Lovel, all excellence ! Dr. Mac Gopus you doubtless like ; but you probably do not admire the Duchess and Lady Catherine. There is a regular coze over a novel for you ! But, if you will have my opinion, I think it Theodore Hook's worst perfor- mance ; far inferior to the Surgeon's Daughter ; a set of fools making themselves miserable by their own nonsensical fancies and suspicions. Let me hear your opinion ; for I will be sworn that, This " last blunder " was the refusal of the King to stand by his Ministers in May 1832. Macaulay proved a bad prophet ; for, after an interval of only three years, William the Fourth repeated his blunder in an aggravated form. 218 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. In spite of all the serious world, Of all the thumbs that ever twirled, Of every broadbrim-shaded brow, Of every tongue that e'er said " thou," You still read books in marble covers About smart girls and dapper lovers. But what folly I have been scrawling ! I must go to work. I cannot all day Be neglecting Madras And slighting Bombay For the sake of a lass. Kindest love to Edward, and to the woman who owns him. Ever yours T. B. M. London: June 17, 1833. Dear Hannah, All is still anxiety here. Whether the House of Lords will throw out the Irish Church Bill, whether the King will consent to create new Peers, whether the Tories will venture to form a Ministry, are matters about which we are all in complete doubt. If the Ministry should really be changed, Parliament will, I feel quite sure, be dissolved. Whether I shall have a seat in the next Parliament I neither know nor care. I shall regret nothing for myself but our Scotch tour. For the public I shall, if this Parliament is dis- solved, entertain scarcely any hopes. I see nothing before us but a frantic conflict between extreme opinions ; a short period of oppression ; then a convulsive reaction ; and then a tre- mendous crash of the Funds, the Church, the Peerage, and the Throne. It is enough to make the most strenuous royalist lean a little to republicanism to think that the whole question be- tween safety and general destruction may probably, at this most fearful conjuncture, depend on a single man whom the accident of his birth has placed in a situation to which certainly his own virtues or abilities would never have raised him. The question must come to a decision, I think, within the fortnight. In the meantime the funds are going down, the newspapers are storming, and the faces of men on both sides are growing day by day more gloomy and anxious. Even during the most violent part of the contest for the Reform Bill I do not remember to have seen so much agitation in the political circles. I have some odd anecdotes for you, which I will tell you when we meet If the Parliament should be dissolved, the West Indian and East Indian Bills are of course 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 219 dropped. What is to become of the slaves? What is to become of the tea-trade ? Will the negroes, after receiving the Resolutions of the House of Commons promising them liberty, submit to the cart-whip ? Will our merchants consent to have the trade with China, which has just been offered to them, snatched away ? The Bank Charter, too, is suspended. But that is comparatively a trifle. After all, what is it to me who is in or out, or whether those fools of Lords are resolved to perish, and drag the King to perish with them in the ruin which they have themselves made ? I begin to wonder what the fascination is which attracts men, who could sit over their tea and their books in their own cool quiet room, to breathe bad air, hear bad speeches, lounge up and down the long gallery, and doze uneasily on the green benches till three in the morning. Thank God, these luxuries are not necessary to me. My pen is sufficient for my support, and my sister's company is sufficient for my happiness. Only let me see her well and cheerful, and let offices in Government, and seats in Parlia- ment, go to those who care for them. If I were to leave public life to-morrow, I declare that, except for the vexation which it might give you and one or two others, the event would not be in the slightest degree painful to me. As you boast of having a greater insight into character than I allow to you, let me know how you explain this philosophical disposition of mine, and how you reconcile it with my ambitious inclinations. That is a problem for a young lady who professes knowledge of human nature. Did I tell you that I dined at the Duchess of Kent's, and sate next that loveliest of women, Mrs. Littleton ? Her husband, our new Secretary for Ireland, told me this evening that Lord Wellesley, who sate near us at the Duchess's, asked Mrs. Lit- tleton afterwards who it was that was talking to her. " Mr. Macaulay." "Oh !" said the Marquess, "I am very sorry I did not know it. I have a most particular desire to be ac- quainted with that man." Accordingly Littleton has engaged me to dine with him, in order to introduce me to the Marquess. I am particularly curious, and always was, to know him. He has made a great and splendid figure in history, and his weak- nesses, though they make his character less worthy of respect, make it more interesting as a study. Such a blooming old swain I never saw ; hair combed with exquisite nicety, a waistcoat of driven snow, and a star and garter put on with rare skill. To-day we took up our Resolutions about India to the House of Lords. The two Houses had a conference on the 220 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. subject in an old Gothic room called the Painted Chamber. The painting consists in a mildewed daub of a woman in the niche of one of the windows. The Lords sate in little cocked hats along a table ; and we stood uncovered on the other side, and delivered in our Resolutions. I thought that before long it may be our turn to sit, and theirs to stand Ever yours T. B. M. London : June si, 1833. Dear Hannah, I cannot tell you how delighted I was to learn from Fanny this morning that Margaret pronounces you to be as well as she could wish you to be. Only continue so, and all the changes of public life will be as indifferent to me as to Horatio. If I am only spared the misery of seeing you suffer, I shall be found A man that fortune's buffets and rewards Has ta'en with equal thanks. Whether we are to have buffets or rewards is known only to Heaven and to the Peers. I think that their Lordships are rather cowed. Indeed, if they venture on the course on which they lately seemed bent, I would not give sixpence for a coronet or a penny for a mitre. I shall not read the Repealers ; and I think it very im- pudent in you to make such a request. Have I nothing to do but to be your novel-taster ? It is rather your duty to be mine. What else have you to do ? I have read only one novel within the last week, and a most precious one it was : the Invisible Gentleman. Have you ever read it? But I need not ask. No doubt it has formed part of your Sunday studies. A wretched, trumpery, imitation of Godwin's worst manner. W T hat a number of stories I shall have to tell you when we meet ! which will be, as nearly as I can guess, about the icth or 1 2th of August. I shall be as rich as a Jew by that time. Next Wednesday will be quarter-day; And then, if I'm alive, Of sterling pounds I shall receive Three hundred seventy-five. Already I possess in cash Two hundred twenty-four, Besides what I have lent to John Which makes up twenty more. 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 221 Also the man who editeth The Yellow and the Blue Doth owe me ninety pounds at least, All for my last review. So, if my debtors pay their debts, You'll find, dear sister mine, That all my wealth together makes Seven hundred pounds and nine. Ever yours T. B. M. The rhymes in which Macaulay unfolds his little budget derive a certain dignity and meaning from the events of the ensuing weeks. The unparalleled labours of the Anti-Slavery leaders were at length approaching a successful issue, and Lord Grey's Cabinet had declared itself responsible for the emanci- pation of the West Indian negroes. But it was already be- ginning to be known that the Ministerial scheme, in its original shape, was not such as would satisfy even the more moderate Abolitionists. Its most objectionable feature was shadowed forth in the third of the Resolutions with which Mr. Stanley, who had the question in charge, prefaced the introduction of his bill : " That all persons, now slaves, be entitled to be registered as apprenticed labourers, and to acquire thereby all the rights and privileges of freemen, subject to the restriction of labouring, for a time to be fixed by Parliament, for their present owners." It was understood that twelve years would be proposed as the period of apprenticeship ; although no trace of this intention could be detected in the wording of the Resolution. Macaulay, who thought twelve years far too long, felt himself justified in supporting the Government during the preliminary stages ; but he took occasion to make some remarks indicating that circumstances might occur which would oblige him to resign office, and adopt a line of his own. As time went on it became evident that his firmness would be put to the test ; and a severe test it was. A rising states- man, whose prospects would be irremediably injured by abruptly quitting a Government that seemed likely to be in power for the next quarter of a century ; a zealous Whig, who shrank from the very appearance of disaffection to his party ; a man of sense, with no ambition to be called Quixotic ; a member for a large constituency, possessed of only seven hundred pounds in the world when his purse was at its fullest ; above all, an affectionate son and brother, now, more than ever, the main hope and reliance of those whom he held most dear ; 222 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. it may well be believed that he was not in a hurry to act the martyr. His father's affairs were worse than bad. The African firm, without having been reduced to declare itself bankrupt, had ceased to exist as a house of business ; or existed only so far that for some years to come every. penny that Macaulay earned, beyond what the necessities of life demanded, was scrupulously devoted to paying, and at length to paying off, his father's creditors : a dutiful enterprise in which he was assisted by his brother Henry, 1 a young man of high spirit and excellent abilities, who had recently been appointed one of the Com- missioners of Arbitration in the Prize Courts at Sierra Leone. The pressure of pecuniary trouble was now beginning to make itself felt even by the younger members of the family. About this time, or perhaps a little earlier, Hannah Macaulay writes thus to one of her cousins : " You say nothing about coming to us. You must come in good health and spirits. Our trials ought not greatly to depress us ; for, after all, all we want is money, the easiest want to bear ; and, when we have so many mercies friends who love us and whom we love ; no bereavements ; and, above all, (if it be not our own fault,) a hope full of immortality let us not be so ungrateful as to repine because we are without what in itself cannot make our happiness." Macaulay's colleagues, who, without knowing his whole story, knew enough to be aware that he could ill afford to give up office, were earnest in their remonstrances ; but he answered shortly, and almost roughly : " I cannot go counter to my father. He has devoted his whole life to the question, and I cannot grieve him by giving way when he wishes me to stand firm." During the crisis of the West India Bill, Zachary Macaulay and his son were in constant correspondence. There is something touching in the picture which these letters present of the older man, (whose years were coming to a close in poverty which was the consequence of his having always lived too much for others,) discussing quietly and gravely how, and when, the younger was to take a step that in the opinion of them both would be fatal to his career : and this with so little consciousness that there was anything heroic in the course which they were pursuing, that it appears never to have occurred to either of them that any other line of conduct could possibly be adopted. Having made up his mind as to what he should do, Mac- aulay set about it with as good a grace as is compatible with 1 Henry married in 1841 a daughter of his brother's old political ally, Lord Denman. He died at Boa Vista, in 1846, leaving two sons, Henry, and Joseph, Macaulay. 1832-34- LORD MAC A UL AY. 223 the most trying position in which a man, and especially a young man, can find himself. Carefully avoiding the attitude of one who bargains or threatens, he had given timely notice in the proper quarter of his intentions and his views. At length the conjuncture arrived when decisive action could no longer be postponed. On the 24th of July Mr. Thomas Fowell Buxton moved an amendment in Committee, limiting the apprentice- ship to the shortest period necessary for establishing the system of free labour. Macaulay, whose resignation was already in Lord Althorp's hands, made a speech which produced all the more effect as being inornate, and, at times, almost awkward. Even if deeper feelings had not restrained the range of his fancy and the flow of his rhetoric, his judgment would have told him that it was not the moment for an oratorical display. He began by entreating the House to extend to him that in- dulgence which it had accorded on occasions when he had addressed it "with more confidence and with less harassed feel- ings." He then, at some length, exposed the effects of the Government proposal. " In free countries the master has a choice of labourers, and the labourer has a choice of masters ; but in slavery it is always necessary to give despotic power to the master. This bill leaves it to the magistrate to keep peace between master and slave. Every time that the slave takes twenty minutes to do that which the master thinks he should do in fifteen, recourse must be had to the magistrate. Society would day and night be in a constant state of litigation, and all differences and difficulties must be solved by judicial in- terference." He did not share in Mr. Buxton's apprehension of gross cruelty as a result of the apprenticeship. " The magistrate would be accountable to the Colonial Office, and the Colonial Office to the House of Commons, in which every lash which was inflicted under magisterial authority would be told and counted. My apprehension is that the result of continuing for twelve years this dead slavery, this state of society destitute of any vital principle, will be that the whole negro population will sink into weak and drawling inefficacy, and will be much less fit for liberty at the end of the period than at the com- mencement. My hope is that the system will die a natural death ; that the experience of a few months will so establish its utter inefficiency as to induce the planters to abandon it, and to substitute for it a state of freedom. I have voted," he said, " for the Second Reading, and I shall vote for the Third Read- ing ; but, while the bill is in Committee, I shall join with other honourable gentlemen in doing all that is possible to amend it." 224 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. Such a declaration, coming from the mouth of a member of the Government, gave life to the debate, and secured to Mr. Buxton an excellent division, which under the circumstances was equivalent to a victory. The next day Mr. Stanley rose ; adverted shortly to the position in which the Ministers stood ; and announced that the term of apprenticeship would be re- duced from twelve years to seven. Mr. Buxton, who, with equal energy and wisdom, had throughout the proceedings acted as leader of the Anti-slavery party in the House of Commons, advised his friends to make the best of the concession ; and his counsel was followed by all those Abolitionists who were think- ing more of their cause than of themselves. It is worthy of remark that Macaulay's prophecy came true, though not at so early a date as he ventured to anticipate. Four years of the provisional system brought all parties to acquiesce in the pre- mature termination of a state of things which denied to the negro the blessings of freedom, and to the planter the profits of slavery. " The papers," Macaulay writes to his father, " will have told you all that has happened, as far as it is known to the public. The secret history you will have heard from Buxton. As to myself, Lord Althorp told me yesterday night that the Cabinet had determined not to accept my resignation. I have therefore the singular good luck of having saved both my honour and my place, and of having given no just ground of offence either to the Abolitionists or to my party-friends. I have more reason than ever to say that honesty is the best policy." This letter is dated the 27th of July. On that day week, Wilberforce was carried to his grave in Westminster Abbey. " We laid him," writes Macaulay, " side by side with Canning, at the feet of Pitt, and within two steps of Fox and Grattan." He died with the promised land full in view. Before the end of August Parliament abolished slavery, and the last touch was put to the work that had consumed so many pure and noble lives. In a letter of congratulation to Zachary Macaulay, Mr. Buxton says : " Surely you have reason to rejoice. My sober and deliberate opinion is that you have done more towards this consummation than any other man. For myself, I take pleasure in acknowledging that you have been my tutor all the way through, and that I could have done nothing without you." Such was the spirit of these men, who, while the struggle lasted, were prodigal of health and ease ; but who, in the day of triumph, disclaimed, each for himself, even that part of the merit which their religion allowed them to ascribe to human effort and self-sacrifice. 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 225 London : July u, 1833. Dear Hannah, I have been so completely overwhelmed with business for some days that I have not been able to find time for writing a line. Yesterday night we read the India Bill a second time. It was a Wednesday, and the reporters gave hardly any account of what passed. They always resent being forced to attend on that day, which is their holiday. I made the best speech, by general agreement, and in my own opinion, that I ever made in my life. I w r as an hour and three-quarters up ; and such compliments as I had from Lord Althorp, Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, Wynne, O'Connell, Grant, the Speaker, and twenty other people, you never heard. As there is no report of the speech, I have been persuaded, rather against my will, to correct it for publication. I will tell you one com- pliment that was paid me, and which delighted me more than any other. An old member said to me : " Sir, having heard that speech may console the young people for never having heard Mr. Burke." l The Slavery Bill is miserably bad. I am fully resolved not to be dragged through the mire, but to oppose, by speaking and voting, the clauses which I think objectionable. I have told Lord Althorp this, and have again tendered my resignation. He hinted that he thought that the Government would leave me at liberty to take my own line, but that he must consult his colleagues. I told him that I asked for no favour ; that I knew what inconvenience would result if official men were allowed to dissent from Ministerial measures, and yet to keep their places ; and that I should not think myself in the smallest degree ill-used if the Cabinet accepted my resignation. This is the present posture of affairs. In the meantime the two Houses are at daggers drawn. Whether the Government will last to the end of the Session I neither know nor care. I am sick of Boards, and of the House of Commons ; and pine for a few quiet days, a cool country breeze, and a little chatting with my dear sister. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : July 19, 1833. My dear Sister, I snatch a few minutes to write a single line to you. We went into Committee on the India Bill at 1 A Tory member said that Macaulay resembled both the Burkes : that he was like the first from his eloquence, and like the second from his stopping other people's mouths. Q 226 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. twelve this morning, sate till three, and are just set at liberty for two hours. At five we recommence, and shall be at work till midnight. In the interval between three and five I have to despatch the current business of the office, which, at present, is fortunately not heavy ; to eat my dinner, which I shall do at Grant's ; and to write a short scrawl to my little sister. My work, though laborious, has been highly satisfactory. No Bill, I believe, of such importance, certainly no important Bill in my time, has been received with such general approba- tion. The very cause of the negligence of the reporters, and of the thinness of the House, is that we have framed our measure so carefully as to give little occasion for debate. Littleton, Denison, and many other members, assure me that they never remember to have seen a Bill better drawn or better conducted. On Monday night, I hope, my work will be over. Our Bill will have been discussed, I trust, for the last time in the House of Commons ; and, in all probability, I shall within forty-eight hours after that time be out of office. I am fully determined not to give way about the West India Bill ; and I can hardly expect, I am sure I do not wish, that the Ministers should suffer me to keep my place and oppose their measure. What- ever may befall me or my party, I am much more desirous to come to an end of this interminable Session than to stay either in office or in Parliament. The Tories are quite welcome to take everything, if they will only leave me my pen and my books, a warm fireside, and you chattering beside it. This sort of philosophy, an odd kind of cross between Stoicism and Epicureanism, I have learned, where most people unlearn all their philosophy, in crowded senates and fine drawing-rooms. But time flies, and Grant's dinner will be waiting. He keeps open house for us during this fight. Ever yours T. B. M. London : July 22, 1833. My dear Father, We are still very anxious here. The Lords, though they have passed the Irish Church Bill through its first stage, will very probably mutilate it in Committee. It will then be for the Ministers to decide whether they can with honour keep their places. I believe that they will resign if any material alteration should be made ; and then everything is confusion. These circumstances render it very difficult for me to shape my course right with respect to the West India Bill, the Second 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 227 Reading of which stands for this evening. I am fully resolved to oppose several of the clauses. But to declare my intention publicly, at a moment when the Government is in danger, would have the appearance of ratting. I must be guided by circum- stances ; but my present intention is to say nothing on the Second Reading. By the time that we get into Committee the political crisis, will, I hope, be over ; the fate of the Church Bill will be decided one way or the other ; and I shall be able to take my own course on the Slavery question without exposing myself to the charge of deserting my friends in a moment of peril. Ever yours affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. To Hannah M. Macaulay, London : July 24. 1833. My dear Sister, You will have seen by the papers that the West India debate on Monday night went off very quietly in little more than an hour. To-night we expect the great struggle, and I fear that, much against my inclination, I must bear a part in it. My resignation is in Lord Althorp's hands. He assures me that he will do his utmost to obtain for me liberty to act as I like on this question : but Lord Grey and Stanley are to be consulted, and I think it very improbable that they will consent to allow me so extraordinary a privilege. I know that, if I were Minister, I would not allow such latitude to any man in office ; and so I told Lord Althorp. He answered in the kindest and most flattering manner ; told me that in office I had surpassed their expectations, and that, much as they wished to bring me in last year, they wished much more to keep me in now. I told him in reply that the matter was one for the Ministers to settle, purely with a view to their own interest ; that I asked for no indulgence ; that I could make no terms ; and that, what I would not do to serve them, I certainly would not do to keep my place. Thus the matter stands. It will probably be finally settled within a few hours. This detestable Session goes on lengthening, and lengthen- ing, like a human hair in one's mouth. (Do you know that delicious sensation ?) Last month we expected to have been up before the middle of August. Now we should be glad to be quite certain of being in the country by the first of September. One comfort I shall have in being turned out : I will not stay a day in London after the West India Bill is through Com- mittee ; which I hope it will be before the end of next week. Q 2 228 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. The new Edinburgh Review is not much amiss ; but I quite agree with the publishers, the editor, and the reading public generally, that the number would have been much the better- for an article of thirty or forty pages from the pen of a gentleman who shall be nameless. . Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M, Macaulay. London : July 25, 1833. My dear Sister, The plot is thickening. Yesterday Buxton moved an instruction to the Committee on the Slavery Bill, which the Government opposed, and which I supported. It was extremely painful to me to speak against all my political friends ; so painful that at times I could hardly go on. I treated them as mildly as I could ; and they all tell me that I performed my difficult task not ungracefully. We divided at two this morning, and were 151 to 158. The Ministers found that, if they persisted, they would infallibly be beaten. Accord- ingly they came down to the House at twelve this day, and agreed to reduce the apprenticeship to seven years for the agricultural labourers, and to five years for the skilled labourers. What other people may do I cannot tell ; but I am inclined to be satisfied with this concession ; particularly as I believe that, if we press the thing further, they will resign, and we shall have no Bill at all, but instead of it a Tory Ministry and a dissolu- tion. Some people flatter me with the assurance that our large minority, and the consequent change in the Bill, have been owing to me. If this be so, I have done one useful act at least in my life. I shall now certainly remain in office ; and if, as I expect, the Irish Church Bill passes the Lords, I may consider myself as safe till the next Session ; when Heaven knows what may happen. It is still quite uncertain when we may rise. I pine for rest, air, and a taste of family life, more than I can express. I see nothing but politicians, and talk about nothing but politics. I have not read Village Belles. Tell me, as soon as you can get it, whether it is worth reading. As John Thorpe ! says : " Novels ! Oh Lord ! I never read novels. I have something else to do." Farewell. T. B. M. l The young Oxford man in " Northanger Abbey." 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 229 To Hannah M. Macaulay London : July 27, 1833. My dear Sister, Here I am, safe and well, at the end of one of the most stormy weeks that the oldest man remembers in Parliamentary affairs. I have resigned my office, and my resignation has been refused. I have spoken and voted against the Ministry under which I hold my place. The Ministry has been so hard run in the Commons as to be forced to modify its plan ; and has received a defeat in the Lords, 1 a slight one to be sure, and on a slight matter, yet such that I, and many others, fully believed twenty-four hours ago that they would have resigned. In fact, some of the Cabinet, Grant among the rest, to my certain knowledge, were for resigning. At last Saturday has arrived. The Ministry is as strong as ever. I am as good friends with the Ministers as ever. Tne East India Bill is carried through our House. The West India Bill is so far modified that, I believe, it will be carried. The Irish Church Bill has got through the Committee in the Lords ; and we are all beginning to look forward to a Prorogation in about three weeks. To day I went to Haydon's to be painted into his great picture of the Reform Banquet. Ellis was with me, and de- clares that Haydon has touched me off to a nicety. I am sick of pictures of my own face. I have seen within the last few days one drawing of it, one engraving, and three paintings They all make me a very handsome fellow. Haydon pro- nounces my profile a gem of art, perfectly antique ; and, what is worth the praise of ten Haydons, I was told yesterday that Mrs. Littleton, the handsomest woman in London, had paid me exactly the same compliment. She pronounced Mr. Mac- aulay's profile to be a study for an artist. I have bought a new looking-glass and razor-case on the strength of these compli- ments, and am meditating on the expediency of having my hair cut in the Burlington Arcade, rather than in Lamb's Conduit Street As Richard says, " Since I am crept in favour with myself, I will maintain it with some little cost." I begin, like Sir Walter Elliot, 2 to rate all my acquaintance 1 On the 25th of July the Archbishop of Canterbury carried an amendment on the Irish Church Bill, against the Government, by 84 votes to 82. 2 The Baronet in " Persuasion." 230 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. v. according to their beauty. But what nonsense I write, and in times that make many merry men look grave ! Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : July 29, 1833. My dear Sister, I dined last night at Holland House. There was a very pleasant party. My Lady was courteous, and my Lord extravagantly entertaining : telling some capital stories about old Bishop Horsley, which were set off with some of the drollest mimicry that I ever saw. Among many others there were Sir James Graham ; and Dr. Holland, who is a good scholar as well as a good physician ; and Wilkie, who is a modest, pleasing companion as well as an excellent artist. For ladies, we had her Grace of - ; and her daughter Lady , a fine, buxom, sonsy lass, with more colour than, I am sorry to say, is often seen among fine ladies. So our dinner and our soiree were very agreeable. We narrowly escaped a scene at one time. Lord is in the navy, and is now on duty in the fleet at the Tagus. We got into a conversation about Portuguese politics. His name was mentioned, and Graham, who is First Lord of the Admi- ralty, complimented the Duchess on her son's merit, to which, he said, every despatch bore witness. The Duchess forthwith began to entreat that he might be recalled. He was very ill, she said. If he stayed longer on that station she was sure that he would die : and then she began to cry. I cannot bear to see women cry, and the matter became serious, for her pretty daughter began to bear her company. That hard-hearted Lord seemed to be diverted by the scene. He, by all accounts, has been doing little else than making women cry during the last five-and-twenty years. However, we all were as still as death while the wiping of eyes and the blowing of noses proceeded. At last Lord Holland contrived to restore our spirits ; but, before the Duchess went away, she managed to have a tete-a-tete with Graham, and, I have no doubt, begged and blubbered to some purpose. I could not help thinking how many honest stout-hearted fellows are left to die on the most unhealthy stations for want of being related to some Duchess who has been handsome, or to some Duchess's daughter who still is so. The Duchess said one thing that amused us. We were talking about Lady Morgan. "When she first came to Lon- don," said Lord Holland, " I remember that she carried a little 1832-34- LORD MA CAUL AY. 231 Irish harp about with her wherever she went." Others denied this. I mentioned what she says in her Book of the Boudoir. There she relates how she went one evening to Lady 's with her little Irish harp, and how strange everybody thought it. " I see nothing very strange," said her Grace, " in her taking her harp to Lady 's. If she brought it safe away with her, that would have been strange indeed." On this, as a friend of yours says, we la-a-a-a-a-a-a-ft. I am glad to find that you approve of my conduct about the Niggers. I expect, and indeed wish, to be abused by the Agency Society. My father is quite satisfied, and so are the best part of my Leeds friends. I amuse myself, as I walk back from the House at two in the morning, with translating Virgil. I am at work on one of the most beautiful episodes, and am succeeding pretty well. You shall have what I have done when I come to Liverpool, which will be, I hope, in three weeks or thereanent. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : July 31, 1833. My dear Sister, Political affairs look cheeringly. The Lords passed the Irish Church Bill yesterday, and mean, we understand, to give us little or no trouble about the India Bill. There is still a hitch in the Commons about the West India Bill, particularly about the twenty millions for compensation to the planters ; but we expect to carry our point by a great majority. By the end of next week we shall be very near the termination of our labours. Heavy labours they have been. So Wilberforce is gone ! We talk of burying him in West- minster Abbey ; and many eminent men, both Whigs and Tories, are desirous to join in paying him this honour. There is, however, a story about a promise given to old Stephen that they should both lie in the same grave. Wilberforce kept his faculties, and, (except when he was actually in fits,) his spirits, to the very last. He was cheerful and full of anecdote only last Saturday. He owned that he enjoyed life much, and that he had a great desire to live longer. Strange in a man who had, I should have said, so little to attach him to this world, and so firm a belief in another : in a man with an impaired fortune, a weak spine, and a worn-out stomach ! What is this fascination which makes us cling to existence in spite of present sufferings and of religious hopes ? Yesterday evening I called at the house in Cadogan Place, where the body is 232 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. lying. I was truly fond of him : that is, " je 1'aimais comme Ton aime." And how is that? How very little one human being generally cares for another ! How very little the world misses anybody ! How soon the chasm left by the best and wisest men closes ! I thought, as- 1 walked back from Cadogan Place, that our own selfishness when others are taken away ought to teach us how little others will suffer at losing us. I thought that, if I were to die to-morrow, not one of the fine people, whom I dine with every week, will take a cotelette aux petits pois the less on Saturday at the table to which I was invited to meet them, or will smile less gaily at the ladies over the champagne. And I am quite even with them. What are those pretty lines of Shelley ? Oh, world, farewell ! Listen to the passing bell. It tells that thou and I must part With a light and heavy heart. There are not ten people in the world whose deaths would spoil my dinner ; but there are one or two whose deaths would break my heart. The more I see of the world, and the more numerous my acquaintance becomes, the narrower and more exclusive my affection grows, and the more I cling to my sisters, and to one or two old tried friends of my quiet days. But why should I go on preaching to you out of Ecclesiastes ? And here comes, fortunately, to break the train of my melan- choly reflections, the proof of my East India Speech from Hansard : so I must put my letter aside, and correct the press. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : August 2, 1833. My dear Sister, I agree with your judgment on Chester- field's Letters. They are for the most part trash ; though they contain some clever passages, and the style is not bad. Their celebrity must be attributed to causes quite distinct from their literary merit, and particularly to the position which the author hld in society. We see in our own time that the books written by public men of note are generally rated at more than their real value : Lord Granville's little compositions, for example ; Canning's verses ; Fox's history ; Brougham's treatises. The writings of people of high fashion, also, have a value set on them far higher than that which intrinsically belongs to them. The verses of the late Duchess of Devonshire, or an occasional 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 233 prologue by Lord Alvanley, attract a most undue share of attention. If the present Duke of Devonshire, who is the very " glass of fashion and mould of form," were to publish a book with two good pages, it would be extolled as a masterpiece in half the drawing-rooms of London. Now Chesterfield was, what no person in our time has been or can be, a great political leader, and at the same time the acknowledged chief of the fashionable world ; at the head of the House of Lords, and at the head of ton ; Mr. Canning and the Duke of Devonshire in one. In our time the division of labour is carried so far that such a man could not exist. Politics require the whole of energy, bodily and mental, during half the year ; and leave very little time for the bow window at White's in the day, or for the crush-room of the Opera at night A century ago the case was different. Chesterfield was at once the most distinguished orator in the Upper House, and the undisputed sovereign of wit and fashion. He held this eminence for about forty years. At last it became the regular custom of the higher circles to laugh whenever he opened his mouth, without waiting for his bon mot. He used to sit at White's with a circle of young men of rank round him, applauding every syllable that he uttered. If you wish for a proof of the kind of position which Chesterfield held among his contemporaries, look at the pro- spectus of Johnson's Dictionary. Look even at Johnson's angry letter. It contains the strongest admission of the bound- less influence which Chesterfield exercised over society. When the letters of such a man were published, of course they were received more favourably by far than they deserved. So much for criticism. As to politics, everything seems tending to repose ; and I should think that by this day fort- night we shall probably be prorogued. The Jew Bill was thrown out yesterday night by the Lords. No matter. Our turn will come one of these days. If you want to see me puffed and abused by somebody who evidently knows nothing about me, look at the New Monthly for this month. Bulwer, I see, has given up editing it. I suppose he is making money in some other way ; for his dress must cost as much as that of any five other members of Parlia- ment. To-morrow Wilberforce is to be buried. His sons acceded, with great eagerness, to the application made to them by a considerable number of the members of both Houses that the funeral should be public. We meet to-morrow at twelve at the House of Commons, and we shall attend the coffin into the Abbey. The Duke of Wellington, Lord Eldon, and Sir R. 234 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. Peel have put down their names, as well as the Ministers and the Abolitionists. My father urges me to pay some tribute to Wilberforce in the House of Commons. If any debate should take place on the third reading of the West India Bill in which I might take part, I should certainly embrace the opportunity of doing honour to his memory. But I do not expect that such an occasion will arise. The House seems inclined to pass the Bill without more contest ; and my father must be aware that anything like theatrical display, anything like a set funeral oration not springing naturally out of the discussion of a question, is extremely distasteful to the House of Commons. I have been clearing off a great mass of business, which had accumulated at our office while we were conducting our Bill through Parliament. To-day I had the satisfaction oi seeing the green boxes, which a week ago were piled up with papers three or four feet high, perfectly empty. Admire my superhuman industry. This I will say for myself, that, when I do sit down to work, I work harder and faster than any person that I ever knew. Ever yours T. B. M. The next letter, in terms too clear to require comment, introduces the mention of what proved to be the most import- ant circumstance in Macaulay's life. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : August 17, 1833. My dear Sister, I am about to write to you on a subject which to you and Margaret will be one of the most agitating interest ; and which, on that account chiefly, is so to me. By the new India Bill it is provided that one of the mem- bers of the Supreme Council, which is to govern our Eastern Empire, is to be chosen from among persons who are not servants of the Company. It is probable, indeed nearly certain, that the situation will be offered to me. The advantages are very great. It is a post of the highest dignity and consideration. The salary is ten thousand pounds a year. I am assured by persons who know Calcutta inti- mately, and who have themselves mixed in the highest circles and held the highest offices at that Presidency, that I may live in splendour there for five thousand a year, and may save the rest of the salary with the accruing interest. I may therefore 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 235 hope to return to England at only thirty-nine, in the full vigour of life, with a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. A larger fortune I never desired. I am not fond of money, or anxious about it. But, though every day makes me less and less eager for wealth, every day shows me more and more strongly how necessary a competence is to a man who desires to be either great or useful. At present the plain fact is that I can continue to be a public man only while I can continue in office. If I left my place in the Government, I must leave my seat in Parliament too. For I must live : I can live only by my pen : and it is absolutely impossible for any man to write enough to procure him a decent subsistence, and at the same time to take an active part in politics. I have not during this Session been able to send a single line to the Edinburgh Review : and, if I had been out of office, I should have been able to do very little. Edward Bulwer has just given up the New Monthly Magazine on the ground that he cannot conduct it, and attend to his Parlia- mentary duties. Cobbett has been compelled to neglect his Register so much that its sale has fallen almost to nothing. Now, in order to live like a gentleman, it would be necessary for me to write, not as I have done hitherto, but regularly, and even daily. I have never made more than two hundred a year by my pen. I could not support myself in comfort on less than five hundred : and I shall in all probability have many others to support. The prospects of our family are, if possible, darker than ever. In the meantime my political outlook is very gloomy. A schism in the Ministry is approaching. It requires orlly that common knowledge of public affairs, which any reader of the newspapers may possess, to see this ; and I have more, much more, than common knowledge on the subject. They cannot hold together. I tell you in perfect seriousness that my chance of keeping my present situation for six months is so small, that I would willingly sell it for fifty pounds down. If I remain in office, I shall, I fear, lose my political character. If I go out, and engage in opposition, I shall break most of the private ties which I have formed during the last three years. In England I see nothing before me, for some time to come, but poverty, unpopularity, and the breaking up of old connections. If there were no way out of these difficulties, I would en- counter them with courage. A man can always act honourably and uprightly ; and, if I were in the Fleet Prison or the rules of the King's Bench, I believe that I could find in my own mind resources which would preserve me from being positively 236 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. unhappy. But, if I could escape from these impending dis- asters, I should wish to do so. By accepting the post which is likely to be offered to me, I withdraw myself for a short time from the contests of faction here. When I return, I shall find things settled, parties formed into new combinations, and new questions under discussion. I shall then be able, without the scandal of a violent separation, and without exposing myself to the charge of inconsistency, to take my own line. In the meantime I shall save my family from distress ; and shall return with a competence honestly earned, as rich as if I were Duke of Northumberland or Marquess of Westminster, and able to act on all public questions without even a temptation to deviate from the strict line of duty. While in India, I shall have to discharge duties not painfully laborious, and of the highest and most honourable kind. I shall have whatever that country affords of comfort or splendour ; nor will my absence be so long that my friends, or the public here, will be likely to lose sight of me. The only persons who know what I have written to you are Lord Grey, the Grants, Stewart Mackenzie, and George Bab- ington. Charles Grant and Stewart Mackenzie, who know better than most men the state of the political world, think that I should act unwisely in refusing this post : and this though they assure me, and, I really believe, sincerely, that they shall feel the loss of my society very acutely. But what shall I feel ? And with what emotions, loving as I do my country and my family, can I look forward to such a separation, en- joined, as I think it is, by prudence and by duty ? Whether the period of my exile shall be one of comfort, and, after the first shock, even of happiness, depends on you. If, as I expect, this offer shall be made to me, will you go with me ? I .know what a sacrifice I ask of you. I know how many dear and precious ties you must, for a time, sunder. I know that the splendour of the Indian Court, and the gaieties of that brilliant society of which you would be one of the leading per- sonages, have no temptation for you. I can bribe you only by telling you that, if you will go with me, I will love you better than I love you now, if I can. I have asked George Babington about your health and mine. He says that he has very little apprehension for me, and none at all for you. Indeed, he seemed to think that the climate would be quite as likely to do you good as harm. All this is most strictly secret You may, of course, show the letter to Margaret ; and Margaret may tell Edward : for I never cabal against the lawful authority of husbands. But 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 237 further the thing must not go. It would hurt my father, and very justly, to hear of it from anybody before he hears of it from myself ; and, if the least hint of it were to get abroad, I should be placed in a very awkward position with regard to the people at I^eeds. It is possible, though not probable, that difficulties may arise at the India House ; and I do not mean to say anything to any person, who is not already in the secret, till the Directors have made their choice, and till the King's pleasure has been taken. And now think calmly over what I have written. I would not have written on the subject even to you, till the matter was quite settled, if I had not thought that you ought to have full time to /nake up your mind. If you feel an insurmountable aversion to India, I will do all in my power to make your residence in England comfortable during my absence, and to enable you to confer instead of receiving benefits. But if my dear sister would consent to give me, at this great crisis of my life, that proof, that painful and arduous proof, of her affection, which I beg of her, I think that she will not repent of it. She shall not, if the unbounded confidence and attachment of one to whom she is dearer than life can compensate her for a few years' absence from much that she loves. Dear Margaret ! She will feel this. Consult her, my love, and let us both have the advantage of such advice as her excellent understanding, and her warm affection for us, may furnish. On Monday next, at the latest, I expect to be with you. Our Scotch tour, under these circumstances, must be short. By Christmas it will be fit that the new Councillor should leave England. His functions in India commence next April. We shall leave our dear Margaret, I hope, a happy mother. Farewell, my dear sister. You cannot tell how impatiently. I shall wait for your answer. . T. B. M. This letter, written under the influence of deep and varied emotions, was read with feelings of painful agitation and surprise. India was not then the familiar name that it has become to a generation which regards a visit to Cashmere as a trip to be undertaken between two London seasons, and which discusses over its breakfast table at home the decisions arrived at on the previous afternoon in the Council-room of Simla or Calcutta. In those rural parsonages and middle-class households where service in our Eastern territories now presents itself in the light of a probable and desirable destiny for a promising son, those 238 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. same territories were forty years ago regarded as an obscure and distant region of disease and death. A girl who had seen no country more foreign than Wales, and crossed no water broader and more tempestuous than the Mersey, looked forward to a voyage which (as she subsequently learned by melancholy experience), might extend over six weary months, with an anxiety that can hardly be imagined by us who spend only half as many weeks on the journey between Dover and Bombay. A separation from beloved relations under such conditions was a separation indeed ; and, if Macaulay and his sister could have foreseen how much of what they left at their departure they would fail to find on their return, it is a question whether any earthly consideration could have induced them to quit their native shore. But Hannah's sense of duty was too strong for these doubts and tremors ; and, happily, (for on the whole her resolution was a fortunate one,) she resolved to accompany her brother in an expatriation which he never would have faced without her. With a mind set at ease by a knowledge of her intention, he came down to Liverpool as soon as the Session was at an end ; and carried her off on a jaunt to Edinburgh, in a post-chaise furnished with Horace Walpole's letters for their common reading, and Smollett's collected works for h'is own. Before October he was back at the Board of Control ; and his letters recommenced, as frequent and rather more serious and business-like than of old. London : October 5, 1833. Dear Hannah, Life goes on so quietly here, or rather stands so still, that I have nothing, or next to nothing, to say. At the Athenaeum I now and then fall in with some person passing through town on his way to the Continent or to Brighton. The other day I met Sharp, and had a long talk with him about everything and everybody, metaphysics, poetry, politics, scenery, and painting. One thing I have observed in Sharp, which is quite peculiar to him among town-wits and diners-out. He never talks scandal. If he can say nothing good of a man, he holds his tongue. I do not, of course, mean that in confidential communication about politics he does not speak freely of public men ; but about the foibles of private individuals I do not believe that, much as I have talked with him, I ever heard him utter one word I passed three or four hours very agreeably in his company at the club. I have also seen Kenny for an hour or two. I do not know that I ever mentioned Kenny to you. When London is over- flowing, I meet such numbers of people that I cannot remember 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 239 half their names. This is the time at which every acquaint- ance, however slight, attracts some degree of attention. In the desert island, even poor Poll was something of a companion to Robinson Crusoe. Kenny is a writer of a class which, in our time, is at the very bottom of the literary scale. He is a dra- matist. Most of the farces, and three-act plays, which have succeeded during the last eight or ten years, are, I am told, from his pen. Heaven knows that, if they are the farces and plays which I have seen, they do him but little honour. How- ever, this man is one of our great comic writers. He has the merit, such as it is, of hitting the very bad taste of our modern audiences better than any other person who has stooped to that degrading work. We had a good deal of literary chat ; and I thought him a clever shrewd fellow. ' My father is poorly: not that anything very serious is the matter with him: but he has a cold, and is in low spirits. Ever yours T. B. M. London : October 14, 1833. Dear Hannah, I have just finished my article on Horace Walpole. This is one of the happy moments of my life: a stupid task performed ; a weight taken off my mind. I should be quite joyous if I had only you to read it to. But to Napier it must go forthwith ; and, as soon as I have finished this letter, I shall put it into the general post with my own fair hands. I was up at four this morning to put the last touch to it. I often differ with the majority about other people's writings, and still oftener about my own ; and therefore I may very likely be mis- taken ; but I think that this article will be a hit. We shall see. Nothing ever cost me more pains than the first half; I never wrote anything so flowingly as the latter half; and I like the latter half the best I have laid it on Walpole so unsparingly that I shall not be surprised if Miss Berry should cut me. You know she was Walpole's favourite in her youth. Neither am I sure that Lord and Lady Holland will be well pleased. But they ought to be obliged to me : for I refrained for their sake from laying a hand, which has been thought to be not a light one, on that old rogue the first Lord Holland. 1 Charles Grant is still at Paris ; ill, he says. I never knew a man who wanted setting to rights so often. He goes as badly as your watch. 1 Lord Holland, once upon a time, speaking to Macanlay of his grandfather, said : " He had that temper which kind folks have been pleased to say belongs to my family ; but he shared the fauH that belonged to that school of statesmen, an utter disbelief in public virtue." 240 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. My father is at me again to provide for P . What on earth have I to do with P ? The relationship is one which none but Scotchmen would recognise. The lad is such a fool that he would utterly disgrace my recommendation. And, as if to make the thing more provoking, his sisters say that he must be provided for in England, for that they cannot think of parting with him. This, to be sure, matters little : for there is at present just as little chance of getting anything in India as in England. But what strange folly this is which meets me in every quarter ; people wanting posts in the army, the navy, the public offices, and saying that, if they cannot find such posts, they must starve ! How do all the rest of mankind live ? If I had not happened to be engaged in politics, and if my father had not been connected, by very extraordinary circumstances, with public men, we should never have dreamed of having places. Why cannot P be apprenticed to some hatter or tailor ? He may do well in such a business : he will do detestably ill as a clerk in my office. He may come to make good coats : he will never, I am sure, write good despatches. There is nothing truer than Poor Richard's saw : " We are taxed twice as heavily by our pride as by the state." The curse of England is the obstinate determination of the middle classes to make their sons what they call gentlemen. So we are overrun by clergy- men without livings ; lawyers without briefs ; physicians without patients ; authors without readers ; clerks soliciting employ- ment, who might have thriven, and been above the world, as bakers, watchmakers, or innkeepers. The next time my father speaks to me about P , I will offer to subscribe twenty guineas towards making a pastry-cook of him. He had a sweet tooth when he was a child. So you are reading Burnet ! Did you begin from the be- ginning ? What do you think of the old fellow ? He was always a great favourite of mine ; honest, though careless ; a strong party man on the right side, yet with much kind feeling towards his opponents, and even towards his personal enemies. He is to me a most entertaining writer ; far superior to Clarendon in the art of amusing, though of course far Clarendon's inferior in discernment, and in dignity and correctness of style. Do you know, by the bye, Clarendon's life of himself? I like it, the part after the Restoration at least, better than his great History. I am very quiet ; rise at seven or half-past ; read Spanish till ten ; breakfast ; walk to my office ; stay there till four ; take a long walk ; dine towards seven ; and am in bed before eleven. I&32-34- LORD MACAULAY 241 I am going through Don Quixote again, and admire it more than ever. It is certainly the best novel in the world, beyond all comparison. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : October 21, 1833. My dear Sister, Grant is here at last, and we have had a very long talk about matters both public and private. The Government would support my appointment ; but he expects violent opposition from the Company. He mentioned my name to the Chairs, and they were furious. They know that I have been against them through the whole course of the nego- tiations which resulted in the India Bill. They put their oppo- sition on the ground of my youth, a very flattering objection to a man who this week completes his thirty-third year. They spoke very highly of me in other respects ; but they seemed quite obstinate. The question now is whether their opposition will be sup- ported by the other Directors. If it should be so, I have advised Grant most strongly to withdraw my name, to put up some other man, and then to fight the battle to the utmost. We shall be suspected of jobbing if we proceed to extremities on behalf of one of ourselves ; but we can do what we like, if it is in favour of some person whom we cannot be suspected of supporting from interested motives. From the extreme un- reasonableness and pertinacity which are discernible in every communication that we receive from the India House at present, I am inclined to think that I have no chance of being chosen by them, without a dispute in which I should not wish the Government to engage for such a purpose. Lord Grey says that I have a right to their support if I ask for it ; but that, for the sake of his administration generally, he is very adverse to my going. I do not think that I shall go. However, a few days will decide the matter. I have heard from Napier. He praises my article on Walpole in terms absolutely extravagant. He says that it is the best that I ever wrote ; and, entre nous, I am not very far from agreeing with him. I am impatient to have your opinion. No flattery pleases me so much as domestic flattery. You will have the Number within the week. Ever yours T. B. M. 242 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. To Macvey Napier, Esq. London : October 21, 1833. Dear Napier, I am glad to learn that you like my article. I like it myself ; which is not much my habit. Very likely the public, which has often been kinder to my performances than I was, may on this, as on other occasions, differ from me in opinion. If the paper has any merit, it owes it to the delay of which you must, I am sure, have complained very bitterly in your heart. I was so thoroughly dissatisfied with the article, as it stood at first, that I completely re- wrote it ; altered the whole arrangement ; left out ten or twelve pages in one part ; and added twice as many in another. I never wrote anything so slowly as the first half, or so rapidly as the last half. You are in an error about Akenside, which I must clear up for his credit, and for mine. You are confounding the Ode to Curio and the Epistle to Curio. The latter is generally printed at the end of Akenside's works, and is, I think, the best thing that he ever wrote. The Ode is worthless. It is merely an abridgment of the Epistle executed in the most unskilful way. Johnson says, in his Life of Akenside, that no poet ever so much mistook his powers as Akenside when he took to lyric composition. "Having," I think the words are, "written with great force and poignancy his Epistle to Curio, he afterwards transformed it into an Ode only disgraceful to its author." l When I said that Chesterfield had lost by the publication of his letters, I of course considered that he had much to lose ; that he has left an immense reputation, founded on the testi- mony of all his contemporaries of all parties, for wit, taste, and eloquence ; that what remains of his Parliamentary oratory is superior to anything of that time that has come down to us, except a little of Pitt's. The utmost that can be said of the letters is that they are the letters of a cleverish man ; and there are not many which are entitled even to that praise. I think he would have stood higher if we had been left to judge of his powers, as we judge of those of Chatham, Mansfield, Charles 1 "Akenside was one of the fiercest and the most uncompromising of the young patriots out of Parliament. When he found that the change of adminis- tration had produced no change of system, he gave vent to his indignation in the ' Epistle to Curio,' the best poem that he ever wrote ; a poem, indeed, which seems to indicate that, if he had left lyrical composition to Gray and Collins, and had employed his powers in grave and elevated satire, he might have disputed the pre-eminence of Dryden." This passage occurs in Macaulay's Essay on Horace Walpole. In the course of the same Essay, Macaulay re- marks that " Lord Chesterfield stands much lower in the estimation of posterity than he would have done if his letters had never been published." 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 243 Townshend, and many others, only by tradition, and by frag- ments of speeches preserved in Parliamentary reports. I said nothing about Lord Byron's criticism on Walpole, because I thought it, like most of his Lordship's criticism, below refutation. On the drama Lord Byron wrote more non- sense than on any subject. He wanted to have restored the unities. His practice proved as unsuccessful as his theory was absurd. His admiration of the " Mysterious Mother " was of a piece with his thinking Gifford, and Rogers, greater poets than Wordsworth, and Coleridge. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. London : October 28, 1833. Dear Hannah, I wish to have Malkin as head of the Commission at Canton, and Grant seems now to be strongly bent on the same plan. 1 Malkin is a man of singular temper, judgment, and firmness of nerve. Danger and responsibility, instead of agitating and confusing him, always bring out what- ever there is in him. This was the reason of his great success at Cambridge. He made a figure there far beyond his learning or his talents, though both his learning and his talents are highly respectable. But the moment that he sate down to be examined, which is just the situation in which all other people, from natural flurry, do worse than at other times, be began to do his very best. His intellect became clearer, and his manner more quiet, than usual. He is the very man to make up his mind in three minutes if the Viceroy of Canton were in a rage, the mob bellowing round the doors of the factory, and an English ship of war making preparations to bombard the town. A propos of places, my father has been at me again about P . Would you think it ? This lad has a hundred and twenty pounds a year for life ! I could not believe my ears ; but so it is ; and I, who have not a penny, with half a dozen brothers and sisters as poor as myself, am to move heaven and earth to push this boy who, as he is the silliest, is also, I think, the richest relation that I have in the world. I am to dine on Thursday with the Fishmongers' Company, the first company for gourmandise in the world. Their magni- ficent Hall near London Bridge is not yet built, but, as respects eating and drinking, I shall be no loser ; for we are to be entertained at the Albion Tavern. This is the first dinner- party that I shall have been to for a long time. There is 1 Sir Benjamin Malkin, a college friend of Macaulay, was afterwards a judge in the Supreme Court at Calcutta. k 2 244 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. nobody in town that I know except official men and they have left their wives and households in the country. I met Poodle Byng, it is true, the day before yesterday in the street ; and he begged me to make haste to Brooks's ; for Lord Essex was there, he said, whipping up for a dinner-party ; cursing and swearing at all his friends for being out of town ; and wishing what an honour ! that Macaulay was in London. I pre- served all the dignity of a young lady in an affaire du cceur. " I shall not run after my Lord, I assure you. If he wants me, he knows where he may hear of me." This nibble is the nearest approach to a dinner-party that I have had. Ever yours T. B. M. London : November i, 1833. Dear Hannah, I have not much to add to what I told you yesterday ; but everything that I have to add looks one way. We have a new Chairman and Deputy Chairman, both very strongly in my favour. Sharp, by whom I sate yesterday at the Fishmongers' dinner, told me that my old enemy James Mill had spoken to him on the subject. Mill is, as you have heard, at the head of one of the principal departments of the India House. The late Chairman consulted him about me ; hoping, I suppose, to have his support against me. Mill said, very handsomely, that he would advise the Company to take me ; for, as public men went. I was much above the average, and, if they rejected me, he thought it very unlikely that they would get anybody so fit. This is all the news that I have to give you. It is not much. But I wish to keep you as fully informed of what is going on as I am myself. Old Sharp told me that I was acting quite wisely, but that he should never see me again ; and he cried as he said it. l I encouraged him : and told him that I hoped to be in England again before the end of 1839, and that there was nothing im- possible in our meeting again. He cheered up after a time ; told me that he should correspond with me, and give me all the secret history both of politics and of society ; and promised to select the best books, and send them regularly to me. The Fishmongers' dinner was very good, but not so pro- fusely splendid as I had expected. There has been a change, I find, and not before it was wanted. They had got at one time to dining at ten guineas a head. They drank my he-ilth, and I harangued them with immense applause. I talked all 1 Mr. Sharp died in 1837, before Macaulay's return from India. 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 45 the evening to Sharp. I told him what a dear sister I had, and how readily she had agreed to go with me. I had told Grant the same in the morning. Both of them extolled my good fortune in having such a companion. Ever yours T. B. M. London : November , 1833. Dear Hannah, Things stand as they stood ; except that the report of my appointment is every day spreading more widely ; and that I am beset by advertising dealers begging leave to make up a hundred cotton shirts for me, and fifty muslin gowns for you, and by clerks out of place begging to be my secretaries. I am not in very high spirits to-day, as I have just received a letter from poor Ellis, to whom I had not com- municated my intentions till yesterday. He writes so affection- ately and so plaintively that he quite cuts me to the heart. There are few indeed from whom I shall part with so much pain ; and he, poor fellow, says that, next to his wife, I am the person for whom he feels the most thorough attachment, and in whom he places the most unlimited confidence. On the nth of this month there is to be a dinner given to Lushington by the electors of the Tower Hamlets. He has persecuted me with importunities to attend, and make a speech for him ; and my father has joined in the request. It is enough, in these times, Heaven knows, for a man who repre- sents, as I do, a town of a hundred and twenty thousand people to keep his own constituents in good humour; and the Spitalfields weavers, and Whitechapel butchers, are nothing to me. But, ever since I succeeded in what everybody allows to have been the most hazardous attempt of the kind ever made, I mean in persuading an audience of manufacturers, all Whigs or Radicals, that the immediate alteration of the corn-laws was impossible, I have been considered as a capital physician for desperate cases in politics. However, to return from that delightful theme, my own praises, Lushington, who is not very popular with the rabble of the Tower Hamlets, thinks that an oration from me would give him a lift. I could not refuse him directly, backed as he was by my father. I only said that I would attend if I were in London on the nth ; but I added that, situated as I was, I thought it very probable that I should be out of town. I shall go to-night to Miss Berry's soiree. I do not know whether I told you that she resented my article on Horace Walpole so much that Sir Stratford Canning advised me not to 246 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. go near her. She was Walpole's greatest favourite. His Reminiscences are addressed to her in terms of the most gallant eulogy. When he was dying at past eighty, he asked her to marry him, merely that he might make her a Countess and leave her his fortune. You know that in Vivian Grey she is called Miss Otranto. I always expected that my article would put her into a passion, and I was not mistaken ; but she has come round again, and sent me a most pressing and kind invitation the other day. I have been racketing lately, having dined twice with Rogers, and once with Grant. Lady Holland is in a most extraordinary state. She came to Rogers's, with Allen, in so bad a humour that we were all forced to rally, and make com- mon cause against her. There was not a person at table to whom she was not rude ; and none of us were inclined to submit. Rogers sneered ; Sydney made merciless sport of her. Tom Moore looked excessively impertinent ; Bobus put her down with simple straightforward rudeness ; and I treated her with what I meant to be the coldest civility. Allen flew into a rage with us all, and especially with Sydney, whose guffaws, as the Scotch say, were indeed tremendous. When she and all the rest were gone, Rogers made Tom Moore and me sit down with him for half an hour, and we coshered over the events of the evening. Rogers said that he thought Allen's firing up in defence of his patroness the best thing that he had seen in him. No sooner had Tom and I got into the street than he broke forth : "That such an old stager as Rogers should talk such nonsense, and give Allen credit for attachment to anything but his dinner ! Allen was bursting with envy to see us so free, while he was conscious of his own slavery." Her Ladyship has been the better for this discipline. She has overwhelmed me ever since with attentions and invitations. I have at last found out the cause of her ill-humour, or at least of that portion of it of which I was the object. She is in a rage at my article on Walpole, but at what part of it I cannot tell. I know that she is very intimate with the Walde- graves, to whom the manuscripts belong, and for whose benefit the letters were published. But my review was surely not calculated to injure the sale of the book. Lord Holland told me, in an aside, that he quite agreed with me, but that we had better not discuss the subject. A note ; and, by my life, from my Lady Holland : " Dear Mr. Macaulay, pray wrap yourself very warm, and come to us on Wednesday." No, my good Lady. I am engaged on Wednes- day to dine at the Albion Tavern with the Directors of the 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 247 East India Company ; now my servants ; next week, I hope, to be my masters Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : November 22, 1833. My dear Sister, The decision is postponed for a week ; but there is no chance of an unfavourable result. The Chairs have collected the opinions of their brethren ; and the result is, that, of the twenty-four Directors, only six or seven at the most will vote against me. I dined with the Directors on Wednesday at the Albion Tavern. We had a company of about sixty persons, and many eminent military men amongst them. The very courteous manner in which several of the Directors begged to be intro- duced to me, and drank my health at dinner, led me to think that the Chairs have not overstated the feeling of the Court. One of them, an old Indian and a great friend of our uncle the General, told me in plain words that he was glad to hear that I was to be in their service. Another, whom I do not even know by sight, pressed the Chairman to propose my health. The Chairman with great judgment refused. It would have been very awkward to have had to make a speech to them in the present circumstances. Of course, my love, all your expenses, from the day of my appointment, are my affair. My present plan, formed after conversation with experienced East Indians, is not to burden myself with an extravagant outfit. I shall take only what will be necessary for the voyage. Plate, wine, coaches, furniture, glass, china, can be bought in Calcutta as well as in London. I shall not have money enough to fit myself out handsomely with such things here ; and to fit myself out shabbily would be folly. I reckon that we can bring our whole expense for the passage within the twelve hundred pounds allowed by the Company. My calculation is that our cabins and board will cost 250?. apiece. The passage of our servants 5o/. apiece. That makes up 6oo/. My clothes and etceteras, as Mrs. Meeke observes, 1 will, I am quite sure, come within 2oo/. Yours will, of course, be more. I will send you 3007. to lay out as you like ; not meaning to confine you to it, by any means ; but you would probably prefer having a sum down to sending in your milliner's bills to me. I reckon my servant's outfit at 5o/. ; your maid's at as much more. The whole will be i2oo/. 1 Mrs. Mecke was his favourite among bad novel-writers. See page 96. 248 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. One word about your maid. You really must choose with great caution. Hitherto the Company has required that all ladies, who take maidservants with them from this country to India, should give security to send them back within two years. The reason was, that no class of. people misconducted them- selves so much in the East as female servants from this country. They generally treat the natives with gross insolence ; an in- solence natural enough to people accustomed to stand in a subordinate relation to others when, for the first time, they find a great population placed in a servile relation towards them. Then, too, the state of society is such that they are very likely to become mistresses of the wealthy Europeans, and to flaunt about in magnificent palanquins, bringing discredit on their country by the immorality of their lives and the vulgarity of their manners. On these grounds the Company has hitherto insisted upon their being sent back at the expense of those who take them out. The late Act will enable your servant to stay in India, if she chooses to stay. I hope, therefore, that you will be careful in your selection. You see how much depends upon it. The happiness and concord of our native household, which will probably consist of sixty or seventy people, may be destroyed by her, if she should be ill-tempered and arrogant If she should be weak and vain, she will probably form con- nections that will ruin her morals and her reputation. I am no preacher, as you very well know ; but I have a strong sense of the responsibility under which we shall both lie with respect to a poor girl, brought by us into the midst of temptations of which she cannot be aware, and which have turned many heads that might have been steady enough in a quiet nursery or kitchen in England. To find a man and wife, both of whom would suit us, would be very difficult ; and I think it right, also, to offer to my clerk to keep him in my service. He is honest, intelligent, and respectful ; and, as he is rather inclined to consumption, the change of climate would probably be useful to him. I cannot bear the thought of throwing any person who has been about me for five years, and with whom I have no fault to find, out of bread, while it is in my power to retain his services. Ever yours T. B. M. London : December 5, 1833. Dear Lord Lansdowne, I delayed returning an answer to your kind letter till this day, in order that I might be able to send you definite intelligence. Yesterday evening the Directors T832-34- LORD MACAULAY, 249 appointed me to a seat in the Council of India. The votes were nineteen for me, and three against me. I feel 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 im- portance 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 the 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. The situation, in which I have been placed for some time back, would have broken the spirit of many men. It has rather tended to make me the most mutinous and un- manageable of the followers of the Government. I tendered my resignation twice during the course of the last Session. I certainly should not have done so if I had been a man of fortune. You, whom malevolence itself could never accuse of coveting office for the sake of pecuniary gain, and whom your salary very poorly compensates for the sacrifice of ease, and of your tastes, to the public service, cannot estimate rightly the feelings of a man who knows that his circumstances lay him open to the suspicion of being actuated in his public conduct by the lowest motives. Once or twice, when I have been defending unpopular measures in the House of Commons, that thought has disordered my ideas, and deprived me of my presence of mind. If this were all, I should feel that, for the sake of my own happiness and of my public utility, a few years would be well spent in obtaining an independence But this is not all. I am not alone in the world. A family which I love most fondly is dependent on me. Unless .1 would see my father left in his old age to the charity of less near relations ; my youngest brother unable to obtain a good professional education ; my 250 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. sisters, who are more to me than any sisters ever were to a brother, forced to turn governesses or humble companions, I must do something, I must make some effort. An oppor- tunity has offered itself. It is in my power to make the last days of my father comfortable, to educate my brother, to pro- vide for my sisters, to procure a competence for myself. I may hope, by the time I am thirty-nine or forty, to return to England with a fortune of thirty thousand pounds. To me that would be affluence. I never wished for more. As far as English politics are concerned, I lose, it is true, a few years. But, if your kindness had not introduced me very early to Parliament, if I had been left to climb up the regular path of my profession, and to rise by my own efforts, I should have had very little chance of being in the House of Commons at forty. If I have gained any distinction in the eyes of my countrymen, if I have acquired any knowledge of Parlia- mentary and official business, and any habitude for the manage- ment of great affairs, I ought to consider these things as clear gain. Then, too, the years of my absence, though lost, as far as English politics are concerned, will not, I hope, be wholly lost, as respects either my own mind or the happiness of my fellow- creatures. I can scarcely conceive a nobler field than that which our Indian Empire now presents to a statesman. While some of my partial friends are blaming me for stooping to accept a share in the government of that Empire, I am afraid that I am aspiring too high for my qualifications. I sometimes feel, I most unaffectedly declare, depressed and appalled by the im- mense responsibility which I have undertaken. You are one of the very few public men of our time who have bestowed on Indian affairs the attention which they deserve ; and you will therefore, I am sure, fully enter into my feelings. And now, dear Lord Lansdowne, let me thank you most warmly for the kind feeling which has dictated your letter. That letter is, indeed, but a very small part of what I ought to thank you for. That at an early age I have gained some credit in public life ; that I have done some little service to more than one good cause ; that I now have it in my power to repair the ruined fortunes of my family, and to save those who are dearest to me from the misery and humiliation of dependence ; that I am almost certain, if I live, of obtaining a competence by honourable means before I am past the full vigour of manhood, all this I owe to your kindness. I will say no more. I will only entreat you to believe that neither now, nor on any former occasion, have I ever said one thousandth part of what I feel. 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 251 If it will not be inconvenient to you, I propose to go to Bowood on Wednesday next. Labouchere will be my fellow- traveller. On Saturday we must bcth return to town. Short as my visit must be, I look forward to it with great pleasure. Believe me, ever, Yours most faithfully and affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : December 5, 1833. My dear Sister,- I am overwhelmed with business, clearing off my work here, and preparing for my new functions. Plans of ships, and letters from captains, pour in without intermission. I really am mobbed with gentlemen begging to have the honour of taking me to India at my own time. The fact is that a Member of Council is a great catch, not merely on account of the high price which he directly pays for accommodation, but because other people are attracted by him. Every father of a young writer, or a young cadet, likes to have his son on board the same vessel with the great man, to dine at the same table, and to have a chance of attracting his notice. Everything in India is given by the Governor in Council ; and, though I have no direct voice in the disposal of patronage, my indirect in- fluence may be great. Grant's kindness through all these negotiations has been such as I really cannot describe. He told me yesterday, with tears in his eyes, that he did not know what the Board would do without me. I attribute his feeling partly to Robert Grant's absence ; not that Robert ever did me ill offices with him ; far from it ; but Grant's is a mind that cannot stand alone. It is, begging your pardon for my want of gallantry, a feminine mind. It turns, like ivy, to some support. When Robert is near him, he clings to Robert. Robert being away, he clings to me. This may be a weakness in a public man ; but I love him the better for it. I have lately m:t Sir James Graham at dinner. He took me aside, and talked to me on my appointment with a warmth of kindness which, though we have been always on good terms, surprised me. But the approach of a long separation, like the approach of death, brings out all friendly feelings with unusual strength. The Cabinet, he said, felt the loss strongly. It was great at the India Board, but in the House of Commons, (he used the word over and over,) " irreparable." They all, how- ever, he said, agreed that a man of honour could not make 252 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. politics a profession unless he had a competence of his own, without exposing himself to privation of the severest kind. They felt that they had never had it in their power to do all they wished to do for me. They had no means of giving me a provision in England ; and they could not refuse me what I asked in India. He said very strongly that they all thought that I judged quite wisely ; and added that, if God heard his prayers, and spared my health, I should make a far greater figure in public life than if I had remained during the next five or six years in England. I picked up in a print-shop the other day some superb views of the suburbs of Chowringhee, and the villas of the Garden Reach. Selina professes that she is ready to die with envy of the fine houses and verandahs. I heartily wish we were back again in a nice plain brick house, three windows in front, in Cadogan Place or Russell Square, with twelve or fifteen hundred a year, and a spare bedroom, (we, like Mrs. Norris, 1 must always haVe a spare bedroom,) for Edward and Margaret Love to them both. Ever yours T. B. M. To Macvey Napier, Esq. London : December 5, 1833. Dear Napier, You are probably not unprepared for what I am about to tell you. Yesterday evening the Directors of the East India Company elected me one of the members of the Supreme Council. It will, therefore, be necessary that in a few weeks, ten weeks, at furthest, I should leave this country for a few years. It would be mere affectation in me to pretend not to know that my support is of some importance to the Edinburgh Review. In the situation in which I shall now be placed, a connection with the Review will be of some importance to me. I know well how dangerous it is for a public man wholly to withdraw himself from the public eye. During an absence of six years, I run some risk of losing most of the distinction, literary and political, which I have acquired. As a means of keeping myself in the recollection of my countrymen during my sojourn abroad the Review will be invaluable to me : nor do I foresee that there will be the slightest difficulty in my con- tinuing to write for you at least as much as ever. I have thought over my late articles, and I really can scarcely call to mind a single sentence in any one of them which might not have been written at Calcutta as easily as in London. Perhaps 1 A leading personage in Miss Austen's " Mansfield Park." 1832-14- LORD MACAULAY. 253 in India I might not have the means of detecting two or three of the false dates in Croker's Boswell. But that would have been all. Very little, if any, of the effect of my most popular articles is produced either by minute research into rare books, or by allusions to mere topics of the day. I think therefore that we might easily establish a commerce mutually beneficial. I shall wish to be supplied with all the good books which come out in this part of the world. Indeed, many books which in themselves are of little value, and which, if I were in England, I should not think it worth while to read, will be interesting to me in India ; just as the commonest daubs, and the rudest vessels, at Pompeii attract the minute attention of people who would not move their eyes to see a modern signpost, or a modern kettle. Distance of place, like distance of time, makes trifles valuable. What I propose, then, is that you should pay me for the articles which I may send you from India, not in money, but in books. As to the amount I make no stipulations. You know that I have never haggled about such matters. As to the choice of books, the mode of transmission, and other matters, we shall have ample time to discuss them before my departure. Let me know whether you are willing to make an arrangement on this basis. I have not forgotten Chatham in the midst of my avocations- I hope to send you an article on him early next week. Ever yours sincerely T. B. MACAULAY. From the Right Hon. Francis Jeffrey to Afawey Napier, Esq. 24, Moray Place : Saturday evening, December 7. My dear Napier, I am very much obliged to you for the permission to read this. It is to me, I will confess, a solemn and melancholy announcement. I ought not, perhaps, so to consider it. But I cannot help it. I was not prepared for six years, and I must still hope that it will not be so much. At my age, and with that climate for him, the chances of our ever meeting again are terribly endangered by such a term. He does not know the extent of the damage which his secession may be to the great cause of Liberal government. His antici- pations and offers about the Review are generous and pleasing, and must be peculiarly gratifying to you. I think, if you can, you should try to see him before he goes, and I envy you the meeting. Ever very faithfully yours F. JEFFREY. 254 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : December 21, 1833. My dear Sister, Yesterday I dined at Boddington's. We had a very agreeable party : Duncannon, Charles Grant, Sharp, Chantrey the sculptor, Bobus Smith, and James Mill. Mill and I were extremely friendly, and I found him a very pleasant companion, and a man of more general information than I had imagined. Bobus was very amusing. He is a great authority on Indian matters. He was during several years Advocate-General in Bengal, and made all his large fortune there. I asked him about the climate. Nothing, he said, could be pleasanter, ex- cept in August and September. He never ate or drank so much in his life. Indeed, his looks do credit to Bengal ; for a healthier man of his age I never saw. We talked about ex- penses. "I cannot conceive," he said, "how anybody at Calcutta can live on less than 3,ooo/. a year, or can contrive to spend more than 4,000!." We talked of the insects and snakes, and he said a thing which reminded me of his brother Sydney : " Always, Sir, manage to have at your table some fleshy, bloom- ing, young writer or cadet, just come out ; that the musquitoes may stick to him, and leave the rest of the company alone." I have been with George Babington to the Asia We saw her to every disadvantage, all litter and confusion : but she is a fine ship, and our cabins will be very good. The captain I like much. He is an agreeable, intelligent, polished man of forty; and very good-looking, considering what storms and changes of climate he has gone through. He advised me strongly to put little furniture into our cabins. I told him to have yours made as neat as possible, without regard to expense. He has promised to have it furnished simply, but prettily ; and when you see it, if any addition occurs to you, it shall be made. I shall spare nothing to make a pretty little boudoir for you. You cannot think how my friends here praise you. You are quite Sir James Graham's heroine. To-day I breakfasted with Sharp, whose kindness is as warm as possible. Indeed, all my friends seem to be in the most amiable mood. I have twice as many invitations as I can accept ; and I have been frequently begged to name my own party. Empty as London is, I never was so much beset with invitations. Sharp asked me about you. I told him how much I regretted my never having had any opportunity of showing you the best part of London society. He said that he 1832-34- LORD MA CAUL AY. 255 would take care that you should see what was best worth seeing before your departure. He promises to give us a few breakfast-parties and dinner-parties, where you will meet as many as he can muster of the best set in town, Rogers, Luttrell, Rice, Tom Moore, Sydney Smith, Grant, and other great wits and politicians. I am quite delighted at this ; both because you will, I am sure, be amused, and pleased, at a time when you ought to have your mind occupied, and because even to have mixed a little in a circle so brilliant will be of advantage to you in India. You have neglected, and very rightly and sensibly, frivolous accomplishments : you have not been at places of fashionable diversion : and it is, therefore, the more desirable that you should appear among the dancing, pianoforte-playing, opera-going, damsels at Calcutta as one who has seen society better than any that they ever approached. I hope that you will not disapprove of what I have done. I accepted Sharp's offer for you eagerly. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : January 2, 1834. My dear Sister, I am busy with an article ' for Napier. 1 cannot in the least tell at present whether I shall like it or not. I proceed with great ease ; and in general I have found that the success of my writings has been in proportion to the ease with which they have been written. I had a most extraordinary scene with Lady Holland. If she had been as young and handsome as she was thirty years ago, she would have turned my head. She was quite hysterical about my going ; paid me such compliments as I cannot repeat ; cried ; raved ; called me dear, dear Macaulay. " You are sacrificed to your family. I see it all. You are too good to them. They are always making a tool of you ; last Session about the slaves ; and now sending you to India ! " I always do my best to keep my temper with Lady Holland for three reasons : because she is a woman ; because she is very un happy in her health, and in the circumstances of her position ; and because she has a real kindness for me. But at last she said something about you. This was too much, and I was beginning to answer her in a voice trembling with anger, when she broke out again : " I beg your pardon. Pray forgive me, dear Macaulay. I was very impertinent. I know you will 1 The first article on Lord Chatham. 256 LIFE AND LETTERS OF OH. v. forgive me. Nobody has such a temper as you. I have said so a hundred times. I said so to Allen only this morning. I am sure you will bear with my weakness. I shall never see you again : " and she cried, and I cooled : for it would have been to very little purpose to be .angry with her. I hear that it is not to me alone that she runs on in this way. She storms at the Ministers for letting me go. I was told that at one dinner she became so violent that even Lord Holland, whose temper, whatever his wife may say, is much cooler than mine, could not command himself, and broke out : " Don't talk such nonsense, my Lady. What, the devil ! Can we tell a gentle- man who has a claim upon us that he must lose his only chance of getting an independence in order that he may come and talk to you in an evening ? " Good-bye, and take care not to become so fond of your own will as my Lady. It is now my duty to omit no oppor- tunity of giving you wholesome advice. I am henceforward your sole guardian. I have bought Gisborne's Duties of Women, Moore's Fables for the Female Sex, Mrs. King's Fe- male Scripture Characters, and Fordyce's Sermons. With the help of these books I hope to keep my responsibility in order on our voyage, and in India. Ever yours T. B. M. To Hannah M. Macaulay. London : January 4, 1834. My dear Sister, I am now buying books ; not trashy books which will only bear one reading ; but good books for a library. I have my eye on all the bookstalls ; and I shall no longer suffer you, when we walk together in London, to drag me past them as you used to do. Pray make out a list of any which you would like to have. The provision which I design for the voyage is Richardson, Voltaire's works, Gibbon, Sis- mondi's History of the French, Davila, the Orlando in Italian, Don Quixote in Spanish, Homer in Greek, Horace in Latin. I must also have some books of jurisprudence, and some to initiate me in Persian and Hindostanee. Shall I buy " Dun- allan " for you ? I believe that in your eyes it would stand in the place of all the rest together. But, seriously, let me know what you would like me to procure. Ellis is making a little collection of Greek classics for me. Sharp has given me one or two very rare and pretty books, which I much wanted. All the Edinburgh Reviews are being bound, so that we shall have a complete set, up to the forth- 1832-34- LORD MACAULAY. 257 coming number, which will contain an article of mine on Chatham. And this reminds me that I must give over writing to you, and fall to my article. I rather think that it will be a good one. Ever yours T. B. M. London : February 13, 1834. Dear Napier, It is true that I have been severely tried by ill-health during the last few weeks ; but I am now rapidly recovering, and am assured by all my medical advisers that a week of the sea will make me better than ever I was in my life. I have several subjects in my head. One is Mackintosh's History ; I mean the fragment of the large work. Another plan which I have is a very fine one, if it could be well exe- cuted . I think that the time is come when a fair estimate may be formed of the intellectual and moral character of Voltaire. The extreme veneration, with which he was regarded during his lifetime, has passed away ; the violent reaction, which followed, has spent itself; and the world can now, I think, bear to hear the truth, and to see the man exhibited as he was, a strange mixture of greatness and littleness, virtues and vices. I have all his works, and shall take them in my cabin on the voyage. But my library is not particularly rich in those books which illustrate the literary history of his times. I have Rousseau, and Marmontel's Memoirs, and Madame du Deffand's Letters, and perhaps a few other works which would be of use. But Grimm's Correspondence, and several other volumes of memoirs and letters, would be necessary. If you would make a small collection of the works which would be most useful in this point of view, and send it after me as soon as possible, I will do my best to draw a good Voltaire. I fear that the article must be enormously long, seventy pages perhaps ; but you know that I do not run into unnecessary lengths. I may perhaps try my hand on Miss Austen's novels. That is a subject on which I shall require no assistance from books. Whatever volumes you may send me ought to be half- bound ; or the white ants will devour them before they have been three days on shore. Besides the books which may be necessary for the Review, I should like to have any work of very striking merit which may appear during my absence. The particular department of literature which interests me most is history ; above all, English history. Any valuable book on that subject I should wish to possess. Sharp, Miss Berry, and some of my other friends, will perhaps, now and then, suggest a s 258 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. book to you. But it is principally on your own judgment that I must rely to keep me well supplied. Yours most truly T. B. MACAULAY. On the 4th of February Macaulay bade farewell to his electors, in an address which the Leeds Tories probably thought too high-flown for the occasion. 1 But he had not yet done with the House of Commons. Parliament met on the first Tuesday in the month ; and, on the Wednesday, O'Con- nell, who had already contrived to make two speeches since the Session began, rose for a third time to call attention to words uttered during the recess by Mr. Hill, the Member for Hull. That gentleman, for want of something better to say to his constituents, had told them that he happened to know ' ' that an Irish Member, who spoke with great violence against every part of the Coercion Bill, and voted against every clause of it, went to Ministers and said : ' Don't bate a single atom of that Bill, or it will be impossible for any man to live in Ireland.'" O'Connell called upon Lord Althorp, as the representative of the Government, to say what truth there was in this statement. Lord Althorp, taken by surprise, acted upon the impulse of the moment, which in his case was a feeling of reluctance to throw over poor Mr. Hill to be bullied by O'Connell and his redoubt- able tail. After explaining that no set and deliberate com- munication of the nature mentioned had been made to the Ministers, his Lordship went on to say that he " should not act properly if he did not declare that he had good reason to believe that some Irish Members did, in private conversation, use very different language " from what they had employed in public. 1 "If, now that I have ceased to be your servant, and am only your sincere and grateful friend, I may presume to offer you advice which must, at least, be allowed to be disinterested, I would say to you : Act towards your future re- presentatives as you have acted towards me. Choose them, as you chose me, without canvassing and without expeme. Encourage them, as you en- couraged me, always to speak to you fearlessly and plainly. Reject, as you have hitherto rejected, the wages of dishonour. Defy, as you have hitherto defied, the threats of petty tyrants. Never forget that the worst and most de- grading species of corruption is the corruption which operates, not by hopes, but by fears. Cherish those noble and virtuous principles for which we have struggled and triumphed together the principles of liberty and toleration, of justice and order. Support, as you have steadily supported, the cause of good government ; and may all the blessings which are the natural fruits of good government descend upon you and be multiplied to you an hundredfold ! May your manufactures flourish ; may your trade be extended ; may your riches increase ! May the works of your skill, and the signs of your prosperity, meet me in the furthest regions of the East, and give me fresh cause to be proud of the intelligence, the industry, and the spirit of my constituents 1 " 1832-34- LORD MAC A UL AY. 2& It was chivalrously, but most unwisely, spoken. O'Connell at once gave the cue by inquiring whether he himself was among the Members referred to, and Lord Althorp assured him that such was not the case. The Speaker tried to interfere; but the matter had gone too far. One Irish representative after another jumped up to repeat the same question with regard to his own case, and received the same answer. At length Sheil rose, and asked whether he was one of the Mem- bers to whom the Noble Lord had alluded. Lord Althorp replied : " Yes. The honourable and learned gentleman is one." Sheil, "in the face of his country, and the presence of his God," asserted that the individual who had given any such information to the Noble Lord was guilty of a "gross and scandalous calumny," and added that he understood the Noble Lord to have made himself responsible for the imputation. Then ensued one of those scenes in which the House of Commons appears at its very worst. All the busybodies, as their manner is, rushed to the front ; and hour after hour slipped away in an unseemly, intricate, and apparently inter- minable wrangle. Sheil was duly called upon to give an assurance that the affair should not be carried beyond the walls of the House. He refused to comply, and was committed to the charge of the Sergeant at Arms. The Speaker then turned to Lord Althorp, who promised in Parliamentary language not to send a challenge. Upon this, as is graphically enough described in the conventional terms of Hansard, " Mr. O'Con- nell made some observation to the honourable Member sitting next him which was not heard in the body of the House. Lord Althorp immediately rose, and amid loud cheers, and with considerable warmth, demanded to know what the hon- ourable and learned gentleman meant by his gesticulation ;" and then, after an explanation from O'Connell, his Lordship went on to use phrases which very clearly signified that, though he had no cause for sending a challenge, he had just as little intention of declining one ; upon which he likewise was made over to the Sergeant. Before, however, honourable Members went to their dinners, they had the relief of learning that their refractory colleagues had submitted to the Speaker's authority, and had been discharged from custody. There was only one way out of the difficulty. On the loth of February a Committee of Investigation was appointed, com- posed of Members who enjoyed a special reputation for dis- cretion. Mr. Hill called his witnesses. The first had nothing relevant to tell. Macaulay was the second ; and he forthwith cut the matter short by declaring that, on principle, he refused 2<5o LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. V. to disclose what had passed in private conversation : a senti- ment which was actually cheered by the Committee. One sentence of common sense brought the absurd embroilment to a rational conclusion. Mr. Hill saw his mistake ; begged that no further evidence might be taken ; and, at the next sitting of the House, withdrew his charge in unqualified terms of self- abasement and remorse. Lord Althorp readily admitted that he had acted " imprudently as a man, and s'ul more impru- dently as a Minister," and stated that he considered himself bound to accept Sheil's denial : but he could not manage so to frame his remarks as to convey to his hearers the idea that his opinion of that honourable gentleman had been raised by the transaction. Sheil acknowledged the two apologies with effusion proportioned to their respective value ; and so ended an affair which, at the worst, had evoked a fresh proof of that ingrained sincerity of character for the sake of which his party would have followed Lord Althorp to the death. l Gravesend : February 15, 1834. Dear Lord Lansdowne, I had hoped that it would have been in my power to shake hands with you once more before my departure ; but this deplorably absurd affair in the House of Commons has prevented me from calling on you. I lost a whole day while the Committee were deciding whether I should, or should not, be forced to repeat all the foolish, shabby, things that I had heard Sheil say at Brooks's. I cannot leave England without sending a few lines to you, and yet they are needless. It is unnecessary for me to say with what feelings I shall always remember our connection, and with what interest I shall always learn tidings of you and of your family. Yours most sincerely T. B. MACAULAY. 1 In Macaulay's journal for June 3, 1851. we read: "I went to breakfast with the Bishop of Oxford, and there learned that Sheil was dead. Poor fellow ! We talked about Sheil, and I related my adventure of February 1834. Odd that it should have been so little known, or so completely forgotten I Everybody thought me right, as I certainly was." 1*34-38- LORD MACAULAY. 261 CHAPTER VI. 1834-1838. The outward voyage Arrival at Madras Macaulay is summoned to join Lord William Bentinck in the Neilglierries His journey up-country His native servant Arcot Bangalore -Seringapatam Ascent of the Neilglierries First sight of the Governor-General Letters to Mr. Eilis, and the Miss Macaulays A summer on the Neilgherries Native Christians Clarissa A tragt-comedy Macaulay leaves the Neilgherries, travels to Calcutta, and there sets up house Letters to Mr. Napier, and Mrs. Crupper Mr. Trevelyan Marriage of Hannah Macaulay Death of Mrs. Cropper Macaulay's work in India His Minutes for Council -Freedom of the Press -Literary gratitude Second Minute on the Freedom of the Press The Black Act A Calcutta public meeting Macaulay's defence of the policy of the Indian Government His Minute on Education He becomes Pre- sident of the Committee of Public Instruction His industry in dis- charging the functions of that post Specimens of his official writing Results of his labours He is appointed President of the Law Com- mission, and recommends the framing of a Criminal Code Appear- ance of the Code Comments of Mr. Fitzjames Stephen Macaulay's private life in India Oriental delicacies - Breakfast-parties Mac- aulay's longing for England Calcutta and Dublin Departure from India Letters to Mr. Ellis, Mr. Sharp, Mr. Napier, and Mr. Z. Macaulay. FROM the moment that a deputation of Falmouth Whigs, headed by their Mayor, came on board to wish Macaulay his health in India and a happy return to England, nothing occurred that broke the monotony of an easy and rapid voyage. "The catch- ing of a shark ; the shooting of an albatross ; a sailor tumbling down the hatchway and breaking his head ; a cadet getting drunk and swearing at the captain," are incidents to which not even the highest literary power can impart the charm of novelty in the eyes of the readers of a seafaring nation. The company on the quarter-deck was much on a level with the average society of an East Indiaman. " Hannah will give you the histories of all these good people at length, I dare say, for she was extremely social ; danced with the gentlemen in the even- ings, and read novels and sermons with the ladies in the 262 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. mornings. I contented myself with being very civil whenever I was with the other passengers, and took care to be with them as little as I could. Except at meals, I hardly exchanged a word with any human being. I never was left for so long a time so completely to my own "resources ; and I am glad to say that I found them quite sufficient to keep me cheerful and employed. During the whole voyage I read with keen and increasing enjoyment. I devoured Greek, Latin, Spanish, Italian, French, and English ; folios, quartos, octavos, and duo- decimos." On the loth of June the vessel lay to off Madras ; and Macaulay had his first introduction to the people for whom he was appointed to legislate in the person of a boatman who pulled through the surf on his raft " He came on board with nothing on him but a pointed yellow cap, and walked among us with a self-possession and civility which, coupled with his colour and his nakedness, nearly made me die of laughing." This gen- tleman was soon followed by more responsible messengers, who brought tidings the reverse of welcome. Lord William Bentinck, who was then Governor-General, was detained by ill-health at Ootacamund in the Neilgherry Hills ; a place which, by name at least, is now as familiar to Englishmen as Malvern ; but which in 1834 was known to Macaulay, by vague report, as situated somewhere "in the mountains of Malabar, beyond Mysore." The state of public business rendered it necessary that the Council should meet ; and, as the Governor-General had left one member of that body in Bengal as his deputy, he was not able to make a quorum until his new colleague arrived from England. A pressing summons to attend his Lordship in the Hills placed Macaulay in some embarrassment on account of his sister, who could not with safety commence her Eastern experiences by a journey of four hundred miles up the country in the middle of June. Happily the second letter which he opened proved to be from Bishop Wilson, who insisted that the son and daughter of so eminent an Evangelical as the Editor of the Christian Observer, themselves part of his old congrega- tion in Bedford Row, should begin their Indian life nowhere except under his roof. Hannah, accordingly, continued her voyage, and made her appearance in Calcutta circles with the Bishop's Palace as a home, and Lady William Bentinck as a kind, and soon an affectionate, chaperon ; while her brother remained on shore at Madras, somewhat consoled for the sepa- ration by finding himself in a country where so much was to be seen, and where, as far as the English residents were concerned, he was regarded with a curiosity at least equal to his own. 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 263 During the first few weeks nothing came amiss to him. " To be on land after three months at sea is of itself a great change. But to be in such a land ! The dark faces, with white turbans, and flowing robes : the trees not our trees : the very smell of the atmosphere that of a hothouse, and the architecture as strange as the vegetation." Every feature in that marvellous scene delighted him both in itself, and for the sake of the in- numerable associations and images which it conjured up in his active and well-stored mind. The salute of fifteen guns that greeted him, as he set his foot on the beach, reminded him that he was in a region where his countrymen could exist only on the condition of their being warriors and rulers. When on a visit of ceremony to a dispossessed Rajah or Nabob, he pleased himself with the reflection that he was face to face with a prince who in old days governed a province as large as a first-class European kingdom, conceding to his Suzerain, the Mogul, no tribute beyond " a little outward respect such as the great Dukes of Burgundy used to pay to the Kings of France ; and who now enjoyed the splendid and luxurious insignificance of an abdicated prince which fell to the lot of Charles the Fifth or Queen Christina of Sweden," with a court that preserved the forms of royalty, the right of keeping as many badly armed and worse paid ragamuffins as he could retain under his tawdry standard, and the privilege of " occasionally sending letters of condolence and congratulation to the King of England, in which he calls himself his Majesty's good brother and ally." Macaulay set forth on his journey within a week from his landing, travelling by night, and resting while the sun was at its hottest. He has recorded his first impressions of Hindostan in a series of journal letters addressed to his sister Margaret. The fresh and vivid character of those impressions the genuine and multiform interest excited in him by all that met his ear or eye explain the secret of the charm which enabled him in after days to overcome the distaste for Indian literature enter- tained by that personage who, for want of a better, goes by the name of the general reader. Macaulay reversed in his own case, the experience of those countless writers on Indian themes who have successively blunted their pens against the passive indifference of the British public ; for his faithful but biilliant studies of the history of our Eastern Empire are to this day incomparably the most popular l of his works. It may 1 When published in a separate form the articles on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings have sold nearly twice as well as the articles on Lord Chatham, nearly thrice as well as the article on Addison, and nearly five times as well as the article on Byron. The great Sepoy mutiny, while it something more than doubled the sale of the essay on Warren Hastings, all but trebled the sale of 264 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CM. VI. be possible, without injury to the fame of the author, to present a few extracts from a correspondence, which is in some sort the raw material of productions that have already secured their place among our national classics : " In the afternoon of the 1 7th June I left Madras. My train con- sisted of thirty-eight persons. I was in one palanquin, and my servant followed in another. He is a half-caste. On the day on which we set out he told me he was a Catholic ; and added, crossing himself and turning up the whites of his eyes, that he had recom- mended himself to the protection of his patron saint, and that he was quite confident that we should perform our journey in safety. I thought of Ambrose Llamcla, Gil Bias's devout valet, who arranges a scheme for robbing his master of his portmanteau, and, when he comes back from meeting his accomplices, pretends that he has been to the cathedral to implore a blessing on their voyage. I did him, however, a great injustice ; for I have found him a very honest man, who knows the native languages ; and wlio can dispute a charge, bully a negligent bearer, arrange a bed, and make a curry. But he is so fond of giving advice that I fear he will some day or other, as the Scotch say, raise my corruption, and provoke me to send him about his business. His name, which I never hear without laughing, is Peter Prim. " Half my journey was by daylight, and all that I saw during that time disappointed me grievously. It is amazing how small a part of the country is under cultivation. Two-thirds at least, as it seemed to me, was in the state of Wandsworth Common, or, to use an illustration which you will understand better, of Chatmoss. The people whom we met were as few as in the Highlands of Scotland. But I have been told that in India the villages generally lie at a distance from the roads, and that much of the land, which when I passed through it looked like parched moor that had never been cultivated, would after the rains be covered with rice." After traversing this landscape for fifteen hours he reached the town of Arcot, which, under his handling, was to be cele- brated far and wide as the cradle of our greatness in the East. " I was most hospitably received by Captain Smith, who com- manded the garrison. After dinner the palanquins went forward with my servant, and the Captain and I took a ride to see the lions of the neighbourhood. He mounted me on a very quiet Aral), and I had a pleasant excursion. We passed through a garden which was attached to the residence of the Nabob of the Carnatic, who anciently held his court at Arcot. The garden has been suf- the essay on Lord Clive ; but, taking the last twenty years together, there has been little to choose between the pair. The steadiness and permanence of the favour with which they are regarded may be estimated by the fact that, during the five years between 1870 and 1874, as compared with the five years between 1865 and 1869, the demand for them has been in the proportion of seven to three ; and, as compared with the five years between 1860 and 1864, in the proportion of three to one. 1834-3& LORD MACAULAY. 265 fered to run to waste, and is only the more beautiful for having been neglected. Garden, indeed, is hardly a proper word. In England it would rank as one of our noblest parks, from which it differs principally in this, that most of the fine trees are fruit trees. From this we came to a mountain pass which reminded me strongly of T3orradaile, near Derwentwater, and through this defile we struck into the road, and rejoined the bearers." And so he went forward on his way, recalling at every step the reminiscence of some place, or event, or person ; and, thereby, doubling for himself, and perhaps for his correspondent, the pleasure which the reality was capable of affording. If he put up at a collector's bungalow, he liked to think that his host ruled more absolutely and over a larger population than "a Duke of Saxe-Weimar or a Duke of Lucca ; " and, when he came across a military man with a turn for reading, he pro- nounced him "as Dominie Sampson said of another Indian Colonel, l a man of great erudition, considering his imperfect opportunities.' " On the 1 9th of June he crossed the frontier of Mysore ; reached Bangalore on the morning of the 2oth, and rested there for three days in the house of the Commandant. " On Monday, the 23rd, I took leave of Colonel Cubbon, who told me, with a warmth which I was vain enough to think sincere, that he had not passed three such pleasant days for thirty years. I went on all night, sleeping soundly in my palanquin. At five I was waked, and found that a carriage was waiting for me. I had told Colonel Cubbon that I very much wished to see Seringapatam. He had written to the British authorities at the town of Mysore, and an officer had come from the Residency to show me all that was to be seen. I must now digress into Indian politics ; and let me tell you that, if you read the little that I shall say about them, you will know more on the subject than half the members of the Cabinet." After a few pages occupied by a sketch of the history of Mysore during the preceding century, Macaulay proceeds : " Seringapatam has always been a place of peculiar interest to me. It was the scene of the greatest events of Indian history. It was the residence of the greatest of Indian princes. From a child, I used to hear it talked of eveiy day. Our uncle Colin was im- prisoned there for four years, and he was afterwards distinguished at the siege. I remember that there was, in a shop-window at Clapham, a daub of the taking of Seringapatam, which, as a boy, I often used to stare at with the greatest interest. I was delighted to have an opportunity of seeing the place ; and, though my ex- pectations were high, they were not disappointed. " The town is depopulated ; but the fortress, which was one of 366 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. the strongest in India, remains entire. A river almost as broad as the Thames at Chelsea breaks into two branches, and surrounds the walls, above which are seen the white minarets of a mosque. We entered, and found everything silent and desolate. The mosque, indeed, is still kept up, and deserves to be so : but the palace of Tippoo has fallen into utter ruin. I saw, however, with no small interest, the airholes of the dungeon in which the English prisoners were confined, and the water-gate leading down to the river where the body of Tippoo was found still warm by the Duke of Wellington, then Colonel Wellesley. The exact spot through which the English soldiers fought their way against desperate dis- advantages into the fort is still perfectly discernible. But, though only thirty-five years have elapsed since the fall of the city, the palace is in the condition of Tintern Abbey and Melrose Abbey. The courts, which bear a great resemblance to those of the Oxford Colleges, are completely overrun with weeds and flowers. The Hall of Audience, once considered the finest in India, still retains some very faint traces of its old magnificence. It is supported on a great number of light and lofty wooden pillars, resting on pedestals of black granite. These pillars were formerly covered with gilding, and here and there the glitter may still be perceived. In a few more years not the smallest trace of this superb chamber will remain. I am surprised that more care was not taken by the English to preserve so splendid a memorial of the greatness of him whom they had conquered. It was not like Lord Wellesley's general mode of proceeding ; and I soon saw a proof of his taste and liberality. Tippoo raised a most sumptuous mausoleum to his father, and attached to it a mosque which he endowed. The build- ings" are carefully maintained at the expense of our Government. You walk up from the fort through a narrow path, bordered by flower beds and cypresses, to the front of the mausoleum, which is very beautiful, and in general character closely resembles the most richly carved of our small Gothic chapels. Within are three tombs, all covered with magnificent palls embroidered in gold with verses from the Koran. In the centre lies Hyder ; on his right the mother of Tippoo ; and Tippoo himself on the left." During his stay at Mysore, Macaulay had an interview with the deposed Rajah ; whose appearance, conversation, palace, furniture, jewels, soldiers, elephants, courtiers, and idols, he depicts in a letter, intended for family perusal, with a minute- ness that would qualify him for an Anglo-Indian Richardson. By the evening of the 24th June he was once more on the road ; and, about noon on the following day, he began to ascend the Neilgherries, through scenery which, for the benefit of readers who had never seen the Pyrenees or the Italian slopes of an Alpine pass, he likened to " the vegetation of Windsor Forest, or Blenheim, spread over the mountains of Cumberland." After reaching the summit of the table-land, 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 267 he passed through a wilderness where for eighteen miles together he met nothing more human than a monkey, until a turn of the road disclosed the pleasant surprise of an amphi- theatre of green hills encircling a small lake, whose banks were dotted with red-tiled cottages surrounding a pretty Gothic church. The whole station presented "very much the look of a rising English watering-place. The largest house is occupied by the Governor-General. It is a spacious and handsome building of stone. To this I was carried, and immediately ushered into his Lordship's presence. I found him sitting by a fire in a carpeted library. He received me with the greatest kindness, frankness, and hospitality. He is, as far as I can yet judge, all that I have heard ; that is to say, rectitude, openness, and good-nature, personified." Many months of close friend- ship and common labours did but confirm Macaulay in this first view of Lord William Bentinck. His estimate of that singularly noble character survives in the closing sentence of the essay on Lord Clive ; and is inscribed on the base of the statue which, standing in front of the Town Hall may be seen far and wide over the great expanse of grass that serves as the park, the parade-ground, and the race-course of Calcutta. To Thomas flower Ellis. Ootacamund : July i, 1834. Dear Ellis, You need not get your map to see where Ootacamund is : for it has not found its way into the maps. It is a new discovery ; a place to which Europeans resort for their health, or, as it is called by the Company's servants, blessings on their learning, a sanaterion. It lies at the height of 7,000 feet above the sea. While London is a perfect gridiron, here am I, at 13 North from the equator, by a blazing wood fire, with my windows closed. My bed is heaped with blankets, and my black servants are coughing round me in all directions. One poor fellow in particular looks so miserably cold that, unless the sun comes out, I am likely soon to see under my own roof the spectacle which, according to Shakespeare, is so interesting to the English, a dead Indian. 1 I travelled the whole four hundred miles between this and Madras on men's shoulders. I had an agreeable journey on the whole. I was honoured by an interview with the Rajah of Mysore, who insisted on showing me all his wardrobe, and his picture gallery. He has six or seven coloured English prints, 1 The Tempest, act ii. scene 2. 268 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. vi. not much inferior to those which I have seen in the sanded parlour of a country inn ; " Going to Cover," " The Death of the Fox," and so forth. But the bijou of his gallery, of which he is as vain as the Grand Duke can be of the Venus, or Lord Carlisle of the Three Maries, is- a head of the Duke of Wel- lington, which has, most certainly, been on a sign-post in England. Yet, after all, the Rajah was by no means the greatest fool whom I found at Mysore. I alighted at a bungalow apper- taining to the British Residency. There I found an English- man who, without any preface, accosted me thus : " Pray, Mr. Macaulay, do not you think that Buonaparte was the Beast ? " "No, Sir, I cannot say that I do." " Sir, he was the Beast. I can prove it. I have found the number 666 in his name. Why, Sir, if he was not the Beast, who was ? " This was a puzzling question, and I am not a little vain of my answer. " Sir," said I, " the House of Commons is the Beast. There are 658 members of the House ; and these, with their chief officers, the three clerks, the Sergeant and his deputy, the Chaplain, the doorkeeper, and the librarian, make 666." " Well, Sir, that is strange. But I can assure you that, if you write Napoleon Buonaparte in Arabic, leaving out only two letters, it will give 666." " And pray, Sir, what right have you to leave out two letters ? And, as St. John was writing Greek, and to Greeks, is it not likely that he would use the Greek rather than the Arabic notation ? " " But, Sir," said this learned divine, "everybody knows that the Greek letters were never used to mark numbers." I answered with the meekest look and voice possible : " I do not think that everybody knows that. Indeed I have reason to believe that a different opinion, erroneous no doubt, is universally embraced by all the small minority who happen to know any Greek." So ended the controversy. The man looked at me as if he thought me a very wicked fellow; and, I dare say, has by this time dis- covered that, if you write my name in Tamul, leaving out T in Thomas, B in Babington, and M in Macaulay, it will give the number of this unfortunate Beast. I am very comfortable here. The Governor-General is the frankest and best-natured of men. The chief functionaries, who have attended him hither, are clever people, but not exactly on a par as to general attainments with the society to which I belonged in London. I thought, however, even at Madras, that I could have formed a very agreeable circle of acquaintance ; and I am assured that at Calcutta I shall find things far better. After all, the best rule in all parts ol the 1834-38- LORD MA CAUL AY. 269 world, as in London itself, is to be independent of other men's minds. My power of finding amusement without companions was pretty well tried on my voyage. I read insatiably ; the Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil, Horace, Caesar's Commentaries, Bacon de Augmentis, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Tasso, Don Quixote, Gibbon's Rome, Mill's India, all the seventy volumes of Voltaire, Sismondi's History of France, and the seven thick folios of the Biographia Britannica. I found my Greek and Latin in good condition enough. I liked the Iliad a little less, and the Odyssey a great deal more than formerly. Horace charmed me more than ever ; Virgil not quite so much as he used to do. The want of human character, the poverty of his supernatural machinery, struck me very strongly. Can any- thing be so bad as the living bush which bleeds and talks, or the Harpies who befoul ^Eneas's dinner ? It is as extravagant as Ariosto, and as dull as Wilkie's Epigoniad. The last six books, which Virgil had not fully corrected, pleased me better than the first six. I like him best on Italian ground. I like his localities ; his national enthusiasm ; his frequent allusions to his country, its history, its antiquities, and its greatness. In this respect he often reminded me of Sir Walter Scott, with whom, in the general character of his mind, he had very little affinity. The Georgics pleased me better ; the Eclogues best, the second and tenth above all. But I think the finest lines in the Latin language are those five which begin, " Sepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala " l I cannot tell you how they struck me. I was amused to find that Voltaire pronounces that passage to be the finest in Virgil. I liked the Jerusalem better than I used to do. I was en- raptured with Ariosto ; and I still think of Dante, as I thought when I first read him, that he is a superior poet to Milton, that he runs neck and neck with Homer, and that none but Shakespeare has gone decidedly beyond him. As soon as I reach Calcutta I intend to read Herodotus again. By the bye, why do not you translate him ? You would do it excellently ; and a translation of Herodotus, well executed, would rank with original compositions. A quarter of an hour a day would finish the work in five years. The notes might be made the most amusing in the world. I wish you would think of it. At all events, I hope you will do something which may interest more than seven or eight people. Your talents are too great, and your leisure time too small, to be wasted in inquiries 1 Eclogue viii. 37. 270 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. so frivolous, (I must call them,) as those in which you have of late been too much engaged ; whether the Cherokees are of the same race with the Chickasaws ; whether Van Diemen's Land was peopled from New Holland, or New Holland from Van Diemen's Land ; what is thje precise mode of appointing a headman in a village in Timbuctoo. I would not give the worst page in Clarendon or Fra Paolo for all that ever was, or ever will be, written about the migrations of the Leleges and the laws of the Oscans. I have already entered on my public functions, and I hope to do some good. The very wigs of the Judges in the Court of King's Bench would stand on end if they knew how short a chapter my Law of Evidence will form. I am not without many advisers. A native of some fortune in Madras has sent me a paper on legislation. " Your honour must know," says this judicious person, " that the great evil is that men swear falsely in this country. No judge knows what to believe. Surely if your honour can make men to swear truly, your honour's fame will be great, and the Company will nourish. Now, I know how men may be made to swear truly ; and I will tell your honour for your fame, and for the profit of the Com- pany. Let your honour cut off the great toe of the right foot of every man who swears falsely, whereby your honour's fame will be extended." Is not this an exquisite specimen of legis- lative wisdom ? I must stop. When I begin to write to England, my pen runs as if it would run on for ever. Ever yours affectionately T. B. M. To Miss Fanny and Miss Selina Macaulay. Ootacamund : August 10, 1834. My dear Sisters, I sent last month a full account of my journey hither, and of the place, to Margaret, as the most stationary of our family ; desiring her to let you all see what I had written to her. I think that I shall continue to take the same course. It is better to write one full and connected narrative than a good many imperfect fragments. Money matters seem likely to go on capitally. My expenses, I find, will be smaller than I anticipated. The Rate of Ex- change, if you know what that means, is very favourable indeed ; and, if I live, I shall get rich fast. I quite enjoy the thought of appearing in the light of an old hunks who knows on which side his bread is buttered ; a warm man ; a fellow who will cut 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 271 up well. This is not a character which the Macaulays have been much in the habit of sustaining ; but I can assure you that, after next Christmas, I expect to lay up, on an average, about seven thousand pounds a year, while I remain in India. At Christmas I shall send home a thousand, or twelve hundred, pounds for my father, and you all. I cannot tell you what a comfort it is to me to find that I shall be able to do this. It reconciles me to all the pains acute enough, some- times, God knows, of banishment. In a few years, if I live probably in less than five years from the time at which you will be reading this letter- we shall be again together in a comfort- able, though a modest, home ; certain of a good fire, a good joint of meat, and a good glass of wine ; without owing obliga- tions to anybody ; and perfectly indifferent, at least as far as our pecuniary interest is concerned, to the changes of the political world. Rely on it, my dear girls, that there is no chance of my going back with my heart cooled towards you. I came hither principally to save my family, and I am not likely while here to forget them. Ever yours T. B. M. The months of July and August Macaulay spent on the Neilgherries, in a climate equable as Madeira and invigorating as Braemar ; where thickets of rhododendron fill the glades and clothe the ridges ; and where the air is heavy with the scent of rose-trees of a size more fitted for an orchard than a flower-bed, and bushes of heliotrope thirty paces round. The glories of the forests and of the gardens touched him in spite of his pro- found botanical ignorance, and he dilates more than once upon his " cottage buried in laburnums, or something very like them, and geraniums which grow in the open air. " He had the more leisure for the natural beauties of the place, as there was not much else to interest even a traveller fresh from England. " I have as yet seen little of the idolatry of India ; and that little, though excessively absurd, is not characterised by atrocity or indecency. There is nothing of the sort at Ootacamund. I have not, during the last six weeks, witnessed a single circumstance from which you would have inferred that this was a heathen country. The bulk of the natives here are a colony from the plains below, who have come up hither to wait on the European visitors, and who seem to trouble themselves very little about caste or religion. The Todas, the aboriginal population of these hills, are a very curious race. They had a grand funeral a little while ago. I should have gone if it had not been a Council day ; but I found afterwards that I had lost nothing. The whole ceremony consisted 272 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VI. in sacrificing bullocks to the manes of the defunct. The roaring of the poor victims was horrible. The people stood talking and laughing till a particular signal was made, and immediately all the ladies lifted up their voices and wept. I have not lived three and thirty years in this world without learning that a bullock roars when he is knocked down, and that a woman can cry whenever she chooses. " By all that I can learn, the Catholics are the most respectable portion of the native Christians. As to Swartz's people in the Tanjore, they are a perfect scandal to the religion which they profess. It would have been thought something little short of blasphemy to say this a year ago ; but now it is considered impious to say otherwise, for they have got into a violent quarrel with the missionaries and the Bishop. The missionaries refused to recog- nise the distinctions of caste in the administration of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, and the Bishop supported them in the refusal. I do not pretend to judge whether this was right or wrong. Swartz and Bishop Heber conceived that the distinction of caste, however objectionable politically, was still only a distinction of rank ; and that, as in English churches the gentlefolks generally take the Sacrament apart from the poor of the parish, so the high-caste natives might be allowed to communicate apart from the Pariahs. " But, whoever was first in the wrong, the Christians of Tanjore took care to be most so. They called in the interposition of Government, and sent up such petitions and memorials as 1 never saw before or since ; made up of lies, invectives, bragging, cant, bad grammar of the most ludicrous kind, and texts of Scripture quoted without the smallest application. I remember one passage by heart, which is really only a fair specimen of the whole : ' These missionaries, my Lord, loving only filthy lucre, bid us to eat Lord- supper with Pariahs as lives ugly, handling dead men, drinking rack and toddy, sweeping the streets, mean fellows altogether, base persons, contrary to that which Saint Paul saith : I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.' "Was there ever a more appropriate quotation ? I believe that nobody on either side of the controversy found out a text so much to the purpose as one which I cited to the Council of India, when we were discussing this business : ' If this be a question of words, and names, and of your law, look ye to it : for I will be no judge of such matters.' But though, like Gallio, I drove them and their petitions from my judgment seat, I could not help saying to one of the missionaries, who is here on the Hills, that I thought it a pity to break up the Church of Tanjore on account of a matter which such men as Swartz and Heber had not been inclined to regard as essential. ' Sir,' said the reverend gentleman, ' the sooner the Church of Tanjore is broken up the better. You can form no notion of the worthlessness of the native Christians there.' I could not dispute this point with him ; but neither could I help thinking, though I was too polite to say so, that it was hardly worth the while of so many good men to come fifteen thousand miles 1834-38. LORD MA CAUL AY. 273 over sea ana- land in order to make proselytes, who, their very instructors being judges, were more children of hell than before." Unfortunately Macaulay's stay on the Neilgherries coincided with the monsoon. "The rain streamed down in floods. It was very seldom that I could see a hundred yards in front of me. During a month together I did not get two hours' walk- ing." He began to be bored, for the first and last time in his life ; while his companions, who had not his resources, were ready to hang themselves for very dulness. The ordinary amusements with which, in the more settled parts of India, our countrymen beguile the rainy season, were wanting in a settle- ment that had only lately been reclaimed from the desert ; in the immediate vicinity of which you still ran the chance of being " trod into the shape of half a crown by a wild elephant, or eaten by the tigers, which prefer this situation to the plains below for the same reason that takes so many Europeans to India : they encounter an uncongenial climate for the sake of what they can get." There were no books in the place except those that Macaulay had brought with him, among which, most luckily, was Clarissa Harlowe. Aided by the rain outside, he soon talked his favourite romance into general favour. The reader will consent to put up with one or two slight inaccuracies in order to have the story told by Thackeray. " I spoke to him once about Clarissa. ' Not read Clarissa ! ' he cried out. ' If you have once read Clarissa, and are infected by it, you can't leave it. When I was in India I passed one hot season in the Hills ; and there were the Governor-General, and the Secre- tary of Government, and the Commander-in-Chief, and their wives. I had Clarissa with me ; and, as soon as they began to read, the whole station was in a passion of excitement about Miss Harlowe, and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly Lovelace. The Governor's wife seized the book ; the Secretary waited for it ; the Chief Justice could not read it for tears.' He acted the whole scene : he paced up and down the Athenaeum library. I dare say he could have spoken pages of the book ; of that book, and of what count- less piles of others ! " An old Scotch doctor, a Jacobin and a free-thinker, who could only be got to attend church by the positive orders of the Governor-General, cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner. 1 The Chief Secretary, afterwards, as 1 Degenerate readers of our own day have actually been provided with an abridgment of Clarissa, itself as long as an ordinary novel. A wiser course than buying the abridgment would be to commence the original at the Third Volume. In the same way, if anyone, after obtaining the outline of Lady Clementina's story from a more adventurous friend, will read Sir Charles Grandison, skipping all letters from Italians, to Italians, and about Italians, he will find that he has got hold of a delightful, and not unmanageable, book. T 274 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. Sir William Macnaghten, the hero and the victim of the darkest episode in our Indian history, declared that reading this copy of Clarissa, under the inspiration of its owner's enthusiasm, was nothing less than an epoch in his life. After the lapse of thirty years, when Ootacamund had long enjoyed the advantage of a book-club and a circulating library, the tradition of Macaulay and his novel still lingered on with a tenacity most unusual in the ever-shifting society of an Indian station. "At length Lord William gave me leave of absence. My bearers were posted along the road ; my palanquins were packed ; and I was to start next day ; when an event took place which may give you some insight into the state of the laws, morals, and manners among the natives. "My new servant, a Christian, but such a Christian as the missionaries make in this part of the world, had been persecuted most unmercifully for his religion by the servants of some other gentlemen on the Hills. At last they contrived to excite against him (whether justly or unjustly I am quite unable to say) the jealousy of one of Lord William's under-cooks. We had accord- ingly a most glorious tragi-comedy ; the part of Othello by the cook aforesaid ; Uesdemona by an ugly, impudent Pariah girl, his wife ; lago by Colonel Casement's servant ; and Michael Cassio by my rascal. The place of the handkerchief was supplied by a small piece of sugar-candy which Desdemona was detected in the act of sucking, and which had found its way from my canisters to her fingers. If I had any part in the piece, it was, I am afraid, that of Roderigo, whom Shakespeare describes as a ' foolish gentleman,' and who also appears to have had ' money in his purse.' " On the evening before my departure my bungalow was besieged by a mob of blackguards. The Native Judge came with them. After a most prodigious quantity of jabbering, of which I could not understand one word, I called the Judge, who spoke tolerable English, into my room, and learned from him the nature of the case. I was, and still am, in doubt as to the truth of the charge. I have a very poor opinion of my man's morals, and a very poor opinion also of the veracity of his accusers. It was, however, so very inconvenient for me to be just then deprived of my servant that I offered to settle the business at my own expense. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been easy enough, for the Hindoos of the lower castes have no delicacy on these subjects. The husband would gladly have taken a few rupees, and walked away ; but the persecutors of my servant interfered, and insisted that he should be brought to trial in order that they might have the pleasure of smearing him with filth, giving him a flogging, beating kettles before him, and carrying him round on an ass with his face to the tail. " As the matter could not be accommodated, I begged the Judge to try the case instantly ; but the rabble insisted that the trial should not take place for some days. I argued the matter 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 275 with them very mildly, and told them that I must go next clay, and that, if my servant were detained, guilty or innocent, he must lose his situation. The gentle and reasoning tone of my expostulations only made them impudent. They are, in truth, a race so accus- tomed to be trampled on by the strong that they always consider humanity as a sign of weakness. The Judge told me that he never heard a gentleman speak such sweet words to the people. But I was now at an end of my sweet words. My blood was beginning to boil at the undisguised display of rancorous hatred and shame- less injustice. I sate down, and wrote a line to the Commandant of the station, begging him to give orders that the case might be tried that very evening. The Court assembled, and continued all night in violent contention. At last the Judge pronounced my servant not guilty. I did not then know, what I learned some days after, that this respectable magistrate had received twenty rupees on the occasion. " The husband would now gladly have taken the money which he refused the day before ; but 1 would not give him a farthing. The rascals who had raised the disturbance were furious. My servant was to set out at eleven in the morning, and I was to follow at two. He had scarcely left the door when I heard a noise. I looked forth, and saw that the gang had pulled him out of his palanquin, torn off his turban, stripped him almost naked, and were, as it seemed, about to pull him to pieces. I snatched up a sword-stick, and ran into the middle of them. It was all I could do to force my way to him, and, for a moment, I thought my own person was in danger as well as his. I supported the poor wretch in my arms ; for, like most of his countrymen, he is a chicken- hearted fellow, and was almost fainting away. My honest barber, a fine old soldier in the Company's service, ran off for assistance, and soon returned with some police officers. I ordered the bearers to turn round, and proceeded instantly to the house of the Com- mandant. I was not long detained here. Nothing can be well imagined more expeditious than the administration of justice in this country, when the judge is a Colonel, and the plaintiff a Councillor. I told my story in three words. In three minutes the rioters were marched off to prison, and my servant, with a sepoy to guard him, was fairly on his road and out of danger." Early next morning Macaulay began to descend the pass. " After going down for about an hour we emerged from the clouds and moisture, and the plain of Mysore lay before us a vast ocean of foliage on which the sun was shining gloriously. I am very little given to cant about the beauties of nature, but I was moved almost to tears. I jumped off the palanquin, and walked in front of it down the immense declivity. In two hours we descended about three thousand feet. Every turning in the road showed the boundless forest below in some new point of view. I was greatly struck with the resemblance which this prodigious jungle, as old as the world and planted by nature, bears to the fine works of the T 2 276 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VI. great English landscape gardeners. It was exactly a Wentworth Park as large as Devonshire. After reaching the foot of the hills, we travelled through a succession of scenes which might have been part of the garden of Eden. Such gigantic trees I never saw. In a quarter of an hour I passed hundreds the smallest of which would bear a comparison with any of those oaks which are shown as prodigious in England. The grass, the weeds, and the wild flowers grew as high as my head. The sun, almost a stranger to me, was now shining brightly ; and, when late in the afternoon I again got out of my palanquin and looked back, I saw the large mountain ridge from which I had descended twenty miles behind me, still buried in the same mass of fog and rain in which I had been living for weeks. " On Tuesday, the i6th " (of September), " I went on board at Madras. I amused myself on the voyage to Calcutta with learning Portuguese, and made myself almost as well acquainted with it as I care to be. I read the Lusiad, and am now reading it a second time. I own that I am disappointed in Camoens ; but I have so often found my first impressions wrong on such subjects that I still hope to be able to join my voice to that of the great body of critics. I never read any famous foreign book, which did not, in the first perusal, fall short of my expectations ; except Dante's poem, and Don Quixote, which were prodigiously superior to what I had imagined. Yet in these cases I had not pitched my expectations low." He had not much time for his Portuguese studies. The run was unusually fast, and the ship only spent a week in the Bay of Bengal, and forty-eight hours in the Hooghly. He found his sister comfortably installed in Government House, where he himself took up his quarters during the next six weeks ; Lady William Bentinck having been prepared to wel- come him as her guest by her husband's letters, more than one of which ended with the words "e un miracolo." Towards the middle of November, Macaulay began housekeeping for him- self ; living, as he always loved to live, rather more generously than the strict necessities of his position demanded. His residence, then the best in Calcutta, has long since been con- verted into the Bengal Club. To Macwy Napier, Esq. Calcutta : December 10, 1834. Dear Napier, First to business. At length I send you the article on Mackintosh ; an article which has the merit of length, whatever it may be deficient in. As I wished to transmit it to England in duplicate, if not in triplicate, I thought it best to have two or three copies coarsely printed here under the seal 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 277 of strict secresy. The printers at Edinburgh will, therefore, have no trouble in deciphering my manuscript, and the cor- rector of the press will find his work done to his hands. The disgraceful imbecility, and the still more disgraceful malevolence, of the editor have, as you will see, moved my indignation not a little. I hope that Longman's connection with the Review will not prevent you from inserting what I have said on this subject. Murray's copy writers are unspar- ingly abused by Southey and Lockhart in the Quarterly ; and it would be hard indeed if we might not in the Edinburgh strike hard at an assailant of Mackintosh. I shall now begin another article. The subject I have not yet fixed upon ; perhaps the romantic poetry of Italy, for which there is an excellent opportunity ; Panizzi's reprint of Boiardo ; perhaps the little volume of Burnet's Characters edited by Bishop Jebb. This reminds me that I have to acknowledge the receipt of a box from Longman, containing this little book ; and other books of much greater value, Grimm's Correspond- ence, Jacquemont's Letters, and several foreign works on jurisprudence. All that you have yet sent have been excel- lently chosen. I will mention, while I am on this subject, a few books which I want, and which I am not likely to pick up here Daru's Histoire de Venise ; St. Real's Conjuration de Venise ; Fra Paolo's works ; Monstrelet's Chronicle ; and Coxe's book on the Pelhams. I should also like to have a really good edition of Lucian . My sister desires me to send you her kind regards. She remembers her visit to Edinburgh, and your hospitality, with the greatest pleasure. Calcutta is called, and not without some reason, the city of palaces : but I have seen nothing in the East like the view from the Castle Rock, nor expect to see anything like it till we stand there together again. Kindest regards to Lord Jeffrey. Yours most truly T. B. MACAULAY. To Mrs. Cropper. Calcutta : December 7, 1834. Dearest Margaret, I rather suppose that some late letters from Nancy may have prepared you to learn what I am now about to communicate. She is going to be married, and with my fullest and warmest approbation. I can truly say that, if I had to search India for a husband for her, I could have found no man to whom I could with equal confidence have entrusted her happiness. Trevelyan is about eight and twenty. He was 2 ;8 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. educated at the Charter-house, and then went to Haileybury, and came out hither. In this country he has distinguished himself beyond any man of his standing by his great talent for business ; by his liberal and enlarged views of policy ; and by literary merit, which, for his opportunities, is considerable. He was at first placed at Delhi under , a very powerful and a very popular man, but extremely corrupt. This man tried to initiate Trevelyan in his own infamous practices. But the young fellow's spirit was too noble for such things. When only twenty-one years of age he publicly accused , then almost at the head of the service, of receiving bribes from the natives. A perfect storm was raised against the accuser. He was almost everywhere abused, and very generally cut. But with a firmness and ability scarcely ever seen in any man so young, he brought his proofs forward, and, after an inquiry of some weeks, fully made out his case. was dismissed in disgrace, and is now living obscurely in England. The Government here and the Directors at home applauded Trevelyan in the highest terms ; and from that time he has been considered as a man likely to rise to the very top of the service. Lord William told him to ask for anything that he wished for. Trevelyan begged that something might be done for his elder brother, who is in the Company's army. Lord William told him that he had richly earned that or any- thing else, and gave Lieutenant Trevelyan a very good diplo- matic employment. Indeed Lord William, a man who makes no favourites, has always given to Trevelyan the strongest marks, not of a blind partiality, but of a thoroughly well- grounded and discriminating esteem. Not long ago Trevelyan was appointed by him to the Under Secretaryship for foreign affairs, an office of a very im- portant and confidential nature. While holding the place he was commissioned to report to Government on the operation of the Internal Transit duties of India. About a year ago his Report was completed. I shall send to England a copy or two of it by the first safe conveyance : for nothing that I can say of his abilities, or of his public spirit, will be half so satisfactory. I have no hesitation in affirming that it is a perfect masterpiece in its kind. Accustomed as I have been to public affairs, I never read an abler State paper ; and I do not believe that there is, I will not say in India, but in England, another man of twenty-seven who could have written it. Trevelyan is a most stormy reformer. Lord William said to me, before anyone had observed Trevelyan's attentions to Nancy : " That man is almost always on the right side in every question ; and it is well that he is so, for he gives a most confounded deal of 1834-38- LORD MACAULAV. 279 trouble when he happens to take the wrong one." l He is quite at the head of that active party among the younger servants of the Company who take the side of improvement. In particular, he is the soul of every scheme for diffusing education among the natives of this country. His reading has been very confined ; but to the little that he has read he has brought a mind as active and restless as Lord Brougham's, and much more judicious and honest. As to his person, he always looks like a gentleman, particu- larly on horseback. He is very active and athletic, and is renowned as a great master in the most exciting and perilous of field sports, the spearing of wild boars. His face has a most characteristic expression of ardour and impetuosity, which makes his countenance very interesting to me. Birth is a thing that I care nothing about ; but his family is one of the oldest and best in England During the important years of his life, from twenty to twenty-five, or thereabouts, Trevelyan was in a remote province of India, where his whole time was divided between public business and field sports, and where he seldom saw a European gentleman and never a European lady. He has no small talk. His mind is full of schemes of moral and political improve- ment, and his zeal boils over in his talk. His topics, even in courtship, are steam navigation, the education of the natives, the equalisation of the sugar duties, the substitution of the Roman for the Arabic alphabet in the Oriental languages. I saw the feeling growing from the first : for, though I generally pay not the smallest attention to those matters, I had far too deep an interest in Nancy's happiness not to watch her behaviour to everybody who saw much of her. I knew it, I believe, before she knew it herself ; and I could most easily have prevented it by merely treating Trevelyan with a little coldness, for he is a man whom the smallest rebuff would completely discourage. But you will believe, my dearest Margaret, that no thought of such base selfishness ever passed through my mind. I would as soon have locked my dear Nancy up in a nunnery as have put the smallest obstacle in the way of her having a good husband. I therefore gave every facility and encouragement to both of them. What I have myself felt it is unnecessary to say. My parting from you almost broke my heart. But when I parted from you I had Nancy : I had all my other relations : I had my friends : I 1 Macaulay used to apply to bis future brother-in-law the remark which Julius Caesar made with regard to his young friend Brutus : " Magni refert hie quid velit ; scd quidquid volet, valde volet." tSo LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. had my country. Now I have nothing except the resources of my own mind, and the consciousness of having acted not un- generously. But I do not repine. Whatever I suffer I have brought on myself. I have neglected the plainest lessons of reason and experience. I have 'staked my happiness without calculating the chances of the dice. I have hewn out broken cisterns ; I have leant on a reed ; I have built on the sand ; and I have fared accordingly. I must bear my punishment as I can ; and, above all, I must take care that the punishment does not extend beyond myself. Nothing can be kinder than Nancy's conduct has been. She proposes that we should form one family ; and Trevelyan, (though, like most lovers, he would, I imagine, prefer having his goddess to himself,) consented with strong expressions of pleasure. The arrangement is not so strange as it might seem at home. The thing is often done here ; and those quarrels between servants, which would inevitably mar any such plan in England, are not to be apprehended in an Indian establish- ment. One advantage there will be in our living together of a most incontestable sort : we shall both be able to save more money. Trevelyan will soon be entitled to his furlough ; but he proposes not to take it till I go home. I shall write in a very different style from this to my father. To him I shall represent the marriage as what it is, in every respect except its effect on my own dreams of happiness a most honourable and happy event ; prudent in a worldly point of view ; and promising all the felicity which strong mutual affection, excellent principles on both sides, good temper, youth, health, and the general approbation of friends can afford. As for myself, it is a tragical denouement of an absurd plot. I remember quoting some nursery rhymes, years ago, when you left me in London to join Nancy at Rothley Temple or Leamington, I forget which. Those foolish lines contain the history of my life. " There were two birds that sat on a stone ; One flew away, and there was but one. The other flew away, and then there was none ; And the poor stone was left all alone." Ever, my dearest Margaret, yours T. B. MACAULAY. A passage from a second letter to the same person deserves to be quoted, as an instance of how a good man may be unable to read aright his own nature, and a wise man to forecast his 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 281 own future. " I feel a growing tendency to cynicism and sus- picion. My intellect remains ; and is likely, I sometimes think, to absorb the whole maa I still retain, (not only undi- minished, but strengthened by the very events which have deprived me of everything else,) my thirst for knowledge ; my passion for holding converse with the greatest minds of all ages and nations ; my power of forgetting what surrounds me, and of living with the past, the future, the distant, and the unreal. Books are becoming everything to me. If I had at this mo- ment my choice of life, I would bury myself in one of those immense libraries that we saw together at the universities, and never pass a waking hour without a book before me." So little was Macaulay aware that, during the years which were to come, his thoughts and cares would be less than ever for himself, and more for others, and that his existence would be passed amidst a bright atmosphere of affectionate domestic happiness, which, until his own death came, no accident was thenceforward des- tined to overcloud. But, before his life assumed the equable and prosperous tenor in which it continued to the end, one more trouble was in store for him. Long before the last letters to his sister Margaret had been written, the eyes which were to have read them had been closed for ever. The fate of so young a wife and mother touched deeply all who had known her, and some who knew her only by name. ' When the melancholy news arrived in India, the young couple were spending their honeymoon in a lodge in the Governor-General's park at Barrackpore. They immediately returned to Calcutta, and, under the shadow of a great sorrow, 2 began their sojourn in their brother's house, who, for his part, did what he might to drown his grief in floods of official work. 1 Moultric made Mrs. Cropper's death the subject of some verses on which her relatives set a high value. He acknowledges his little poem to be the tri- bute of one who had been a stranger to her whom it was written to commemo- rate : " And yet methinks we are not strange : so many claims there be Which seem to weave a viewless band between my soul and thee. Sweet sister of my early friend, the kind, the single-hearted, Than whose remembrance none more bright still gilds the days departed 1 Beloved, with more than sister's love, by some whose love to me Is now almost my brightest gem in this' world's treasury." 2 "Aprils. Lichfield. Easter Sunday. After the service was ended we went over the Cathedral. When I stood before the famous children by Chan- trey, I could think only of one thing ; that, when last I was there, in 1832, my dear sister Margaret was with me, and that she was greatly affected. I could not command my tears, and was forced to leave our party, and walk about by myself." Macaulay's Journal for the year 1849. 282 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. The narrative of that work may well be the despair of Macaulay's biographer. It would be inexcusable to slur over what in many important respects was the most honourable chapter of his life ; while, on the other hand, the task of inter- esting Englishmen in the details of Indian administration is an undertaking which has baffled every pen except his own. In such a dilemma the safest course is to allow that pen to tell the story for itself ; or rather so much of the story as, by concen- trating the attention of the reader upon matters akin to those which are in frequent debate at home, may enable him to judge whether Macaulay, at the council-board and the bureau, was the equal of Macaulay in the senate and the library. Examples of his Minute-writing may with some confidence be submitted to the criticism of those whose experience of public business has taught them in what a Minute should differ from a Despatch, a Memorial, a Report, and a Decision. His method of applying general principles to the circumstances of a special case, and of illustrating those principles with just as much literary ornament as would place his views in a pictorial form before the minds of those whom it was his business to convince, is strikingly exhibited in the series of papers by means of which he reconciled his colleagues in the Council, and his masters in Leadenhall Street, to the removal of the modified Censorship which existed in India previously to the year 1835. " It is difficult," he writes, " to conceive that any measures can be more indefensible than those which I propose to repeal. It has always been the practice of politic rulers to disguise their arbitrary measures under popular forms and names. The conduct of the Indian Government with respect to the Press has been altogether at variance with this trite and obvious maxim. The newspapers have for years been allowed as ample a measure of practical lib- erty as that which they enjoy in England. If any inconveniences arise from the liberty of political discussion, to those inconveniences we are already subject. Yet while our policy is thus liberal and indulgent, we are daily reproached and taunted with the bondage in which we keep the Press. A strong feeling on this subject ap- pears to exist throughout the European community here ; and the loud complaints which have lately been uttered are likely to pro- duce a considerable effect on the English people, who will see at a glance that the law is oppressive, and who will not know how completely it is inoperative. " To impose strong restraints on political discussion is an intel- ligible policy, and may possibly though I greatly doubt it be in some countries a wise policy. But this is not the point at issue. The question before us is not whether the Press shall be free, but whether, being free, it shall be called free. It is surely mere mad- 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 283 ness in a Government to make itself unpopular for nothing ; to be indulgent, and yet to disguise its indulgence under such outward forms as bring on it the reproach of tyranny. Yet this is now our policy. We are exposed to all the dangers dangers, I conceive, greatly over-rated of a free Press ; and at the same time we con- trive to incur all the opprobrium of a censorship. It is universally allowed that the licensing system, as at present administered, does not keep any man who can buy a press from publishing the bitter- est and most sarcastic reflections on any public measure, or any public functionary. Yet the very words ' license to print ' have a sound hateful to the ears of Englishmen in every part of the globe. It is unnecessary to inquire whether this feeling be reasonable ; whether the petitioners who have so strongly pressed this matter on our consideration would not have shown a better judgment if they had been content with their practical liberty, and had reserved their murmurs for practical grievances. The question for us is not what they ought to do, but what we ought to do ; not whether it be wise in them to complain when they suffer no injury, but whether it be wise in us to incur odium unaccompanied by the smallest ac- cession of security or of power. " One argument only has been urged in defence of the present system. It is admitted that the Press of Bengal has long been suffered to enjoy practical liberty, and that nothing but an extreme emergency could justify the Government in curtailing that liberty But, it is said, such an emergency may arise, and the Government ought to retain in its hands the power of adopting, in that event, the sharp, prompt, and decisive measures which may be necessary for the preservation of the Empire. But when we consider with what vast powers, extending over all classes of people, Parliament has armed the Governor-General in Council, and, in extreme cases, the Governor-General alone, we shall probably be inclined to allow little weight to this argument. No Government in the world is better provided with the means of meeting extraordinary dangers by extraordinary precautions. Five persons, who may be brought together in half an hour, whose deliberations are secret, who are not shackled by any of those forms which elsewhere delay legisla- tive measures, can, in a single sitting, make a law for stopping every press in India. Possessing as we do the unquestionable power to interfere, whenever the safety of the State may require it, with overwhelming rapidity and energy, we surely ought not, in quiet times, to be constantly keeping the offensive form and cere- monial of despotism before the eyes of those whom, nevertheless, we permit to enjoy the substance of freedom." Eighteen months elapsed ; during which the Calcutta Press found occasion to attack Macaulay with a breadth and ferocity of calumny such as few public men, in any age or country, have ever endured, and none, perhaps, have ever forgiven. There were many mornings when it was impossible for him to allow the newspapers to lie about his sister's drawing-room. 284 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vr. The Editor of the Periodical which called itself, and had a right to call itself, the '''Friend of India" undertook to shame his brethren by publishing a collection of their invectives ; but it was very soon evident that no decent journal could venture to foul its pages by reprinting the epithets, and the anecdotes, which constituted the daily greeting of the literary men of Calcutta to their fellow-craftsman of the Edinburgh Review. But Macaulay's cheery and robust common sense carried him safe and sound through an ordeal which has broken down sterner natures than his, and embittered as stainless lives. The allusions in his correspondence, all the more surely because they are brief and rare, indicate that the torrent of obloquy to which he was exposed interfered neither with his temper nor with his happiness ; and how little he allowed it to disturb his judgment or distort his public spirit is proved by the tone of a State paper, addressed to the Court of Directors in September 1836, in which he eagerly vindicates the freedom of the Cal- cutta Press, at a time when the writers of that Press, on the days when they were pleased to be decent, could find for him no milder appellations than those of cheat, swindler, and charlatan. " I regret that on this, or on any subject, my opinion should differ from that of the Honourable Court. But I still conscien- tiously think that we acted wisely when we passed the law on the subject of the Press ; and I am quite certain that we should act most unwisely if we were now to repeal that law. " I must, in the first place, venture to express an opinion that the importance of that question is greatly over-rated by persons, even the best informed and the most discerning, who are not actually on the spot. It is most justly observed by the Honourable Court that many of the arguments which may be urged in favour of a free Press at home do not apply to this country. But it is, I conceive, no less true that scarcely any of those arguments which have been employed in Europe to defend restrictions on the Press apply to a Press such as that of India. " In Europe, and especially in England, the Press is an engine of tremendous power, both for good and for evil. The most en- lightened men, after long experience both of its salutary and of its pernicious operation, have come to the conclusion that the good on the whole preponderates. But that there is no inconsiderable amount of evil to be set off against the good has never been dis- puted by the warmest friend to freedom of discussion. " In India the Press is comparatively a very feeble engine. It does far less good and far less harm than in Europe. It sometimes renders useful services to the public. It sometimes brings to the notice of the Government evils the existence of which would other- wise have been unknown. It operates, to some extent, as a 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 285 salutary check on public functionaries. It does something towards keeping the administration pure. On the other hand, by mis- representing public measures, and by flattering the prejudices of those who support it, it sometimes produces a slight degree of excitement in a very small portion of the community. " How slight that excitement is, even when it reaches its greatest height, and how little the Government has to fear from it, no person whose observation has been confined to European societies will readily believe. In this country the number of English residents is very small, and, of that small number, a great proportion are engaged in the service of the State, and are most deeply interested in the maintenance of existing institutions. Even those English settlers who are not in the service of the Government have a strong interest in its stability. They are few; they are thinly scattered among a vast population, with whom they have neither language, nor religion, nor morals, nor manners, nor colour in common ; they feel that any convulsion which should overthrow the existing order of things would be ruinous to themselves. Par- ticular acts of the Government especially acts which are mortifying to the pride of caste naturally felt by an Englishman in India are often angrily condemned by these persons. But every indigo- planter in Tirhoot, and every shopkeeper in Calcutta, is perfectly aware that the downfall of the Government would be attended with the destruction of his fortune, and with imminent hazard to his life. " Thus, among the English inhabitants of India, there are no fit subjects for that species of excitement which the Press some- times produces at home. There is no class among them analogous to that vast body of English labourers and artisans whose minds are rendered irritable by frequent distress and privation, and on whom, therefore, the sophistry and rhetoric of bad men often pro- duce a tremendous effect. The English papers here might be infinitely more seditious than the most seditious that were ever printed in London without doing harm to anything but their own circulation. The fire goes out for want of some combustible material on which to seize. How little reason would there be to apprehend danger to order and property in England from the most inflammatory writings, if those writings were read only by Ministers of State, Commissioners of the Customs and Excise, Judges and Masters in Chancery, upper clerks in Government offices, officers in the army, bankers, landed proprietors, barristers, and master manufacturers ! The most timid politician would not anticipate the smallest evil from the most seditious libels, if the circulation of those libels were confined to such a class of readers ; and it is to such a class of readers that the circulation of the English newspapers in India is almost entirely confined." The motive for the scurrility with which Macaulay was assailed by a handful of sorry scribblers was his advocacy of the Act familiarly known as the Black Act, which withdrew 286 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. from British subjects resident in the provinces their so-called privilege of bringing civil appeals before the Supreme Court at Calcutta. Such appeals were thenceforward to be tried by the Sudder Court, which was manned by the Company's Judges, " aL of them English gentlemen, of liberal education : as free as even the Judges of the Supreme Court from any imputation of personal corruption, and selected by the Government from a body which abounds in men as honourable and as intelligent as ever were employed in the service of any state." The change embodied in the Act was one of little practical moment ; but it excited an opposition based upon arguments and assertions of such a nature that the success or failure of the proposed measure became a question of high and undeniable importance. " In my opinion," writes Macaulay, " the chief reason for pre- ferring the Sudder Court is this that it is the court which we have provided to administer justice, in the last resort, to the great body of the people. If it is not fit for that purpose, it ought to be made so. If it is fit to administer justice to the great body of the people, why should we exempt a mere handful of settlers from its jurisdiction? There certainly is, I will not say the reality, but the semblance of partiality and tyranny in the distinction made by the Charter Act of 1813. That distinction seems to indicate a notion that the natives of India may well put up with something less than justice, or that Englishmen in India have a title to some- thing more than justice. If we give our own countrymen an appeal to the King's Courts, in cases in which all others are forced to be contented with the Company's Courts, we do in fact cry down the Company's Courts. We proclaim to the Indian people that there are two sorts of justice a coarse one, which we think good enough for them, and another of superior quality, which we keep for ourselves. If we take pains to show that we distrust our highest courts, how can we expect that the natives of the country will place confidence in them ? " The draft of the Act was published, and was, as I fully ex- pected, not unfavourably received by the British in the Mofussil. 1 Seven weeks have elapsed since the notification took place. Time has been allowed for petitions from the furthest corners of the territories subject to this Presidency. But I have heard of only one attempt in the Mofussil to get up a remonstrance ; and the Mofussil newspapers which I have seen, though generally disposed to cavil at all the acts of the Government, have spoken favourably of this measure. " In Calcutta the case has been somewhat different; and this is a remarkable fact. The British inhabitants of Calcutta are the only British-born subjects in Bengal who will not be affected by the proposed Act ; and they are the only British subjects in Bengal 1 The term "Mofussil" is used to denote the provinces of the Bengal Presidency, as opposed to the Capital. 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 287 who have expressed the smallest objection to it. The clamour, indeed, has proceeded from a very small portion of the society of Calcutta. The objectors have not ventured to call a public meeting, and their memorial has obtained very few signatures. But they have attempted to make up by noise and virulence for what has been wanting in strength. It may at first sight appear strange that a law, which is not unwelcome to those who are to live under it, should excite such acrimonious feelings among people who are wholly exempted from its operation. But the explanation is simple. Though nobody who resides at Calcutta will be sued in the Mofussil courts, many people who reside at Calcutta have, or wish to have, practice in the Supreme Court. Great exertions have accordingly been made, though with little success, to excite a feeling against this measure among the English inhabitants of Calcutta. " The political phraseology of the English in India is the same with the political phraseology of our countrymen at home ; but it is never to be forgotten that the same words stand for very different things at London and at Calcutta. We hear much about public opinion, the love of liberty, the influence of the Press. But we must remember that public opinion means the opinion of five hundred persons who have no interest, feeling, or taste in common with the fifty millions among whom they live ; that the love of liberty means the strong objection which the five hundred feel to every measure which can prevent them from acting as they choose towards the fifty millions, that the Press is altogether supported by the five hundred, and has no motive to plead the cause of the fifty millions. " We know that India cannot have a free Government. But she may have the next best thing a firm and impartial despotism. The worst state in which she can possibly be placed is that in which the memorialists would place her. They call on us to' recognise them as a privileged order of freemen in the midst of slaves. It was for the purpose of averting this great evil that Parliament, at the same time at which it suffered Englishmen to settle in India, armed us with those large powers which, in my opinion, we ill deserve to possess, if we have not the spirit to use them now." Macaulay had made two mistakes. He had yielded to the temptation of imputing motives, a habit which the Spectator newspaper has pronounced to be his one intellectual vice, finely adding that it. is "the vice of rectitude;" and he had done worse still, for he had challenged his opponents to a course of agitation. They responded to the call. After preparing the way by a string of communications to the public journals, in which their objections to the Act were set forth at enormous length, and with as much point and dignity as can be obtained by a copious use of italics and capital letters, they called a public meeting, the proceedings at which were almost too ludicrous for 288 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VI. description. "I have seen," said one of the speakers, "at a Hindoo festival, a naked dishevelled figure, his face painted with grotesque colours, and his long hair besmeared with dirt and ashes. His tongue was pierced with an iron bar, and his breast was scorched by the fire from the burning altar which rested on his stomach. This revolting figure, covered with ashes, dirt, and bleeding voluntary wounds, may the next moment ascend the Sudder bench, and in a suit between a Hindoo and an Englishman think it an act of sanctity to decide against law in favour of the professor of the true faith. " Another gentleman, Mr. Longueville Clarke, reminded "the tyrant" that There yawns the sack, and yonder rolls the sea. " Mr. Macaulay may treat this as an idle threat ; but his know- ledge of history will supply him with many examples of what has occurred when resistance has been provoked by milder in- stances of despotism than the decimation of a people." This pretty explicit recommendation to lynch a Member of Council was received with rapturous applause. At length arose a Captain Biden, who spoke as follows : "Gentlemen, I come before you in the character of a British seaman, and on that ground claim your attention for a few moments. Gentlemen, there has been much talk during the evening of laws, and regulations, and rights, and liberties : but you all seem to have forgotten that this is the anniversary of the glorious Battle of Waterloo. I beg to propose, and I call on the statue of Lord Cornwallis and yourselves to join me in three cheers for the Duke of Wellington and the Battle of Waterloo.'* The audience, who by this time were pretty well convinced that no grievance which could possibly result under the Black Act could equal the horrors of a crowd in the Town Hall of Calcutta during the latter half of June, gladly caught at the diversion, and made noise enough to satisfy even the gallant orator. The business was brought to a hurried close, and the meeting was adjourned till the following week. But the luck of Macaulay's adversaries pursued them still. One of the leading speakers at the adjourned meeting, himself a barrister, gave another barrister the lie, and a tumult ensued which Captain Biden in vain endeavoured to calm by his favourite remedy. "The opinion at Madras, Bombay, and Canton, "said he, and in so saying he uttered the only sentence of wisdom which either evening had produced, " is that there is no public opinion at Calcutta but the lawyers. And now, who has the presumption to call it a burlesque? let's give three cheers for 1834-38. LORD MA CAUL AY. 289 the Battle of Waterloo, and then I'll propose an amendment which shall go into the whole question." The Chairman, who certainly had earned the vote of thanks for " his very extra- ordinary patience," which Captain Biden was appropriately se- lected to move, contrived to get resolutions passed in favour of petitioning Parliament and the Home Government against the obnoxious Act. The next few weeks were spent by the leaders of the move- ment in squabbling over the preliminaries of duels that never came off, and applying for criminal informations for libel against each other, which their beloved Supreme Court very judiciously refused to grant ; but in the course of time the petitions were signed, and an agent was selected, who undertook to convey them to England. On the 22nd of March, 1838, a Committee of Inquiry into the operation of the Act was moved for in the House of Commons ; but there was nothing in the question which tempted Honourable Members to lay aside their cus- tomary indifference with regard to Indian controversies, and the motion fell through without a division. The House allowed the Government to have its own way in the matter ; and any possible hesitation on the part of the Ministers was borne down by the emphasis with which Macaulay claimed their support. " I conceive," he wrote, " that the Act is good in itself, and that the time for passing it has been well chosen. The strongest reason, however, for passing it is the nature of the opposition which it has experienced. The organs of that opposition re- peated every day that the English were the conquerors, and the lords, of the country; the dominant race ; the electors of the House of Commons, whose power extends both over the Company at home, and over the Governor-General in Council here. The constituents of the British Legislature, they told us, were not to be bound by laws made by any inferior authority. The firmness with which the Government withstood the idle outcry of two or three hundred people, about a matter with which they had nothing to do, was designated as insolent defiance of public opinion. We were enemies of freedom, because we would not suffer a small white aristocracy to domi- neer over millions. How utterly at variance these principles are with reason, with justice, with the honour of the British Government, and with the dearest interests of the Indian people, it is unnecessary for me to point out For myself, I can only say that, if the Government is to be conducted on such prin- ciples, I am utterly disqualified, by all my feelings and opinions, from bearing any part in it, and cannot too soon resign my place to some person better fitted to hold it" 290 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. It is fortunate for India that a man with the tastes, and the training, of Macaulay came to her shores as one vested with authority, and that he came at the moment when he did ; for that moment was the very turning-point of her intellectual progress. All educational action had been at a stand for some time back, on account of an irreconcilable difference of opinion in the Committee of Public Instruction; which was divided, five against five, on either side of a controversy, vital, inevit- able, admitting of neither postponement nor compromise, and conducted by both parties with a pertinacity and a warmth that was nothing but honourable to those concerned. Half of the members were for maintaining and extending the old scheme of encouraging Oriental learning by stipends paid to students in Sanscrit, Persian, and Arabic ; and by liberal grants for the publication of works in those languages. The other half were in favour of teaching the elements of knowledge in the verna- cular tongues, and the higher branches in English. On his arrival, Macaulay was appointed President of the Committee ; but he declined to take any active part in its proceedings until the Government had finally pronounced on the question at issue. Later in January 1835 the advocates of the two systems, than whom ten abler men could not be found in the service, laid their opinions before the Supreme Council ; and, on the 2nd of February, Macaulay, as a member of that Council, produced a minute in which he adopted and defended the views of the English section in the Committee. " How stands the case ? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre- eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us ; with models of every species of eloquence ; with historical compositions, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equalled ; with just and lively representations of human life and human nature; with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, and trade; with full and correct in- formation respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the in- tellect of man. Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language is of far fn-eater value than all the literature which three hundred 1834-38. LORD MACAULAY. 291 years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australasia; communities which are every year becoming more important, and more closely connected with our Indian Empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects. " The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own ; whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal con- fession, whenever they differ from those of Europe, differ for the worse ; and whether, when we can patronise sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines, which would disgrace an English farrier astronomy, which would move laughter in the girls at an English boarding- school history, abounding with kings thirty feet high, and reigns thirty thousand years long and geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter. "We are not without experience to guide us. History furnishes several analogous cases, and they all teach the same lesson. There are in modern times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society of prejudice overthrown of knowledge diffused of taste purified of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous. " The first instance to which I refer is the great revival of letters among the western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost everything that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto acted; had they neglected the language of Cicero and Tacitus ; had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island ; had they printed nothing, and taught nothing at the universities, but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon, and romances in Norman French, would England have been what she now is ? What the Greek and Latin were to the contempo- raries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some depart- ments in history, for example I am certain that it is much less so. ' k Another instance may be said to be still before our eyes. V 3 292 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. Within the last hundred and twenty years a nation which had previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the Crusades has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilised communities. I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class, abounding with persons fit to serve the state in the highest functions, and in no wise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London. There is reason to hope that this vast Empire, which in the time of our grandfathers was probably behind the Punjab, may, in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. And how was this change effected ? Not by flattering national prejudices ; not by feeding the mind of the young Muscovite with the old woman's stories which his rude fathers had believed ; not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas ; not by encouraging him to study the great question, whether the world was or was not created on the 1 3th of September ; not by calling him 'a learned native,' when he has mastered all these points of knowledge ; but by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that informa- tion within his reach. The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar." This Minute, which in its original shape is long enough for an article in a quarterly review, and as businesslike as a Report of a Royal Commission, set the question at rest at once and for ever. On the 7th of March, 1835, Lord William Bentinck decided that " the great object of the British Government ought to be the promotion of European literature and science among the natives of India ; " two of the Orientalists retired from the Committee of Public Instruction ; several new mem- bers, both English and native, were appointed ; and Macaulay entered upon the functions of President with an energy and assiduity which in his case was an infallible proof that his work was to his mind. The post was no sinecure. It was an arduous task to plan, found, and construct, in all its grades, the education of such a country as India. The means at Macaulay's disposal were utterly inadequate for the undertaking on which he was engaged. Nothing resembling an organised staff was as yet in existence. There were no Inspectors of Schools. There were no training colleges for masters. There were no boards of experienced managers. The machinery consisted of voluntary committees acting on the spot, and corresponding directly with the superintending body at Calcutta. Macaulay rose to the occasion, and threw himself into the routine of 1834-38. LORD MA CAUL AY. 293 administration and control with zeal sustained by diligence and tempered by tact "We were hardly prepared," said a com- petent critic, " for the amount of conciliation which he evinces in dealing with irritable colleagues and subordinates, and for the strong, sterling, practical common sense with which he sweeps away rubbish, or cuts the knots of local and depart- mental problems." The mastery which a man exercises over himself, and the patience and forbearance displayed in his dealings with others, are generally in proportion to the value which he sets upon the objects of his pursuit If we judge Macaulay by this standard, it is plain that he cared a great deal more for providing our Eastern Empire with an educational outfit that would work and wear than he ever cared for keeping his own seat in Parliament or pushing his own fortunes in Downing Street. Throughout his innumerable Minutes, on all subjects from the broadest principle to the narrowest detail, he is everywhere free from crotchets and susceptibilities ; and every- where ready to humour any person who will make himself useful, and to adopt any appliance which can be turned to account " I think it highly probable that Mr. Nicholls may be to blame, because I have seldom known a quarrel in which both parties were not to blame. But I see no evidence that he is so. Nor do I see any evidence which tends to prove that Mr. Nicholls leads the Local Committee by the nose. The Local Committee appear to have acted with perfect propriety, and I cannot consent to treat them in the manner recommended by Mr. Sutherland. If we appoint the Colonel to be a member of their body, we shall in effect pass a most severe censure on their proceedings. I dislike the suggestion of putting military men on the Committee as a check on the civilians. Hitherto we have never, to the best of my belief, been troubled by any such idle jealousies. I would appoint the fittest men without caring to what branch of the service they belonged, or whether they belonged to the service at all." l Exception had been taken to an applicant for a mastership, on the ground that he had been a preacher with a strong turn for proselytising. " Mr. seems to be so little concerned about proselytising, that he does not even know how to spell the word ; a circumstance which, if I did not suppose it to be a slip of the pen, I should think a more serious objection than the ' Reverend ' which formerly stood before his name. I am quite content with his assurances." 1 This, and the following extracts, are taken from a volume of Macanlay's Minutes, " now first collected from Records in the Department of Public Instruction, by H. Woodrow, Esq., M.A., Inspector of Schools at Calcutta, and formerly Fellow of Cams College, Cambridge." The collection was pub- lished in India. 294 LIFE AND LETTERS Of ck. VI. In default of better, Macaulay was always for employing the tools which came to hand. A warm and consistent advocate of appointment by competitive examination, wherever a field for competition existed, he was no pedantic slave to a theory. In the dearth of schoolmasters, -which is a feature in every infant educational system, he refused to reject a candidate who " mistook Argos for Corinth," and backed the claims of any aspirant of respectable character who could " read, write, and work a sum." " By all means accept the King of Oude's present ; though, to be sure, more detestable maps were never seen. One would think that the revenues of Oude, and the treasures of Saadut All, might have borne the expense of producing something better than a map in which Sicily is joined on to the toe of Italy, and in which so im- portant an eastern island as Java does not appear at all." " As to the corrupting influence of the zenana, of which Mr. Trevelyan speaks, I may regret it ; but I own that I cannot help thinking that the dissolution of the tie between parent and child is as great a moral evil as can be found in any zenana. In whatever degree infant schools relax that tie they do mischief. For my own part, I would rather hear a boy of three years old lisp all the bad words in the language than that he should have no feelings of family affection that his character should be that which must be expected in one who has had the misfortune of having a school- master in place of a mother." " I do not see the reason for establishing any limit as to the age of scholars. The phenomena are exactly the same which have always been found to exist when a new mode of education has been rising into fashion. No man of fifty now learns Greek with boys ; but in the sixteenth century it was not at all unusual to see old Doctors of Divinity attending lectures side by side with young students." "With respect to making our College libraries circulating libraries, there is much to be said on both sides. If a proper subscription is demanded from these who have access to them, and if all that is raised by this subscription is laid out in adding to the libraries, the students will be no losers by the plan. Our libraries, the best of them at least, would be better than any which would be readily accessible at an up-country station ; and I do not know why we should grudge a young officer the pleasure of reading our copy of Boswell's Life of Johnson or Marmontel's Memoirs, if he is willing to pay a few rupees for the privilege." These utterances of cultured wisdom or homely mother-wit are sometimes expressed in phrases almost as amusing, though not so characteristic, as those which Frederic the Great used to scrawl on the margin of reports and despatches for the informa- tion of his secretaries. 1834-38. LORD MA CAUL AY. 295 " We are a little too indulgent to the whims of the people in our employ. We pay a large sum to send a master to a distant station. He dislikes the place. The collector is uncivil ; the surgeon quarrels with him ; and he must be moved. The expenses of the journey have to be defrayed. Another man is to be trans- ferred from a place where he is comfortable and useful. Our masters run from station to station at our cost, as vapourised ladies at home run about from spa to spa. All situations have their discomforts ; and there are times when we all wish that our lot had been cast in some other line of life, or in some other place.' With regard to a proposed coat of arms for Hooghly College, he says " I do not see why the mummeries of European heraldry should be introduced into any part of our Indian system. Heraldry is not a science which has any eternal rules. It is a system of arbitrary canons, originating in pure caprice. Nothing can be more absurd and grotesque than armorial bearings, considered in themselves. Certain recollections, certain associations, make them interesting in many cases to an Englishman ; but in those recollec- tions and associations the natives of India do not participate. A lion, rampant, with a folio in his paw, with a man standing on each side of him, with a telescope over his head, and with a Persian motto under his feet, must seem to them either very mysterious, or very absurd." In a discussion on the propriety of printing some books of Oriental science, Macaulay writes : " I should be sorry to say anything disrespectful of that liberal and generous enthusiasm for Oriental literature which appears in Mr. Sutherland's minute : but I own that I cannot think that we ought to be guided in the distribution of the small sum, which the Government has allotted for the purpose of education, by con- siderations which seem a little romantic. That the Saracens a thousand years ago cultivated mathematical science is hardly, I think, a reason for our spending any money in translating English treatises on mathematics into Arabic. Mr. Sutherland would probably think it very strange if we were to urge the destruction of the Alexandrian Library as a reason against patronising Arabic literature in the nineteenth century. The undertaking may be, as Mr. Sutherland conceives, a great national work. So is the break- water at Madras. But under the orders which we have received from the Government, we have just as little to do with one as with the other." Now and then a stroke, aimed at Hooghly College, hits nearer home. That men of thirty should be bribed to continue their education into mature life " seems very absurd. Moghal Jan has been paid to learn something during twelve years. We 296 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VI. are told that he is lazy and stupid : but there are hopes that in four years more he will have completed his course of study. We have had quite enough of these lazy, stupid schoolboys of thirty." " I must frankly own that I do not like the list of books. Grammars of rhetoric and grammars of logic are among the most useless furniture of a shelf. Give a boy Robinson Crusoe. That is worth all the grammars of rhetoric and logic in the world. We ought to procure such books as are likely to give the children a taste for the literature of the West ; not books filled with idle dis- tinctions and definitions, which every man who has learned them makes haste to forget. Who ever reasoned better for having been taught the difference between a syllogism and an enthymeme? Who ever composed with greater spirit and elegance because he could define an oxymoron or an aposiopesis ? I am not joking, but writing quite seriously, when I say that I would much rather order a hundred copies of Jack the Giant-killer for our schools than a hundred copies of any grammar of rhetoric or logic that ever was written." " Goldsmith's Histories of Greece and Rome are miserable performances, and I do not at all like to lay out so/, on them, even after they have received all Mr. Pinnock's improvements. I must own too, that I think the order for globes and other instruments un- necessarily large. To lay out 3247. at once on globes alone, useful as I acknowledge those articles to be, seems exceedingly profuse, when we have only about 3,ooo/. a year for all purposes of English edu- cation. One 12-inch or 1 8-inch globe for each school is quite enough ; and we ought not, I think, to order sixteen such globes when we are about to establish only seven schools. Useful as the telescopes, the theodolites, and the other scientific instruments mentioned in the indent undoubtedly are, we must consider that four or five such instruments run away with a year's salary of a schoolmaster, and that, if we purchase them, it will be necessary to defer the establishment of schools " At one of the colleges at Calcutta the distribution of prizes was accompanied by some histrionic performances on the part of the pupils. " I have no partiality," writes Macaulay, " for such ceremonies. I think it a very questionable thing whether, even at home, public spouting and acting ought to form part of the system of a place of education. But in this country such exhibitions are peculiarly out of place. I can conceive nothing more grotesque than the scene from the Merchant of Venice, with Portia repre- sented by a little black boy. Then, too, the subjects of recitation were ill chosen. We are attempting to introduce a great nation to a knowledge of the richest and noblest literature in the world. The society of Calcutta assemble to see what progress we are 1834-38. LORD MACAULAY. 297 making ; and we produce as a sample a boy who repeats some blackguard doggrel of George Colman's, about a fat gentleman who was put to bed over an oven, and about a man-midwife who was called out of his bed by a drunken man at night. Our disciple tries to hiccup, and tumbles and staggers about in imitation of the tipsy English sailors whom he has seen at the punch houses. Really, if we can find nothing better worth reciting than this trash, we had better give up English instruction altogether." " As to the list of prize books, I am not much better satisfied. It is absolutely unintelligible to me why Pope's Works and my old friend Moore's Lalla Rookh should be selected from the whole mass of English poetry to be prize books. I will engage to frame, currente calamo, a better list. Bacon's Essays, Hume's England, Gibbon's Rome, Robertson's Charles V., Robertson's Scotland, Robertson's America, Swift's Gulliver, Robinson Crusoe, Shakespeare's Works, Paradise Lost, Milton's smaller poems, Arabian Nights, Park's Travels, Anson's Voyage, the Vicar of Wakefield, Johnson's Lives Gil Bias, Voltaire's Charles XII., Southey's Nelson, Middletons Life of Cicero. " This may serve as a specimen. These are books which will amuse and interest those who obtain them. To give a boy Aber- crombie on the Intellectual Powers, Dick's Moral Improvement, Young's Intellectual Philosophy, Chalmers's Poetical Economy ! ! ! (in passing I may be allowed to ask what that means ?) is quite absurd. I would not give orders at random for books about which we know nothing. We are under no necessity of ordering at hap- hazard. We know Robinson Crusoe, and Gulliver, and the Arabian Nights, and Anson's Voyage, and many other delightful works which interest even the very young, and which do not lose their interest to the end of our lives. Why should we order blindfold such books as Markham's New Children's Friend, the Juvenile Scrap Book, the Child's Own Book, Niggens's Earth, Mudie's Sea, and somebody else's Fire and Air ? books which, I will be bound for it, none of us ever opened. " The list ought in all its parts to be thoroughly recast. If Sir Benjamin Malkin will furnish the names of ten or twelve works ot a scientific kind, which he thinks suited for prizes, the task will not be difficult ; and, with his help, I will gladly undertake it. There is a marked distinction between a prize book and a school book. A prize book ought to be a book which a boy receives with pleasure, and turns over and over, not as a task, but spontaneously. I have not forgotten my own school-boy feelings on this subject. My pleasure at obtaining a prize was greatly enhanced by the knowledge that my little library would receive a very agreeable addition. I never was better pleased than when at fourteen I was master of Boswell's Life of Johnson, which I had long been wish- ing to read. If my master had given me, instead of Boswell, a Critical Pronouncing Dictionary, or a Geographical Class book, I should have been much less gratified by my success." 298 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. The idea had been started of paying authors to write books in the languages of the country. On this Macaulay remarks : " To hire four or five people to make a literature is a course which never answered and never will answer, in any part of the world. Languages grow. They cannot be built. We are now following the slow but sure course on which alone we can depend for a supply of good books in the vernacular languages of India. We are attempting to raise up a large class of enlightened natives. I hope that, twenty years hence, there will be hundreds, nay- thousands, of natives familiar with the best models of composition, and well acquainted with Western science. Among them some persons will be found who will have the inclination and the ability to exhibit European knowledge in the vernacular dialects. This I believe to be the only way in which we can raise up a good ver- nacular literature in this country.' These hopeful anticipations have been more than fulfilled. Twice twenty years have brought into existence, not hundreds or thousands, but hundreds of thousands, of natives who can appreciate European knowledge when laid before them in the English language, and can reproduce it in their own. Taking one year with another, upwards of a thousand works of litera- ture and science are published annually in Bengal alone, and at least four times that number throughout the entire continent. Our colleges have more than six thousand students on their books, and two hundred thousand boys are receiving a liberal education in schools of the higher order. For the improvement of the mass of the people, nearly seven thousand young men are in training as Certificated Masters. The amount allotted in the budget to the item of Public Instruction has increased more than seventy-fold since 1835 ; and is largely supplemented by the fees which parents of all classes willingly contribute when once they have been taught the value of a commodity the demand for which is~created by the supply. During many years past the generosity of wealthy natives has to a great extent been diverted from the idle extravagance of pageants and festivals, to promote the in- tellectual advancement of their fellow-countrymen. On several different occasions, at a single stroke of the pen, our Indian universities have been endowed with twice, three times, four times the amount of the slender sum which Macaulay had at his command. But none the less was he the master-engineer, whose skill and foresight determined the direction of the channels, along which this stream of public and private munifi- cence was to flow for the regeneration of our Eastern Empire. It may add something to the merit of Macaulay's labours in the cause of Education that those labours were voluntary 1834-38. LORD MACAULAY. 299 and unpaid ; and voluntary and unpaid likewise was another service which he rendered to India, not less durable than the first, and hardly less important. A clause in the Act of 1833 gave rise to the appointment of a Commission to inquire into the Jurisprudence and Jurisdiction of our Eastern Empire. Macaulay, at his own instigation, was appointed President of that Commission. He had not been many months engaged in his new duties before he submitted a proposal, by the adoption of which his own industry and the high talents of his colleagues, Mr. Cameron and Sir John Macleod, might be turned to the best account by being employed in framing a ' Criminal Code for the whole Indian Empire. "This Code, "writes Macaulay, "should not be a mere digest of existing usages and regulations, but should comprise all the reforms which the Commission may think desirable. It should be framed on two great principles, the principle of suppressing crime with the smallest possible amount of suffering, and the principle of ascertaining truth at the smallest possible cost of time and money. The Commis- sioners should be particularly charged to study conciseness, as far as it is consistent with perspicuity. In general, I believe, it will be found that perspicuous and concise expressions are not only compatible, but identical." The offer was eagerly accepted, and the Commission fell to work. The results of that work did not show themselves quickly enough to satisfy the most practical, and, (to its credit be it spoken,) the most exacting of Governments ; and Mac- aulay was under the necessity of explaining and excusing a procrastination, which was celerity itself as compared with any codifying that had been done since the days of Justinian. " During the last rainy season, a season, I believe, peculiarly unhealthy, every member of the Commission, except myself, was wholly incapacitated for exertion. Mr. Anderson has been twice under the necessity of leaving Calcutta, and has not, till very lately, been able to labour with his accustomed activity. Mr. Macleod has been, till within the last week or ten days, in so feeble a state that the smallest effort seriously disordered him ; and his health is so delicate that, admirably qualified as he is, by very rare talents, for the discharge of his functions, it would be imprudent, in forming any prospective calculation, to reckon on much service from him. Mr. Cameron, of the importance of whose assistance I need not speak, has been, during more than four months, utterly unable to do any work, and has at length been compelled to ask leave of absence, in order to visit the Cape for the recovery of his health. Thus, as the Governor-General has stated, Mr. Millett and myself have, during a considerable time, constituted the whole effective strength of the Commission. Nor has Mr. Millett been able to 300 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. devote to the business of the Commission his whole undivided attention. " I must say that, even if no allowance be made for the un- toward occurrences which have retarded our progress, that progress cannot be called slow. People who have never considered the importance and difficulty of the task in which we are employed are surprised to find that a Code cannot be spoken off extempore, or written like an article in a magazine. I am not ashamed to acknowledge that there are several chapters in the Code on which I have been employed for months ; of which I have changed the whole plan ten or twelve times ; which contain not a single word as it originally stood ; and with which I am still very far indeed from being satisfied. I certainly shall not hurry on my share of the work to gratify the childish impatience of the ignorant. Their censure ought to be a matter of perfect indifference to men engaged in a task, on the right performance of which the welfare of millions may, during a long series of years, depend. The cost of the Commission is as nothing when compared with the importance of such a work. The time during which the Commission has sat is as nothing compared with the time during which that work will produce good, or evil, to India. " Indeed, if we compare the progress of the Indian Code with the progress of Codes under circumstances far more favourable, we shall find little reason to accuse the Law Commission of tardiness. Buonaparte had at his command the services of experienced jurists to any extent to which he chose to call for them ; yet his legislation proceeded at a far slower rate than ours. The French Criminal Code was begun, under the Consulate, in March 1801 ; and yet the Code of Criminal Procedure was not completed till 1808, and the Penal Code not till 1810. The Criminal Code of Louisiana was commenced in February 1821. After it had been in preparation during three years and a half, an accident happened to the papers which compelled Mr. Livingstone to request indulgence for another year. Indeed, when I remember the slow progress of law reforms at home, and when I consider that our Code decides hundreds of questions, every one of which, if stirred in England, would give occasion to voluminous controversy and to many animated debates, I must acknowledge that I am inclined to fear that we have been guilty rather of precipitation than of delay." This Minute was dated the 2nd of January, 1837 ; and in the course of the same year the Code appeared, headed by an Introductory Report in the shape of a letter to the Governor- General, and followed by an Appendix containing eighteen notes, each in itself an essay. The most readable of all Digests, its pages are alive with illustrations drawn from his- tory, from literature, and from the habits and occurrences of everyday life. The offence of fabricating evidence is exempli- fied by a case which may easily be recognised as that of Lady 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 301 Macbeth and the grooms ; l and the offence of voluntary culpable homicide by an imaginary incident of a pit covered with sticks and turf, which irresistibly recalls a reminiscence of Jack the Giant-killer. The chapters on theft and trespass establish the rights of book owners as against book stealers, book borrowers, and book defacers, 2 with an affection- ate precision which would have gladdened the heart of Charles Lamb or Sir Walter Scott In the chapter on manslaughter, the judge is enjoined to treat with lenity an act done in the first anger of a husband or father, pro- voked by the intolerable outrage of a certain kind of criminal assault. " Such an assault produced the Sicilian Vespers. Such an assault called forth the memorable blow of Wat Tyler." And, on the question whether the severity of a hurt should be considered in apportioning the punishment, we are reminded of " examples which are universally known. Harley was laid up more than twenty days by the wound which he received from Guiscard;" while "the scratch which Damien gave to Louis the Fifteenth was so slight that it was followed by no feverish symptoms. " Such a sanguine estimate of the diffusion of know- ledge with regard to the details of ancient crimes could proceed from no pen but that of the writer who endowed schoolboys with the erudition of professors, and the talker who, when he poured forth the stores of his memory, began each of his disquisitions with the phrase, "don't you remember?" If it be asked whether or not the Penal Code fulfils the ends for which it was framed, the answer may safely be left to the gratitude of Indian civilians, the younger of whom carry it about in their saddle-bags, and the older in their heads. The value which it possesses in the eyes of a trained English lawyer may be gathered from the testimony of Macaulay's emi- nent successor, Mr. Fitzjames Stephen, who writes of it thus : 1 " A, after wounding a person with a knife, goes into the room where Z is sleeping, smears Z's clothes with blood, and lays the knife under Z's pillow ; intending not only that suspicion may thereby be turned away from himself, but also that Z may be convicted of voluntarily causing grievous hurt. A is liable to punishment as a fabricator of false evidence." 2 "A, being on friendly terms with Z, goes into Z's library, in Z's absence, and takes a book without Z's express consent. Here, it is probable that A may have conceived that he had Z's implied consent to use Z's books. If this was A's impression, A has not committed theft." " A takes up a book belonging to Z, and reads it, not having any right over the book, and not having the consent of any person entitled to authorise A so to do. A trespasses. ' ' A, being exasperated at a passage in a book which is lying on the counter of Z, snatches it up, and tears it to pieces. A has not committed theft, as he has not acted fraudulently, though he may have committed criminal trespass and mischief." 302 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VI. "In order to appreciate the importance of the Penal Code, it must be borne in mind what crime in India is. Here, in England, order is so thoroughly well established that the crime of the country is hardly more than an annoyance. In India, if crime is allowed to get to a head, it is capable of destroying the peace and prosperity of whole tracts of country. The mass of the people in their com- mon moods are gentle, submissive, and disposed to be innocent ; but, for that very reason, bold and successful criminals are danger- ous in the extreme. In old days, when they joined in gangs or organised bodies, they soon acquired political importance. Now, in many parts of India, crime is quite as uncommon as in the least criminal parts of England ; and the old high-handed systematised crime has almost entirely disappeared. This great revolution (for it is nothing less) in the state of society of a whole continent has been brought about by the regular administration of a rational body of criminal law. " The administration of criminal justice is entrusted to a very small number of English magistrates, organised according to a carefully-devised system of appeal and supervision which represents the experience of a century. This system is not unattended by evils ; but it is absolutely necessary to enable a few hundred civilians to govern a continent. Persons in such a position must be provided with the plainest instructions as to the nature of their duties. These instructions, in so far as the administration of cri- minal justice is concerned, are contained in the Indian Penal Code and the Code of Criminal Procedure. The Code of Criminal Procedure contains 541 sections, and forms a pamphlet of 210 widely printed octavo pages. The Penal Code consists of 510 sections. Pocket editions of these Codes are published, which may be carried about as easily as a pocket Bible ; and I doubt whether, even in Scotland, you would find many people who know their Bibles as Indian civilians know their Codes. After describing the confusion and complication of the criminal law of our Indian Empire before it was taken in hand by the Commission of 1834, Mr. Stephen proceeds to say : " Lord Macaulay's great work was far too daring and original to be accepted at once. It was a draft when he left India in 1838. His successors made remarks on it for twenty-two years. Those years were filled with wars and rumours of wars. The Afghan disasters and triumphs, the war in Central India, the wars with the Sikhs, Lord Dalhousie's annexations, threw law reform into the background, and produced a state of mind not very favourable to it. Then came the Mutiny, which in its essence was the break- down of an old system ; the renunciation of an attempt to effect an impossible compromise between the Asiatic and the European view of things, legal, military, and administrative. The effect of the Mutiny on the Statute-book was unmistakable. The Code of Civil Procedure was enacted in 1859. The Penal Code was enacted in 1860, and came into operation on the 1st of January. I834-3 8 - LORD MACAULAY. 303 1862. The credit of passing the Penal Code into law, and of giving to every part of it the improvements which practical skill and technical knowledge could bestow, is due to Sir Barnes Peacock, who held Lord Macaulay's place during the most anxious years through which the Indian Empire has passed. The Draft and the Revision are both eminently creditable to their authors ; and the result of their successive efforts has been to reproduce in a concise, and even beautiful, form the spirit of the law of England; the most technical, the most clumsy, and the most bewildering of all systems of criminal law ; though I think, if its principles are fully understood, it is the most rational. If anyone doubts this assertion, let him compare the Indian Penal Code with such a book as Mr. Greaves's edition of Russell on Crimes. The one subject of homicide, as treated by Mr. Greaves and Russell, is, I should think, twice as long as the whole Penal Code ; and it does not contain a tenth part of the matter." " The point which always has surprised me most in connection with the Penal Code is, that it proves that Lord Macaulay must have had a knowledge of English criminal law which, considering how little he had practised it, may fairly be called extraordinary. 1 He must have possessed the gift of going at once to the very root of the matter, and of sifting the corn from the chaff to a most unusual degree ; for his Draft gives the substance of the criminal law of England, down to its minute working details, in a compass which, by comparison with the original, may be regarded as almost absurdly small. The Indian Penal Code is to the English crimi- nal law what a manufactured article ready for use is to the materials out of which it is made. It is to the French ' Code Penal,' and, I may add, to the North German Code of 1871, what a finished picture is to a sketch. It is far simpler, and much better expressed, than Livingstone's Code for Louisiana ; and its practical success has been complete. The clearest proof of this is that hardly any questions have arisen upon it which have had to be determined by the courts ; and that few and slight amendments have had to be made in it by the Legislature." Without troubling himself unduly about the matter, Mac- aulay was conscious that the world's estimate of his public services would be injuriously affected by the popular notion, which he has described as "so flattering to mediocrity," that a great writer cannot be a great administrator ; and it is possible that this consciousness had something to do with the heartiness and fervour which he threw into his defence of the author of " Cato " against the charge of having been an inefficient Sec- retary of State. There was much in common between his own 1 Macaulay's practice at the bar had been less than little, according to an account which he gave of it at a public dinner : ' ' My own forensic experience, gentlemen, has been extremely small ; for my only recollection of an achievement that way is that at quarter sessions I once convicted a boy of stealing a parcel of cocks and hens." 304 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. lot and that of the other famous essayist who had been likewise a Whig statesman ; and this similarity in their fortunes may account in part for the indulgence, and almost tenderness, with which he reviewed the career and character of Addison. Addison himself, at his villa in .Chelsea, and still more amidst the gilded slavery of Holland House, might have envied the literary seclusion, ample for so rapid a reader, which the usages of Indian life permitted Macaulay to enjoy. " I have a very pretty garden," he writes, " not unlike our little grass-plot at Clapham, but larger. It consists of a fine sheet of turf, with a gravel walk round it, and flower-beds scattered over it. It looks beautiful just now after the rains, and I hear that it keeps its verdure during a great part of the year. A flight of steps leads down from my library into the garden, and it is so well shaded that you may walk there till ten o'clock in the morning." Here, book in hand, and in dressing-gown and slippers, he would spend those two hours after sun-rise which Anglo-Indian gentlemen devote to riding, and Anglo-Indian ladies to sleep- ing off the arrears of the sultry night. Regularly, every morn- ing, his studies were broken in upon by the arrival of his baby niece, who came to feed the crows with the toast which accompanied his early cup of tea ; a ceremony during which he had much ado to protect the child from the advances of a multitude of birds, each almost as big as herself, which hopped and fluttered round her as she stood on the steps of the veran- dah. When the sun drove him indoors, (which happened sooner than he had promised himself, before he had learned by experience what the hot season was,) he went to his bath and toilette, and then to breakfast ; " at which we support nature under the exhausting effects of the climate by means of plenty of eggs, mango-fish, snipe-pies, and frequently a hot beefsteak. My cook is renowned through Calcutta for his skill He brought me attestations of a long succession of gourmands, and among them one from Lord Dalhousie, who pronounced him decidedly the first artist in Bengal. 1 This great man, and his two assistants, I am to have for thirty rupees a month. While I am on the subject of the cuisine, I may as well say all that I have to say about it at once. The tropical fruits are wretched. The best of them is inferior to our apricot or gooseberry. When I was a child, I had a notion of its being the most exquisite of treats to eat plantains and yams, and to drink palm-wine. How I envied my father for having enjoyed these luxuries ! I have now enjoyed them all, and I have found, 1 Lord Dalhousie, the father of the Governor-General, was CommaTider-iQ- Chief in India during the years 1830 and 1831. 1834-38. LORD MACAULAY. 305 like much greater men on much more important occasions, that all is vanity. A plantain is very like a rotten pear, so like that I would lay twenty to one that a person blindfolded would not discover the difference. A yam is better. It is like an indifferent potato. I tried palm-wine at a pretty village near Madras, where I slept one night. I told Captain Barren that I had been curious to taste that liquor ever since I first saw, eight or nine and twenty years ago, the picture of the negro climbing the tree in Sierra Leone. The next morning I was roused by a servant, with a large bowl of juice fresh from the tree. I drank it, and found it very like ginger-beer in which the ginger has been sparingly used." Macaulay necessarily spent away from home the days on which the Supreme Council, or the Law Commission, held their meetings ; but the rest of his work, legal, literary, and educational, he carried on in the quiet of his library. Now and again, a morning was consumed in returning calls ; an expenditure of time which it is needless to say that he sorely grudged. " Happily, the good people here are too busy to be at home. Except the parsons, they are all usefully occupied somewhere or other, so that I have only to leave cards ; but the reverend gentlemen are always within doors in the heat of the day, lying on their backs, regretting breakfast, longing for tiffin, and crying out for lemonade." After lunch he sate with Mrs. Trevelyan, translating Greek or reading French for her benefit ; and Scribe's comedies and Saint Simon's Memoirs beguiled the long languid leisure of the Calcutta afternoon, while the punkah swung overhead, and the air came heavy and scented through the moistened grass-matting which shrouded the windows. At the approach of sunset, with its attendant breeze, he joined his sister in her drive along the banks of the Hooghly ; and they returned by starlight, too often to take part in a vast banquet of forty guests, dressed as fashionably as people can dress at ninety degrees East from Paris ; who, one and all, had far rather have been eating their curry, and drinking their bitter beer, at home, in all the comfort of muslin and nankeen. Macaulay is vehement in his dislike of " those great formal dinners, which unite all the stiffness of a levee to all the disorder and discomfort of a two-shilling ordinary. Nothing can be duller. Nobody speaks except to the person next him. The conversation is the most deplorable twaddle ! and, as I always sit next to the lady of the highest rank, or, in other words, to the oldest, ugliest, and proudest woman in the com- pany, I am worse off than my neighbours." Nevertheless he was far too acute a judge of men to under- 306 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. vi. value the special type of mind which is produced and fostered by the influences of an Indian career. He was always ready to admit that there is no better company in the world than a young and rising civilian ; no one who has more to say that is worth hearing, and who can say it in a manner better adapted to interest those who know good talk from bad. He delighted in that freedom from pedantry, affectation, and pretension which is one of the most agreeable characteristics of a service, to belong to which is in itself so effectual an education, that a bore is a phenomenon notorious everywhere within a hundred miles of the station which has the honour to possess him, and a fool is quoted by name throughout all the three Presidencies. Macaulay writes to his sisters at home : " The best way of seeing society here is to have very small parties. There is a little circle of people whose friendship I value, and in whose conversation I take pleasure : the Chief Justice, Sir Edward Ryan my old friend, Malkin ; ! Cameron and Macleod, the Law Commissioners ; Macnaghten, among the older servants of the Company, and Mangles, Colvin, and John Peter Grant among the younger. These, in my opinion, are the flower of Calcutta society, and I often ask some of them to a quiet dinner." On the Friday of every week, these chosen few met round Macaulay's breakfast table to discuss the progress which the Law Commission had made in its labours ; and each suc- cessive point which was started opened the way to such a flood of talk, legal, historical, political, and personal, that the company would sit far on towards noon over the empty tea- cups, until an uneasy sense of accumulating despatch-boxes drove them, one by one, to their respective offices. There are scattered passages in these letters which prove that Macaulay's feelings, during his protracted absence from his native country, were at times almost as keen as those which racked the breast of Cicero, when he was forced to exchange the triumphs of the Forum, and the cozy suppers with his brother augurs, for his hateful place of banishment at Thes- salonica, or his hardly less hateful seat of government at Tarsus. The complaints of the English statesman do not, however, amount in volume to a fiftieth part of those reiterated out- 1 It cannot be said that all the claims made upon Macaulay's friendship were acknowledged as readily as those of Sir Benjamin Malkin. " I am dunned unmercifully by place-hunters. The oddest application that I have received is from that rascal , who is somewhere in the interior. He tells me he.is sure that prosperity has not changed me ; that I am still the same John Macaulay who was his dearest friend, his more than brother : and that he means to come up, and live with me at Calcutta. If he fulfils his intention, I will have him taken before the police magistrates." 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 307 pourings of lachrymose eloquence with which the Roman philosopher bewailed an expatriation that was hardly one-third as long. " I have no words," writes Macaulay, very much under-estimating the wealth of his own vocabulary, "to tell you how I pine for England, or how intensely bitter exile has been to me, though I hope that I have borne it well. I feel as if I had no other wish than to see my country again and die. Let me assure you that banishment is no light matter. No person can judge of it who has not experienced it. A complete revolution in all the habits of life ; an estrangement from almost every old friend and acquaintance ; fifteen thousand miles of ocean between the exile and everything that he cares for : all this is, to me at least, very trying. There is no tempta- tion of wealth, or power, which would induce me to go through it again. But many people do not feel as I do. Indeed, the servants of the Company rarely have such a feeling ; and it is natural that they should not have it, for they are sent out while still schoolboys, and when they know little of the world. The moment of emigration is to them also the moment of emancipation ; and the pleasures of liberty and affluence to a great degree compensate them for the loss of their home. In a few years they become Orientalised, and, by the time that they are of my age, they would generally prefer India, as a residence, to England. But it is a very different matter when a man is transplanted at thirty-three." Making, as always, the best of everything, he was quite ready to allow that he might have been placed in a still less agreeable situation. In the following extract from a letter to his friend, Mrs. Drummond, there is much which will come home to those who are old enough to remember how vastly the Dublin of 1837 differed, for the worse, from the Dublin of 1875. "It now seems likely that you may remain in Ireland for years. I cannot conceive what has induced you to submit to such an exile. I declare, for my own part, that, little as I love Calcutta, I would rather stay here than be settled in the Phcenix Park. The last residence which I would choose would be a place with all the plagues, and none of the attractions, of a capital ; a provincial city on fire with factions political and religious, peopled by raving Orangemen and raving Repealers, and distracted by a contest between Protestantism as fanatical as that of Knox and Catholicism as fanatical as that of Bonner. We have our share of the miseries of life in this country. We are annually baked four months, boiled four more, and allowed the remaining four to become cool if we can. At this moment the sun is blazing like a furnace. The earth, soaked with x 2 308 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. oceans of rain, is steaming like a wet blanket. Vegetation is rotting all round us. Insects and undertakers are the only living creatures which seem to enjoy the climate. But, though our atmosphere is hot, our factions are lukewarm. A bad epigram in a newspaper, or a public meeting attended by a tailor, a pastry-cook, a reporter, two or three barristers, and eight or ten attorneys, are our most formidable annoyances. We have agitators in our own small way, Tritons of the minnows, bearing the same sort of resemblance to O'Connell that a lizard bears to an alligator. Therefore Calcutta for me, in preference to Dublin." He had good reason for being grateful to Calcutta, and still better for not showing his gratitude by prolonging his stay there over a fourth summer and autumn. " That tremendous crash of the great commercial houses which took place a few years ago has produced a revolution in fashions. It ruined one half of the English society in Bengal, and seriously injured the other half. A large proportion of the most important functionaries here are deeply in debt, and accordingly, the mode of living is now exceedingly quiet and modest. Those immense subscriptions, those public tables, those costly equi- pages and entertainments of which Heber, and others who saw Calcutta a few years back, say so much, are never heard of. Speaking for myself, it was a great piece of good fortune that I came hither just at the time when the general distress had forced everybody to adopt a moderate way of living. Owing very much to that circumstance, (while keeping house, I think, more handsomely than any other member of Council,) I have saved what will enable me to do my part towards making my family comfortable; and I shall have a competency for myself, small indeed, but quite sufficient to render me as perfectly independent as if I were the possessor of Burleigh or Chatsworth. " l "The rainy season of 1837 has been exceedingly unhealthy. Our house has escaped as well as any ; yet Hannah is the only one of us who has come off untouched. The baby has been repeatedly unwell. Trevelyan has suffered a good deal, and is kept right only by occasional trips in a steamer down to the mouth of the Hooghly. I had a smart touch of fever, which happily stayed but an hour or two, and I took such vigorous 1 Macaulay writes to Lord Mahon on the last day of December 1836 : " In another year I hope to leave this country, with a fortune which you would think ridiculously small, but which will make me as independent as if I had all that Lord Westminster has above the ground, and Lord Durham below it. I have no intention of again taking part in politics ; but I cannot tell what effect the sight of the old Hall and Abbey may produce on me." 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 309 measures that it never came again ; but I remained unnerved and exhausted for nearly a fortnight. This was my first, and I hope my last, taste of Indian maladies. It is a happy thing for us all that we are not to pass another year in the reek of this deadly marsh." Macaulay wisely declined to set the hope of making another lac of rupees against the risk, to himself and others, of such a fate as subsequently befell Lord Canning and Mr. James Wilson. He put the finishing stroke to his various labours ; resigned his seat in the Council, and his Presidentships of the Law Commission and the Committee of Public Instruction ; and, in company with the Trevelyans, sailed for England in the first fortnight of the year 1838. To Mr. Thomas Floiver Ellis. Calcutta : December 15, 1834. Dear Ellis, Many thanks for your letter. It is delightful in this strange land to see the handwriting of such a friend We must keep up our spirits. We shall meet, I trust, in little more than four years, with feelings of regard only strengthened by our separation. My spirits are not bad ; and they ought not to be bad. I have health ; affluence ; consideration ; great power to do good ; functions which, while they are honourable and useful, are not painfully burdensome; leisure for study; good books ; an unclouded and active mind ; warm affections ; and a very dear sister. There will soon be a change in my domestic arrangements. My sister is to be married next week. Her lover, who is lover enough to be a knight of the Round Table, is one of the most distinguished of our young Civilians. I have the very highest opinion of his talents both for action and for discussion. Indeed, I should call him a man of real genius. He is also, what is even more important, a man of the utmost purity of honour, of a sweet temper, and of strong prin- ciple. His public virtue has gone through very severe trials, and has come out resplendent. Lord William, in congratu- lating me the other day, said that he thought my destined brother-in-law the ablest young man in the service. His name is Trevelyan. He is a nephew of Sir John Trevelyan, a baronet ; in Cornwall I suppose, by the name; for I never took the trouble to ask. He and my sister will live with me during my stay here. I have a house about as large as Lord Dudley's in Park Lane, or rather larger, so that I shall accommodate them without the smallest difficulty. This arrangement is acceptable to me, because it saves me from the misery of parting with my sister 310 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. in this strange land ; and is, I believe, equally gratifying to Trevelyan, whose education, like that of other Indian servants, was huddled up hastily at home ; who has an insatiable thirst for knowledge of every sort ; and who looks on me as little less than an oracle of wisdom. He came to me the other morning to know whether I would advise him to keep up his Greek, which he feared he had nearly lost. I gave him Homer, and asked him to read a page ; and I found that, like most boys of any talent who had been at the Charterhouse, he was very well grounded in that language. He read with perfect rapture, and has marched off with the book, declaring that he shall never be content till he has finished the whole This, you will think, is not a bad brother-in-law for a man to pick up in 22 degrees of North latitude, and 100 degrees of East longitude. I read much, and particularly Greek ; and I find that I am, in all essentials, still not a bad scholar. I could, I think, with a year's hard study, qualify myself to fight a good battle for a Craven's scholarship. I read, however, not as I read at College, but like a man of the world. If I do not know a word, I pass it by unless it is important to the sense. If I find, as I have of late often found, a passage which refuses to give up its mean- ing at the second reading, I let it alone. I have read during the last fortnight, before breakfast, three books of Herodotus, and four plays of ^Eschylus. My admiration of .^Eschylus has been prodigiously increased by this re-perusal. I cannot con- ceive how any person of the smallest pretension to taste should doubt about his immeasurable superiority to every poet of an- tiquity, Homer only excepted. Even Milton, I think, must yield to him. It is quite unintelligible to me that the ancient critics should have placed him so low. Horace's notice of him in the Ars Poetica is quite ridiculous. There is, to be sure, the " magnum loqui ; " but the great topic insisted on is the skill of ^Eschylus as a manager, as a property-man ; the judicious way in which he boarded the stage ; the masks, the buskins, and the dresses. 1 And, after all, the "magnum loqui," though the most obvious characteristic of ^schylus, is by no means his highest or his best. Nor can I explain this by saying that Horace had too tame and unimaginative a mind to appreciate ^Kschylus. Horace knew what he could himself do, and, with admirable wisdom, he confined himself to that ; but he seems to have had a perfectly clear comprehension of the merit of those great masters whom he never attempted to rival. He 1 " Post hunc personne pallaeque repertor honestse /Eschylus et modicis instravit pulpita tignis, Et docuit magnurnque loqui, nitique cothurno." 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 311 praised Pindar most enthusiastically. It seems incomprehensible to me that a critic, who admired Pindar, should not admire ^Eschylus far more. Greek reminds me of Cambridge and of Thirlwall. When you see Thirlwall, tell him that I congratulate him from the bottom of my soul on having suffered in so good a cause ; and that I would rather have been treated as he has been treated, on such an account, than have the Mastership of Trinity. 1 There would be some chance for the Church, if we had more Churchmen of the same breed, worthy successors of Leighton and Tillotson. From one Trinity Fellow I pass to another. (This letter is quite a study to a metaphysician who wishes to illustrate the Law of Association.) We have no official tidings yet of Malkin's appointment to the vacant seat on the Bench at Calcutta. I cannot tell you how delighted I am at the prospect of having him here. An honest enlightened Judge, without professional narrowness, is the very man whom we want on public grounds. And, as to my private feelings, nothing could be more agreeable to me than to have an old friend, and so estimable a friend, brought so near to me in this distant country. Ever, dear Ellis, Yours very affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. Calcutta : February 8, 1835. Dear Ellis, The last month has been the most painful that I ever went through. Indeed, I never knew before what it was to be miserable. Early in January, letters from England brought me news of the death of my youngest sister. What she was to me no words can express. I will not say that she was dearer to me than anything in the world ; for my sister who was with me was equally dear ; but she was as dear to me as one human being can be to another. Even now, when time has begun to do its healing office, I cannot write about her without being altogether unmanned. That I have not utterly sunk under this blow I owe chiefly to literature. What a blessing it is to love books as I love them ; to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal ! Many times during the last 1 The subjoined extract from the letter of a leading member of Trinity College explains Macaulay's indignation. "Thirlwall published a pamphlet in 1834, on the admission of Dissenters to the University. The result was that he was either deprived of his Assistant Tutorship or had to give it up. Thirl- wall left Cambridge soon afterwards. I suppose that, if he had remained, he would have been very possibly Wordsworth's successor in the Mastership." I2 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. few weeks I have repeated to myself those fine lines of old Hesiod: tl yap ns KOI rrevOos fX a>v vtoKq&ti 6vfi (TriXrjderai, ovSe ri KJj& ' ' 1 6tda>v. 1 I have gone back to Greek literature with a passion quite astonishing to myself. I have never felt anything like it. I was enraptured with Italian during the six months which I gave up to it ; and I was little less pleased with Spanish. But, when I went back to the Greek, I felt as if I had never known before what intellectual enjoyment was. Oh that won- derful people ! There is not one art, not one science, about which we may not use the same expression which Lucretius has employed about the victory over superstition, " Primum Graius homo ." I think myself very fortunate in having been able to return to these great masters while still in the full vigour of life, and when my taste and judgment are mature. Most people read all the Greek that they ever read before they are five and twenty. They never find time for such studies afterwards till they are in the decline of life ; and then their knowledge of the language is in a great measure lost, and cannot easily be recovered. Accordingly, almost all the ideas that people have of Greek literature, are ideas formed while they were still very young. A young man, whatever his genius may be, is no judge of such a writer as Thucydides. I had no high opinion of him ten years ago. I have now been reading him with a mind accustomed to historical researches, and to political affairs ; and I am astonished at my own former blindness, and at his greatness. I could not bear Euripides at college. I now read my recantation. He has faults undoubtedly. But what a poet ! The Medea, the Alcestis, the Troades, the Bacchse, are alone sufficient to place him in the very first rank. Instead of depreciating him, as I have done, I may, for aught I know, end by editing him. I have read Pindar, with less pleasure than I feel in reading the great Attic poets, but still with admiration. An 1 " For if to one whose grief is fresh, as he sits silent with sorrow-stricken heart, a minstrel, the henchman of the Muses, celebrates the men of old and the gods who possess Olympus ; straightway he forgets his melancholy, and remembers not at all his grief, beguiled by the blessed gift of the goddesses of song." In Macaulay's Hesiod this passage is scored with three lines in pencil. 1834-38- LORD MA CAUL AY. 313 idea occurred to me which may very likely have been noticed by a hundred people before. I was always puzzled to under- stand the reason for the extremely abrupt transitions in those Odes of Horace which are meant to be particularly fine. The " justum et tenacem " is an instance. All at once you find yourself in heaven, Heaven knows how. What the firmness of just men in times of tyranny, or of tumult, has to do with Juno's oration about Troy it is hardly possible to conceive. Then, again, how strangely the fight between the Gods and the Giants is tacked on to the fine hymn to the Muses in that noble ode, " Descende ccelo et die age tibia " ! This always struck me as a great fault, and an inexplicable one ; for it is peculiarly alien from the calm good sense, and good taste, which distinguish Horace. My explanation of it is this. The Odes of Pindar were the acknowledged models of lyric poetry. Lyric poets imitated his manner as closely as they could ; and nothing was more re- markable in his compositions than the extreme violence and abruptness of the transitions. This in Pindar was quite natural and defensible. He had to write an immense number of poems on subjects extremely barren, and extremely monoton- ous. There could be little difference between one boxing- match and another. Accordingly, he made all possible haste to escape from the immediate subject, and to bring in, by hook or by crook, some local description ; some old legend ; some- thing or other, in short, which might be more susceptible of poetical embellishment, and less utterly threadbare, than the circumstances of a race or a wrestling-match. This was not the practice of Pindar alone. There is an old story which proves that Simonides did the same, and that sometimes the hero of the day was nettled at finding how little was said about him in the Ode for which he was to pay. This abruptness of transition was, therefore, in the Greek lyric poets, a fault ren- dered inevitable by the peculiarly barren and uniform nature of the subjects which they had to treat. But, like many other faults of great masters, it appeared to their imitators a beauty ; and a beauty almost essential to the grander Ode. Horace was perfectly at liberty to choose his own subjects, and to treat them after his own fashion. But he confounded what was merely accidental in Pindar's manner with what was essential ; and because Pindar, when he had to celebrate a foolish lad from ^Egina who had tripped up another's heels at the Isthmus, made all possible haste to get away from so paltry a topic to the ancient heroes of the race of ^Eacus, Horace took it into his head that he ought always to begin as far from the subject 3 H LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. as possible, and then arrive at it by some strange and sudden bound. This is my solution. At least I can find no better. The most obscure passage, at least the strangest passage, in all Horace may be explained by supposing that he was misled by Pindar's example : I mean- that odd parenthesis in the " Qualem Ministrum : " quibus Mos unde deductus per omne . This passage, taken by itself, always struck me as the harshest, queerest, and most preposterous digression in the world. But there are several things in Pindar very like it. l You must excuse all this, for I labour at present under a suppression of Greek, and am likely to do so for at least three years to come. Malkin may be some relief ; but I am quite unable to guess whether he means to come to Calcutta. I am in excellent bodily health, and I am recovering my mental health ; but I have been sorely tried. Money matters look well. My new brother-in-law and I are brothers in more than law. I am more comfortable than I expected to be in this country ; and, as to the climate, I think it, beyond all compari- son, better than that of the House of Commons. Yours affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. Writing three days after the date of the foregoing letter, Macaulay says to his old friend Mr. Sharp : " You see that my mind is not in great danger of rusting. The danger is that I may become a mere pedant. I feel a habit of quotation grow- ing on me : but I resist that devil, for such it is, and it flees from me. It is all that I can do to keep Greek and Latin out of all my letters. Wise sayings of Euripides are even now at my fingers' ends. If I did not maintain a constant struggle against this propensity, my correspondence would resemble the notes to the ' Pursuits of Literature.' It is a dangerous thing for a man with a very strong memory to read very much. I could give you three or four quotations this moment in support of that proposition ; but I will bring the vicious propensity under subjection, if I can." 2 1 Orelli makes an observation, much to the same effect, in his note on this passage in his edition of 1850. 2 Many years later Macaulay wrote to my mother : " Dr. came, and I found him a very clever man ; a little of a coxcomb, but, I dare say, not the worse physician for that. He must have quoted Horace and Virgil six times at least a propos of his medical inquiries. Horace says, in a poem in which he jeers the Stoics, that even a \\ise man is out of sort when ' pituita molesta est;' which is, being interpreted, 'when his phlegm is troublesome.' The 1834-38- LORD MACAU LAY. 315 Calcutta, May 29, 1835. Dear Ellis, I am in great want of news. We know that the Tories dissolved at the end of December, and we also know that they were beaten towards the end of February. 1 As to what passed in the interval, we are quite in the dark. I will not plague you with comments on events which will have been driven out of your mind by other events before this reaches you, or with prophecies which may be falsified before you receive them. About the final issue I am certain. The lan- guage of the first great reformer is that which I should use in reply to the exultation of our Tories here, if there were any of them who could understand it : xov, OSrrrTf rov Kparovvr dti' (pal 8' f\a(r6rj /3e'Aoy, 3 as Philoctetes says. In a few months I shall have enough to enable me to live, after my very moderate fashion, in perfect independence at home ; and whatever debts any Governor- General may choose to lay on me at Calcutta shall be paid off, he may rely on it, with compound interest, at Westminster. My time is divided between public business and books. I mix with society as little as I can. My spirits have not yet re- covered, I sometimes think that they will never wholly recover, Doctor thought it necessary to quote this passage in order to prove that phlegm is troublesome ; a proposition, of the truth of which, I will venture to say, no man on earth is better convinced than myself." 1 In November 1834 the King called Sir Robert Peel to power : after having of his own accord, dismissed the Whig Ministry. Parliament was dissolved, but the Tories did not succeed in obtaining a majority. After three months of constant and angry fighting, Peel was driven from office in April 1835. 2 ' ' Worship thou, adore, and flatter the monarch of the hour. To me Jove is of less account than nothing. Let him have his will, and his sceptre, for this brief season ; for he will not long be the ruler of the Gods." It is needless to say that poor William the Fourth was the Jove of the Whig Prometheus. 5 " It shall be to his cost, so long as this bow carries true." 3i6 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH, VL the shock which they received five months ago. I find that nothing soothes them so much as the contemplation of those miracles of art which Athens has bequeathed to us. I am really becoming, I hope not a pedant, but certainly an enthusiast about classical literature. I have just finished a second reading of Sophocles. I am now deep in Plato, and intend to go right through all his works. His genius is above praise. Even where he is most absurd, as, for example, in the Cratylus, he shows an acuteness, and an expanse of intellect, which is quite a phenomenon by itself. The character of Socrates does not rise upon me. The more I read about him, the less I wonder that they poisoned him. If he had treated me as he is said to have treated Protagoras, Hippias, and Gorgias, I could never have forgiven him. Nothing has struck me so much in Plato's dialogues as the raillery. At college, somehow or other, I did not understand or appreciate it. I cannot describe to you the way in which it now tickles me. I often sink forward on my huge old Marsilius Ficinus in a fit of laughter. I should say that there never was a vein of ridicule so rich, at the same time so delicate. It is superior to Voltaire's ; nay, to Pascal's. Perhaps there are one or two passages in Cervantes, and one or two in Fielding, that might give a modern reader a notion of it. I have very nearly finished Livy. I never read him through before. I admire him greatly, and would give a quarter's salary to recover the lost Decades. While I was reading the earlier books I went again through Niebuhr. And I am sorry to say that, having always been a little sceptical about his merits, I am now a confirmed unbeliever. I do not of course mean that he has no merit. He was a man of immense learning, and of great ingenuity. But his mind was utterly wanting in the faculty by which a demonstrated truth is distinguished from a plausible supposition. He is not content with suggesting that an event may have happened. He is certain that it happened, and calls on the reader to be certain too, (though not a trace of it exists in any record whatever,) because it would solve the phenomena so neatly. Just read over again, if you have for- gotten it, the conjectural restoration of the Inscription in page 126 of the second volume ; and then, on your honour as a scholar and a man of sense, tell me whether in Bentley's edition of Milton there is anything which approaches to the audacity of that emendatioa Niebuhr requires you to believe that some of the greatest men in Rome were burned alive in the Circus ; that this event was commemorated by an inscription on a monument, one half of which is still in existence ; but that no 1834-38. LORD MACAULAY. 317 Roman historian knew anything about it ; and that all tradition of the event was lost, though the memory of anterior events much less important has reached our time. When you ask for a reason, he tells you plainly that such a thing cannot be estab- lished by reason ; that he is sure of it ; and that you must take his word. This sort of intellectual despotism always moves me to mutiny, and generates a disposition to pull down the reputa- tion of the dogmatist. Niebuhr's learning was immeasurably superior to mine ; but I think myself quite as good a judge of evidence as he was. I might easily believe him if he told me that there were proofs which I had never seen ; but, when he produces all his proofs, I conceive that I am perfectly com- petent to pronounce on their value. As I turned over his leaves just now, I lighted on another instance of what I cannot but call ridiculous presumption. He says that Martial committed a blunder in making the penul- timate of Porsena short. Strange that so great a scholar should not know that Horace had done so too ! Minacis aut Etrusca Porsenas manus. There is something extremely nauseous to me in a German Professor telling the world, on his own authority, and without giving the smallest reason, that two of the best Latin poets were ignorant of the quantity of a word which they must have used in their exercises at school a hundred times. As to the general capacity of Niebuhr for political specula- tions, let him be judged by the Preface to the Second Volume. He there says, referring to the French Revolution of July 1830, that " unless God send us some miraculous help, we have to look forward to a period of destruction similar to that which the Roman world experienced about the middle of the third century." Now, when I see a man scribble such abject non- sense about events which are passing under our eyes, what confidence can I put in his judgment as to the connection of causes and effects in times very imperfectly known to us ? But I must bring my letter, or review, to a close. Re- member me most kindly to your wife. Tell Frank that I mean to be a better scholar than he when I come back, and that he must work hard if he means to overtake me. Ever, dear Ellis, Your affectionate friend T. B. MACAULAY. Calcutta : August 25, 1835. Dear Ellis, Cameron arrived here about a fortnight ago, and we are most actively engaged in preparing a complete 318 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. Criminal Code for India. He and I agree excellently. Ryan, the most liberal of Judges, lends us his best assistance. I heartily hope, and fully believe, that we shall put the whole Penal law, and the whole law of Criminal Procedure, into a moderately sized volume. I begin to take a very warm interest in this work. It is, indeed, one of the finest employments of the intellect that it is easy to conceive. I ought, however, to tell you that, the more progress I make as a legislator, the more intense my contempt for the mere technical study of law becomes. I am deep in the examination of the political theories of the old philosophers. I have read Plato's Republic, and his Laws ; and I am now reading Aristotle's Politics ; after which I shall go through Plato's two treatises again. I every now and then read one of Plutarch's Lives on an idle afternoon ; and in this way I have got through a dozen of them. I like him pro- digiously. He is inaccurate, to be sure, and a romancer : but he tells a story delightfully, and his illustrations and sketches of character are as good as anything in ancient eloquence. I have never, till now, rated him fairly. As to Latin, I am just finishing Lucan, who remains pretty much where he was in my opinion ; and I am busily engaged with Cicero, whose character, moral and intellectual, interests me prodigiously. I think that I see the whole man through and through. But this is too vast a subject for a letter. I have gone through all Ovid's poems. I admire him ; but I was tired to death before I got to the end. I amused myself one evening with turning over the Metamorphoses, to see if I could find any passage of ten lines which could, by possibility, have been written by VirgiL Whether I was in ill luck or no I cannot tell ; but I hunted for half an hour without the smallest success. At last I chanced to light on a little passage more Virgilian, to my thinking, than Virgil himself. Tell me what you say to rny criticism. It is part of Apollo's speech to the laurel Semper habebunt Te coma, te citharae, te nostrae, laure, pharetrae Tu ducibus Latiis aderis, cum laeta triumphum Vox canet, et longas visent Capitolia pompas. Portibus Augustis eadem fidissima custos Ante fores stabis, mediamque tuebere quercum. As to other Latin writers, Sallust has gone sadly down in my opinion. Csesar has risen wonderfully. I think him fully entitled to Cicero's praise. 1 He has won the honour of an 1 In the dialogue "De Claris Oratoribus" Cicero makes Atticus say that a consummate judge of style (who is evidently intended for Cicero himself,) 1834-38. LORD MAC A UL AY. 319 excellent historian while attempting merely to give hints for history. But what are they all to the great Athenian? I do assure you that there is no prose composition in the world, not even the De Corona, which I place so high as the seventh book of Thucydides. It is the ne plus ultra of human art. I was delighted to find in Gray's letters the other day this query to Wharton : " The retreat from Syracuse Is it or is it not the finest thing you ever read in your life ? " Did you ever read Athenseus through ? I never did ; but I am meditating an attack on him. The multitude of quotations looks very tempting ; and I never open him for a minute with- out being paid for my trouble. Yours very affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. Calcutta : December 30, 1835. Dear Ellis, What the end of the Municipal Reform Bill is to be I cannot conjecture. Our latest English intelligence is of the 1 5th of August. The Lords were then busy in rendering the only great service that I expect them ever to render to the nation ; that is to say, in hastening the day of reckoning. 1 But I will not fill my paper with English politics. I am in excellent health. So are my sister and brother-in- law, and their little girl, whom I am always nursing ; and of whom I am becoming fonder than a wise man, with half my experience, would choose to be of anything except himself. I have but very lately begun to recover my spirits. The tre- mendous blow which fell on me at the beginning of this year has left marks behind it which I shall carry to my grave. Literature has saved my life and my reason. Even now, I dare not, in the intervals of business, remain alone for a minute without a book in my hand. What my course of life will be, when I return to England, is very doubtful. But 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 pronounces Caesar's Latin to be the most elegant, with one implied exception, that had ever been heard in the Senate or the Forum. Atticus then goes on to detail at full length a compliment which Caesar had paid to Cicero's powers of expression ; and Brutus declares with enthusiasm that such praise, coming from such a quarter, is worth more than a Triumph, as Triumphs were then given ; and inferior in value only to the honours which were voted to the statesman who had baffled Catiline. The whole passage is a model of self-glorification, exquisite in skill and finish. 1 In the middle of August the Irish Tithe Bill went up to the House of Lords, where it was destined to undergo a mutilation which was fatal to its existence. 320 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. life ; and to leave the pleasures of pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, aching heads, and diseased stomachs to Roebuck and to Praed. In England I might probably be of a very different opinion. But, in the quiet of my own little grass-plot, when the moon, at its rising, finds me with the Philoctetes or the De Finibus in my hand, I often wonder what strange infatuation leads men who can do something better to squander their intellect, their health, their energy, on such subjects as those which most states- men are engaged in pursuing. I comprehend perfectly how a man who can debate, but who would make a very indifferent figure as a contributor to an annual or a magazine, such : a man as Stanley, for example, should take the only line by which he can attain distinction. But that a man before whom the two paths of literature and politics lie open, and who might hope for eminence in either, should choose politics, and quit litera- ture, seems to me madness. On the one side is health, leisure, peace of mind, the search after truth, and all the enjoyments of friendship and conversation. On the other side is almost certain ruin to the constitution, constant labour, constant anxiety. Every friendship which a man may have, becomes precarious as soon as he engages in politics. As to abuse, men soon become callous to it, but the discipline which makes them callous is very severe. And for what is it that a man who might, if he chose, rise and lie down at his own hour, engage in any study, enjoy any amusement, and visit any place, con- sents to make himself as much a prisoner as if he were within the rules of the Fleet ; to be tethered during eleven months of the year within the circle of half a mile round Charing Cross ; to sit, or stand, night after night for ten or twelve hours, in- haling a noisome atmosphere, and listening to harangues of which nine-tenths are far below the level of a leading article in a newspaper ? For what is it that he submits, day after day, to see the morning break over the Thames, and then totters home, with bursting temples, to his bed? Is it for fame? Who would compare the fame of Charles Townshend to that of Hume, that of Lord North to that of Gibbon, that of Lord Chatham to that of Johnson ? Who can look back on the life of Burke and not regret that the years which he passed in ruining his health and temper by political exertions were not passed in the composition of some great and durable work? Who can read the letters to Atticus, and not feel that Cicero would have been an infinitely happier and better man, and a not less celebrated man, if he had left us fewer speeches, and 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 321 more Academic Questions and Tusculan Disputations ; if he had passed the time which he spent in brawling with Vatinius and Clodius in producing a history of Rome superior even to that of Livy ? But these, as I said, are meditations in a quiet garden, situated far beyond the contagious influence of English faction. What I might feel if I again saw Downing Street and Palace Yard is another question. I tell you sincerely my present feelings. I have cast up my reading account, and brought it to the end of the year 1835. It includes December 1834 ; for I came into my house and unpacked my books at the end of November 1834. During the last thirteen months I have read yKschylus twice ; Sophocles twice ; Euripides once ; Pindar twice ; Callimachus ; Apollonius Rhodius ; Quintus Calaber ; Theocritus twice ; Herodotus ; Thucydides ; almost all Xeno- phon'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. Of Aristophanes I think as I always thought ; but Lucian has agreeably surprised me. At school I read some of his Dialogues of the Dead when I was thirteen ; and, to my shame, I never, to the best of my belief, read a line of him since. I am charmed with him. His style seems to me to be superior to that of any extant writer who lived later than the age of Demosthenes and Theophrastus. He has a most peculiar and delicious vein of humour. It is not the humour of Aristophanes ; it is not that of Plato : and yet it is akin to both ; not quite equal, I admit, to either, but still exceedingly charming. I hardly know where to find an instance of a writer, in the decline of a literature, who has shown an invention so rich, and a taste so pure. But, if I get on these matters, I shall fill sheet after sheet. They must wait till we take another long walk, or another tavern dinner, together ; that is, till the summer of 1838. I had a long story to tell you about a classical examination here ; but I have not time. I can only say that some of the competitors tried to read the Greek with the papers upside down ; and that the great man of the examination, the Thirl- wall of Calcutta, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, trans- V ?22 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VI. lated the words of TheophrastUS, oaag \eirovpyiaQ \t\tiTOvpyriKf, " how many times he has performed divine service." l Ever yours affectionately T. B. MACAU LAY. 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, his- torical, 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. 2 In his copy of Quintus Calaber, (a versifier who is less unknown by the title of Quintus Smyrnaeus,) appear the entries, "September 22, 1835." "Turned over, July 13, 1837." It may be 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 Smyrnseus twice. Calcutta : May 30, 1836. Dear Ellis, I have just received your letter dated Decem- ber 28. How time flies ! Another hot season has almost passed away, and we are daily expecting the beginning of the rains. Cold season, hot season, and rainy season are all much the same to me. I shall have been two years on Indian ground in less than a fortnight, and I have not taken ten grains of solid, or a pint of liquid, medicine during the whole of that time. If I judged only from my own sensations, I should say that this climate is absurdly maligned ; but the yellow, spectral, figures which surround me serve to correct the conclusions which I should be inclined to draw from the state of my own health. 1 "How many public services he had discharged at his own expense." Macaulay used to say that a lady who dips into Mr. Grote's history, and learns that Alcibiades won the heart of his fellow-citizens by the novelty of his theories and the splendour of his liturgies, may get a very false notion of that states- man's relations with the Athenian public. 3 See Appendix II. at the end of the volume. 1834-38. LORD MACAULAY. 323 One execrable effect the climate produces. It destroys all the works of man with scarcely one exception. Steel rusts ; razors lose their edge ; thread decays ; clothes fall to pieces ; books moulder away, and drop out of their bindings ; plaster cracks ; timber rots ; matting is in shreds. The sun, the steam of this vast alluvial tract, and the infinite armies of white ants, make such havoc with buildings that a house requires a com- plete repair every three years. Ours was in this situation about three months ago ; and, if we had determined to brave the rains without any precautions, we should, in all probability, have had the roof down on our heads. Accordingly we were forced to migrate for six weeks from our stately apartments and our flower-beds, to a dungeon where we were stifled with the stench of native cookery, and deafened by the noise of native music. At last we have returned to our house. We found it all snow-white and pea-green ; and we rejoice to think that we shall not again be under the necessity of quitting it, till we quit it for a ship bound on a voyage to London. We have been for some months in the middle of what the people here think a political storm. To a person accustomed to the hurricanes of English faction this sort of tempest in a horsepond is merely ridiculous. We have put the English settlers up the country under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Company's Courts in civil actions in which they are concerned with natives. The English settlers are perfectly contented ; but the lawyers of the Supreme Court have set up a yelp which they think terrible, and which has infinitely diverted me. They have selected me as the object of their invectives, and I am generally the theme of five or six columns of prose and verse daily. I have not patience to read a tenth part of what they put forth. The last ode in my praise which I perused began, " Soon we hope they will recall ye, Tom Macaulay, Tom Macaulay." The last prose which I read was a parallel between me and Lord Strafford. My mornings, from five to nine, are quite my own. I still give them to ancient literature. I have read Aristophanes twice through since Christmas ; and have also read Herodotus, and Thucydides again. I got into a way last year of reading a Greek play every Sunday. I began on Sunday the i8th of October with the Prometheus, and next Sunday I shall finish with the Cyclops of Euripides. Euripides has made a complete conquest of me. It has been unfortunate for him that we have so many of his pieces. It has, on the other hand, I 324 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VI. suspect, been fortunate for Sophocles that so few of his have come down to us. Almost every play of Sophocles, which is now extant, was one of his masterpieces. There is hardly one of them which is not mentioned with high praise by some ancient writer. Yet one of them, the Trachiniae, is, to my thinking, very poor and insipid. Now, if we had nineteen plays of Sophocles, of which twelve or thirteen should be no better than the Trachiniae, and if, on the other hand, only seven pieces of Euripides had come down to us, and if those seven had been the Medea, the Bacchaa, the Iphigenia in Aulis, the Orestes, the Phoenissae, the Hippolytus, and the Alcestis, I am not sure that the relative position which the two poets now hold in our estimation would not be greatly altered. I have not done much in Latin. I have been employed in turning over several third-rate and fourth-rate writers. After finishing Cicero, I read through the works of both the Senecas, father and son. There is a great deal in the Controversise both of curious information, and of judicious criticism. As to the son, I cannot bear him. His style affects me in something the same way with that of Gibbon. But Lucius Seneca's affecta- tion is even more rank than Gibbon's. His works are made up of mottoes. There is hardly a sentence which might not be quoted; but to read him straightforward is like dining on nothing but anchovy sauce. I have read, as one does read such stuff, Valerius Maximus, Annaeus Florus, Lucius Ampelius, and Aurelius Victor. I have also gone through Phsedrus. I am now better employed. I am deep in the Annals of Tacitus, and I am at the same time reading Suetonius. You are so rich in domestic comforts that I am inclined to envy you. I am not, however, without my share. I am as fond of my little niece as her father. I pass an hour or more every day in nursing her, and teaching her to talk. She has got as far as Ba, Pa, and Ma ; which, as she is not eight months old, we consider as proofs of a genius little inferior to that of Shakespeare or Sir Isaac Newtoa The municipal elections have put me in good spirits as to English politics. I was rather inclined to despondency. Ever yours affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. Calcutta : July 25, 1836. My dear Ellis, I have heard from you again, and glad I always am to hear from you. There are few things to which I look forward with more pleasure than to our meeting. It is really worth while to go into banishment for a few years for the 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 325 pleasure of going home again. Yet that home will in some things be a different home oh how different a home ! from that to which I expected to return. But I will not stir up the bitterness of sorrow which has at last subsided. You take interest, I see, in my Greek and Latin studies. I continue to pursue them steadily and actively. I am now read- ing Demosthenes with interest and admiration indescribable. I am slowly, at odd minutes, getting through the stupid trash of Diodorus. I have read through Seneca, and an affected empty scribbler he is. I have read Tacitus again, and, by the bye, I will tell you a curious circumstance relating to that matter. In my younger days I always thought the Annals a prodigiously superior work to the History. I was surprised to find that the Annals seemed cold and poor to me on the last reading. I began to think that I had overrated Tacitus. But, when I began the History, I was enchanted, and thought more highly of him than ever. I went back to the Annals, and liked them even better than the History. All at once the explanation of this occurred to me. While I was reading the Annals I was reading Thucydides. When I began the History, I began the Hellenics. What made the Annals appear cold and poor to me was the intense interest which Thucydides inspired. Indeed, what colouring is there which would not look tame when placed side by side with the magnificent light, and the terrible shade, of Thucydides ? Tacitus was a great man, but he was not up to the Sicilian expedition. When I finished Thucydides, and took up Xenophon, the case was reversed. Tacitus had been a foil to Thucydides. Xenophon was a foil to Tacitus. I have read Pliny the Younger. Some of the Epistles are interesting. Nothing more stupid than the Panegyric was ever preached in the University church. I am reading the Augustan History, and Aulus Gellius. Aulus is a favourite of mine. I think him one of the best writers of his class. I read in the evenings a great deal of English, French, and Italian ; and a little Spanish. I have picked up Portuguese enough to read Camoens with care ; and I want no more. I have adopted an opinion about the Italian historians quite dif- ferent from that which I formerly held, and which, I believe, is generally considered as orthodox. I place Fra Paolo decidedly at the head of them, and next to him Davila, whom I take to be the best modern military historian except Colonel Napier. Davila's battle of Ivry is worthy of Thucydides himself. Next to Davila I put Guicciardini, and last of all Machiavelli. But I do not think that you ever read much Italian. The English poetry of the day has very few attractions foi 526 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. me. Van Artevelde is far the best specimen that I have lately seen. I do not much like Talfourd's Ion ; but I mean to read it again. It contains pretty lines ; but, to my thinking, it is neither fish nor flesh. There is too much, and too little, of the antique about it. Nothing but the most strictly classical cos- tume can reconcile me to a mythological plot ; and Ion is a modern philanthropist, whose politics and morals have been learned from the publications of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. I do not know whether the noise which the lawyers of the Supreme Court have been raising against our legislative authority has reached, or will reach, England. They held a public meeting, which ended, or rather began, continued, and ended, in a riot ; and ever since then the leading agitators have been challenging each other, refusing each other's challenges, libelling each other, swearing the peace against each other, and blackballing each other. Mr. Longueville Clarke, who aspires to be the O'Connell of Calcutta, called another lawyer a liar. The last-mentioned lawyer challenged Mr. Longueville Clarke. Mr. Longueville Clarke refused to fight, on the ground that his opponent had been guilty of hugging attorneys. The Bengal Club accordingly blackballed Longueville. This, and some other similar occurrences, have made the opposition here tho- roughly ridiculous and contemptible. They will probably send a petition home ; but, unless the House of Commons has undergone a great change since 1833, they have no chance there. I have almost brought my letter to a close without mention- ing the most important matter about which I had to write. I dare say you have heard that my uncle General Macaulay, who died last February, has left me io,ooo/. This legacy, together with what I shall have saved uy the end of 1837, will make me quite a rich man ; richer than I even wish to be as a single man ; and every day renders it more unlikely that I should marry. We have had a very unhealthy season ; but sickness has not come near our house. My sister, my brother-in-law, and their little child, are as well as possible. As to me, I think that, as Buonaparte said of himself after the Russian campaign, J'ai le diable au corps. Ever yours affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. 1834-38. LORD MACAULAY. 327 To Macvey Napier, Esq. Calcutta : November 26, 1836. Dear Napier, At last I send you an article of interminable length about Lord Bacon. I hardly know whether it is not too long for an article in a Review ; but the subject is of such vast extent that I could easily have made the paper twice as long as it is. About the historical and political part there is no great probability that we shall differ in opinion ; but what I have said about Bacon's philosophy is widely at variance with what Dugald Stuart, and Mackintosh, have said on the same subject. I have not your essay ; nor have I read it since I read it at Cambridge, with very great pleasure, but without any knowledge of the subject. I have at present only a very faint and general recollection of its contents, and have in vain tried to procure a copy of it here. I fear, however, that, differing widely as I do from Stewart and Mackintosh, I shall hardly agree with you. My opinion is formed, not at second hand, like those of nine- tenths of the people who talk about Bacon ; but after several very attentive perusals of his greatest works, and after a good deal of thought. If I am in the wrong, my errors may set the minds of others at work, and may be the means of bringing both them, and me, to a knowledge of the truth. I never bestowed so much care on anything that I have written. There is not a sentence in the latter half of the article which has not been repeatedly recast. I have no expectation that the popu- larity of the article will bear any proportion to the trouble which I have expended on it. But the trouble has been so great a pleasure to me that I have already been greatly over- paid. Pray look carefully to the printing. In little more than a year I shall be embarking for England, and I have determined to employ the four months of my voyage in mastering the German language. I should be much obliged to you to send me out, as early as you can, so that they may be certain to arrive in time, the best grammar, and the best dictionary, that can be procured ; a German Bible ; Schiller's works ; Goethe's works ; and Niebuhr's History, both in the original, and in the translation. My way of learning a language is always to begin with the Bible, which I can read without a dictionary. After a few days passed in this way, I am master of all the common particles, the common rules of syntax, and a pretty large vocabulary. Then I fall on some good classical work. It was in this way that I learned both 328 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. Spanish and Portuguese, and I shall try the same course with German. I have little or nothing to tell you about myself. My life has flowed away here with strange rapidity. It seems but yesterday that I left my country ;.and I am writing to beg you to hasten preparations for my return. I continue to enjoy perfect health, and the little political squalls which I have had to weather here are mere capfuls of wind to a man who has gone through the great hurricanes of English faction. I shall send another copy of the article on Bacon by another ship. Yours very truly T. B. MACAULAV. Calcutta : November 28, 1836. Dear Napier, There is an oversight in the article on Bacon which I shall be much obliged to you to correct I have said that Bacon did not deal at all in idle rants " like those in which Cicero and Mr. Shandy sought consolation for the loss of Tullia and of Bobby." Nothing can, as a general remark, be more true, but it escaped my recollection that two or three of Mr. Shandy's consolatory sentences are quoted from Bacon's Essays. The illustration, therefore, is singularly unfortunate. Pray alter it thus ; " in which Cicero vainly sought consolation for the loss of Tullia." To be sure, it is idle to correct such trifles at a distance of fifteen thousand miles. Yours ever T. B. MACAULAY. From Lord Jeffrey to Macvey Napier, Esq. May 2, 1837. My dear N., What mortal could ever dream of cutting out the least particle of this precious work, to make it fit better into your Review ? It would be worse than paring down the Pitt Diamond to fit the old setting of a Dowager's ring. Since Bacon himself, I do not know that there has been anything so fine. The first five or six pages are in a lower tone, but still magnificent, and not to be deprived of a word. Still, I do not object to consider whether it might not be best to serve up the rich repast in two courses ; and on the whole I incline to that partition. 120 pages might cloy even epicures, and would be sure to surfeit the vulgar ; and the biography and philosophy are so entirely distinct, and of not 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 329 very unequal length, that the division would not look like a fracture. FRANCIS JEFFREY. In the end, the article appeared entire ; occupying 104 pages of the Review ; and accompanied by an apology for its length in the shape of one of those editorial appeals to " the intelli- gent scholar," and " the best class of our readers," which never fail of success. The letters addressed to Zachary Macaulay are half filled with anecdotes oi the nursery ; pretty enough, but such as only a grandfather could be expected to read. In other respects, the correspondence is chiefly remarkable for the affectionate ingenuity with which the son selects such topics as would in- terest the father. Calcutta : October 12, 1836. My dear Father, We were extremely gratified by receiving, a few days ago, a letter from you which, on the whole, gave a good account of your health and spirits. The day after to- morrow is the first anniversary of your little grand-daughter's birthday. The occasion is to be celebrated with a sort of droll puppet-show, much in fashion among the natives ; an exhibi- tion much in the style of Punch in England, but more dramatic and more showy. All the little boys and girls from the houses of our friends are invited, and the party will, I have no doubt, be a great deal more amusing than the stupid dinners and routs with which the grown-up people here kill the time. In a few months, I hope, indeed, in a few weeks, we shall send up the Penal Code to Government We have got rid of the punishment of death, except in the case of aggravated treason and wilful murder. We shall also get rid indirectly of everything that can properly be called slavery in India. There will remain civil claims on particular people for particular services, which claims may be enforced by civil action ; but no person will be entitled, on the plea of being the master of another, to do anything to that other which it would be an offence to do to a free-man. Our English schools are flourishing wonderfully. We find it difficult, indeed, in some places impossible, to provide instruction for all who want it. At the single town of Hoogly fourteen hundred boys are learning English. The effect of this education on the Hindoos is prodigious. No Hindoo, who has received an English education, ever remains sincerely attached to his religion. Some continue to profess it as a 330 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. matter of policy; but many profess themselves pure Deists, and some embrace Christianity. It is my firm belief that, if our plans of education are followed up, there will not be a single idolater among the respectable classes in Bengal thirty years hence. And this will be effected without any efforts to proselytise ; without the smallest interference with religious liberty; merely by the natural operation of knowledge and reflection. I heartily rejoice in the prospect. I have been a sincere mourner for Mill. He and I were on the best terms, and his services at the India House were never so much needed as at this time. I had a most kind letter from him a few weeks before I heard of his death. He has a son just come out, to whom I have shown such little attentions as are in my power. Within half a year after the time when you read this we shall be making arrangements for our return. The feelings with which I look forward to that return I cannot express. Perhaps I should be wise to continue here longer, in order to enjoy during a greater number of months the delusion, for I know that it will prove a delusion, of this delightful hope. I feel as if I never could be unhappy in my own country ; as if to exist on English ground and among English people, seeing the old familiar sights and hearing the sound of my mother tongue, would be enough for me. This cannot be : yet some days of intense happiness I shall surely have ; and one of those will be the day when I again see my dear father and sisters. Ever yours most affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. Calcutta : November 30, 1836. Dear Ellis, How the months run away ! Here is another cold season : morning fogs, cloth coats, green peas, new pota- toes, and all the accompaniments of a Bengal winter. As to my private life, it has glided on, since I wrote to you last, in the most peaceful monotony. If it were not for the books which I read, and for the bodily and mental growth of my dear little niece, I should have no mark to distinguish one part f the year from another. Greek and Latin, breakfast, business, an evening walk with a book, a drive after sunset, dinner, coffee, my bed, there you have the history of a day. My classical studies go on vigorously. I have read Demosthenes twice, I need not say with what delight and admiration. I am now deep in Isocrates : and from him I shall pass to Lysias. I have finished Diodorus Siculus at last, after dawdling over him at odd times ever since last March. He is a stupid, credulous, prosing old ass ; yet I 1834-38- LORD MACAULAY. 331 heartily wish that we had a good deal more of him. I have read Arrian's expedition of Alexander, together with Quintus Curtius. I have at stray hours read Longus's Romance and Xenophon's Ephesiaca : and I mean to go through Heliodorus, and Achilles Tatius, in the same way. Longus is prodigiously absurd ; but there is often an exquisite prettiness in the style. Xenophon's Novel is the basest thing to be found in Greek. 1 It was discovered at Florence, little more than a hundred years ago, by an English envoy. Nothing so detestable ever came from the Minerva Press. I have read Theocritus again, and like him better than ever. As to Latin, I made a heroic attempt on Pliny's Natural History ; but I stuck after getting through about a quarter of it. I have read Ammianus Marcellinus, the worst written book in ancient Latin. The style would disgrace a monk of the tenth century ; but Marcellinus has many of the substantial qualities of a good historian. I have gone through the Augustan history, and much other trash relating to the lower empire ; curious as illustrating the state of society, but utterly worthless as composition. I have read Statius again and thought him as bad as ever. I really found only two lines worthy of a great poet in all the Thebais. They are these. What do you think of my taste ? " Clamorem, bello qualis supremus apertis Urbibus, aut pelago jam descendente carina." I am now busy with Quintilian and Lucan, both excellent writers. The dream of Pompey in the seventh book of the Pharsalia is a very noble piece of writing. I hardly know an instance in poetry of so great an effect produced by means so simple. There is something irresistibly pathetic in the lines : " Qualis erat populi facies, clamorque faventum Olim cum juvenis " and something unspeakably solemn in the sudden turn which follows " Crastina dira quies " There are two passages in Lucan which surpass in eloquence anything that I know in the Latin language. One is the enumeration of Pompey's exploits : 1 Xenophon the Ephesian lived in the third or fourth century of the Christian era. At the end of his work Macaulay has written : "A most stupid, worthless performance, below the lowest trash of an English circulating library." Achilles Tatius he disposes of whh the words "Detestable trash ; " and the /Ethiopics of Heliodorus, which he appears to have finished on Easter-day, 1837, he pronounces "The best of the Greek Romances, which is not saying much for it." 332 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. " Quod si tarn sacro dignaris nomine saxum " The other is the character which Cato gives of Pompey, "Civis obit, inquit " a pure gem of rhetoric, without one flaw, and, in my opinion, not very far from historical truth. 1 When I consider that Lucan died at twenty-six, I cannot help ranking him among the most extraordinary men that ever lived. I am glad that you have so much business, and sorry that you have so little leisure. In a few years you will be a Baron of the Exchequer ; and then we shall have ample time to talk over our favourite classics. Then I will show you a most superb emendation of Bentley's in Ampelius, and I will give you unanswerable reasons for pronouncing that Gibbon was mistaken in supposing that Quintus Curtius wrote under Gordian. Remember me most kindly to Mrs. Ellis. I hope that I shall find Frank writing as good Alcaics as his father. Ever yours affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. Calcutta : March 8, 1837. Dear Ellis, I am at present very much worked, and have been so for a long time past. Cameron, after being laid up for some months, sailed at Christmas for the Cape, where I hope his health will be repaired ; for this country can very ill spare him. However, we have almost brought our great work to a conclusion. In about a month we shall lay before the Govern- 1 The following remarks occur at the end of Macaulay's copy of the Pharsalia : August 30, 1835. ' ' When Lucan's age is considered, it is impossible not to allow that the poem is a very extraordinary one : more extraordinary, perhaps, than if it had been of a higher kind ; for it is more common for the imagination to be in full vigour at an early time of life than for a young man to obtain a complete mastery of political and philosophical rhetoric. I know no declamation in the world, not even Cicero's best, which equals some passages in the Pharsalia. As to what were meant for bold poetical flights, the sea-fight at Marseilles, the Centurion who is covered with wounds, the snakes in the Libyan desert, it is all as detestable as Cibber's Birthday Odes. The furious partiality of Lucan takes away much of the pleasure which his talents would otherwise afford. A poet who is, as has often been said, less a poet than a historian, should to a certain degree conform to the laws of history. The manner in which he represents the two parties is not to be reconciled with the laws even of fiction. The senators are demigods ; Pompey, a pure lover of his country ; Cato, the abstract idea of virtue ; while Ctesar, the finest gentleman, the most humane conqueror, and the most popular politician that Rome ever produced, is a bloodthirsty ogre. If Lucan had lived, he would probably have improved greatly." "Again, December 9, 1836." 1834-38. LORD MA CAUL AY. 333 ment a complete Penal Code for a hundred millions of people, with a commentary explaining and defending the provisions of the text. Whether it is well, or ill, done heaven knows. I only know that it seems to me to be very ill done when I look at it by itself; and well done when I compare it with Livingstone's Code, with the French Code, or with the English statutes which have been passed for the purpose of consolidating and amend- ing the Criminal Law. In health I am as well as ever I was in my life. Time glides fast. One day is so like another that, but for a habit which I acquired soon after I reached India of pencilling in my books the date of my reading them, I should have hardly any way of estimating the lapse of time. If I want to know when an event took place, I call to mind which of Calderon's plays, or of Plutarch's Lives, I was reading on that day. I turn to the book ; find the date ; and am generally astonished to see that, what seems removed from me by only two or three months, really happened nearly a year ago. I intend to learn German on my voyage home, and I have indented largely, (to use our Indian official term), for the re- quisite books. People tell me that it is a hard language ; but I cannot easily believe that there is a language which I cannot master in four months, by working ten hours a day. I promise myself very great delight and information from German litera- ture ; and, over and above, I feel a sort of presentiment, a kind of admonition of the Deity, which assures me that the final cause of my existence, the end for which I was sent into this vale of tears, was to make game of certain Germans. The first thing to be done in obedience to this heavenly call is to learn German ; and then I may perhaps try, as Milton says, " Frangere Saxonicas Britonum sub Marte phalanges." Ever yours affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. The years which Macaulay spent in India formed a transi- tion period between the time when he kept no journal at all, and the time when the daily portion of his journal was completed as regularly as the daily portion of his History. Between 1834 and 1838, he contented himself with jotting down any circumstance that struck his fancy in the book which he happened to have in hand. The records of "his Calcutta life, written in half a dozen different languages, are scattered throughout the whole range of classical literature from Hesiod to Macrobius. At the end of the eighty-ninth Epistle 334 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. vi. of Seneca we read : " April 14, 1836. Hodie pnemia distribui Toef f-v TU> fiovffeiv SavtrKpiriKti) VECLVHIKOIQ." l On the last page of the Birds of Aristophanes : "Jan. 16, 1836. ot Trptff/Btte oi Trapa TOV /3aert\o> rutv NrjiravXirair tioyyovro \0ef it; KaXfrovrrai'." 2 . On the first page of Theocritus : " March 20, 1835. Lord W. Bentinck sailed this morning." On the last page of the " De Amicitia : " " March 5, 1836. Yesterday Lord Auckland arrived at Government House, and was sworn in." Beneath an idyl of Moschus, of all places in the world, Macaulay notes the fact of Peel being First Lord of the Trea- sury ; and he finds space, between two quotations in Athenaeus, to commemorate a Ministerial majority of 29 on the Second Reading of the Irish Church Bill. A somewhat nearer approach to a formal diary may be found in his Catullus, which contains a catalogue of the English books that he read in the cold season of 1835-36 ; as for instance : Gibbon's Answer to Davis . . November 6 and 7 Gibbon on Virgil's VI ./Eneid . November 7 Whately's Logic . . . November 15 Thirlwall's Greece . . . November 22 Edinburgh Review . . . November 29 And all this was in addition to his Greek and Latin studies, to his official work, to the French that he read with his sister, and the unrecorded novels that he read to himself; which last would alone have afforded occupation for two ordinary men, unless this month of November was different from every other month of his existence since the day that he left Mr. Preston's schoolroom. There is something refreshing, amidst the long list of graver treatises, to light upon a periodical entry of " rii*:- viKita " ; the immortal work of a Classic who has had more readers in a single year than Statius and Seneca in all their eighteen centuries together. Macaulay turned over with indif- ference, and something of distaste, the earlier chapters of that modern Odyssey. The first touch which came home to him was Jingle's " Handsome Englishman ! " In that phrase he recog- nised a master ; and, by the time that he landed in England, he knew his Pickwick almost as intimately as his Grandi- son. 1 "To-day I distributed the prizes to the students of the Sanscrit College." 3 " The ambassadors from the King of Nepaul entered Calcutta yesterday. " It may be observed that Macaulay wrote Greek with or without accents, ac- cording to the humour, or hurry, of the moment. 1834-38. LORD MAC A UL AY. 335 Calcutta : June 15, 1837. Dear Napier, Your letter about my review of Mackintosh miscarried, vexatiously enough. I should have been glad to know what was thought of my performance among friends and foes ; for here we have no information on such subjects. The literary correspondents of the Calcutta newspapers seem to be penny-a-line men, whose whole stock of literature comes from the conversations in the Green Room. My long article on Bacon has, no doubt, been in your hands some time. I never, to the best of my recollection, proposed to review Hannah More's Life or Works. If I did, it must have been in jest. She was exactly the very last person in the world about whom I should choose to write a critique. She was a very kind friend to me from childhood. Her notice first called out my literary tastes. Her presents laid the foundation of my library. She was to me what Ninon was to Voltaire, begging her pardon for comparing her to a bad woman, and yours for comparing myself to a great man. She really was a second mother to me. I have a real affection for her memory. I therefore could not possibly write about her unless I wrote in her praise ; and all the praise which I could give to her writings, even after straining my conscience in her favour, would be far indeed from satisfying any of her admirers. I will try my hand on Temple, and on Lord Clive. Shaftesbury I shall let alone. Indeed, his political life is so much connected with Temple's that, without endless repetition, it would be impossible for me to furnish a separate article on each. Temple's Life and Works ; the part which he took in the controversy about the ancients and moderns ; the Oxford confederacy against Bentley ; and the memorable victory which Bentley obtained, will be good subjects. I am in training for this part of the subject, as I have twice read through the Pha- laris controversy since I arrived in India I have been almost incessantly engaged in public business since I sent off the paper on Bacon ; but I expect to have comparative leisure during the short remainder of my stay here. The Penal Code of India is finished, and is in the press. The illness of two of my colleagues threw the work almost entirely on me. It is done, however ; and I am not likely to be called upon for vigorous exertion during the rest of my Indian career. Yours ever T. B. MACAULAY. If you should have assigned Temple, or Clive, to anybody .336 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vi. else, pray do not be uneasy on that account The pleasure of writing pays itself. Calcutta : December 18, 1837. Dear Ellis, My last letter was on a deeply melancholy subject, the death of our poor friend Malkin. I have felt very much for his widow. The intensity of her affliction, and the fortitude and good feeling which she showed as soon as the first agony was over, have interested me greatly in her. Six or seven of Malkin's most intimate friends here have joined with Ryan and me, in subscribing to put up a plain marble tablet in the cathedral, for which I have written an inscription. 1 My departure is now near at hand. This is the last letter which I shall write to you from India. Our passage is taken in the Lord Hungerford ; the most celebrated of the huge floating hotels which run between London and Calcutta. She is more renowned for the comfort and luxury of her internal arrange- ments than for her speed. As we are to stop at the Cape for a short time, I hardly expect to be with you till the end of May, or the beginning of June. I intend to make myself a good German scholar by the time of my arrival in England. I have already, at leisure moments broken the ice. I have read about half of the New Testament in Luther's translation, and am now getting rapidly, for a beginner, through Schiller's History of the Thirty Years' War. My German library consists of all Goethe's works, all Schiller's works, Muller's History of Switzerland, some of Tieck, some of Lessing, and other works of less fame. I hope to despatch them all on my way home. I like Schiller's style exceedingly. His history contains a great deal of very just and deep thought, conveyed in language so popular and agreeable that dunces would think him superficial. I lately took it into my head to obtain some knowledge of the Fathers, and I read therefore a good deal of Athanasius, which by no means raised him in my opinion. I procured the magnificent edition of Chrysostom, by Montfaucon, from a public library here, and turned over the eleven huge folios, reading wherever the subject was of peculiar interest. As to reading him through, the thing is impossible. These volumes contain matter at least equal to the whole extant literature of the best times of Greece, from Homer to Aristotle inclusive. There are certainly some very brilliant passages in his homilies. It seems curious that, though the Greek literature began to flourish so much earlier than the Latin, it continued to flourish so much later. Indeed, if you except the century which 1 This inscription appears in Lord Macaulay's Miscellaneous Works. 1834-38. LORD MACAU LAY. 337 elapsed between Cicero's first public appearance and Livy's death, I am not sure that there was any time at which Greece had not writers equal or superior to their Roman contempo- raries. I am sure that no Latin writer of the age of Lucian is to be named with Lucian ; that no Latin writer of the age of Longinus is to be named with Longinus ; that no Latin prose of the age of Chrysostom can be named with Chrysostom's compositions. I have read Augustin's Confessions. The book is not without interest ; but he expresses himself in the style of a field-preacher. Our Penal Code is to be published next week. It has cost me very intense labour ; and, whatever its faults may be, it is certainly not a slovenly performance. Whether the work proves useful to India or not, it has been of great use, I feel and know, to my own mind 1 Ever yours affectionately T. B. MACAULAY. 1 In October 1854, Macaulay writes to my mother : "I cannot but be pleased to find that, at last, the Code on which I bestowed the labour of two of the best years of my life has had justice done to it. Had this justice been done sixteen years ago, I should probably have given much more attention to legislation, and much less to literature than I have done. I do not know that I should have been either happier or more useful than I have been." 338 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. vn. CHAPTER VII. 1838-1839. Death of Zachary Macaulay Mr. Wallace and Mackintosh Letters to Mr. Napier, and Mr. Ellis Sir Walter Scott Lord Brougham First mention of the History Macaulay goes abroad His way of regard- ing scenery Chalons-sur-Marne Lyons Marseilles Genoa Pisa- Florence Macaulay refuses the Judge Advocateship Florence to Rome Thrasymene St. Peter's The New Zealander The Vatican The Temporal Power The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception Letter to Lord Lansdowne The Canadian Insurrection Gibbon Rome to Naples Bulwer's novels Impressions of Naples Virgil's tomb Macaulay sets out homewards Mr. Goulbum Versailles. THE Lord Hungerford justified her reputation of a bad sailer, and the homeward voyage was protracted into the sixth month. This unusual delay, combined with the knowledge that the ship had met with very rough weather after leaving the Cape, gave rise to a report that she had been lost with all on board, and brought a succession of Whig politicians into the City to inquire at Lloyd's about the safety of her precious freight But it was in the character of a son and brother, and not of a party orator, that Macaulay was most eagerly and anxiously expected. He had, indeed, been sorely missed. " You can have no con- ception," wrote one of his sisters, in the year 1834, "of the change which has come over this household. It is as if the sun had deserted the earth. The chasm Tom's departure has made can never be supplied. He was so unlike any other being one ever sees, and his visits amongst us were a sort of re- freshment which served not a little to enliven and cheer our monotonous way of life ; but now day after day rises and sets without object or interest, so that sometimes I almost feel aweary of this world. " Things did not mend as time went on. With Zachary Macaulay, as has been the case with so many like him, the years which intervened between the time when his work was done, and the time when he went to receive his wages, were years of trouble, of sorrow, and even of gloom. Failing health ; failing eyesight ; the sense of being helpless and useless, after an active and beneficent career ; the consciousness of depen- 1838-39- LORD MACAU LAY. 339 dence upon others at an age when the moral disadvantages of poverty are felt even more keenly than youth feels its material discomforts ; such were the clouds that darkened the close of a life which had never been without its trials. During the months that his children were on their homeward voyage his health was breaking fast ; and before the middle of May he died, without having again seen their faces. Sir James Stephen, writing to Fanny Macaulay, says : " I know not how to grieve for the loss of your father, though it removes from this world one of the oldest, and, assuredly, one of the most excellent friends I have ever had. What rational man would not leap for joy at the offer of bearing all his burdens, severe as they were, if he could be assured of the same approving conscience and of the same blessed reward ? He was almost the last sur- vivor of a noble brotherhood now reunited in affection, and in employment. Mr. Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Babington, my father, and other not less dear, though less conspicuous, companions of his many labours, have ere now greeted him as their associate in the world of spirits ; and, above all, he has been welcomed by his Redeemer with ' Well done, good and faithful servant.' " Zachary Macaulay's bust in Westminster Abbey bears on its pedestal a beautiful inscription, (which is, and probably will re- main, his only biography,) in which much more is told, than he himself would wish to have been told, about a man WHO DURING FORTY SUCCESSIVE YEARS, PARTAKING IN THE COUNSELS AND THE LABOURS WHICH, GUIDED BY FAVOURING PROVIDENCE, RESCUED AFRICA FROM THE WOES, AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE FROM THE GUILT, OF SLAVERY AND THE SLAVE-TRADE, MEEKLY ENDURED THE TOIL, THE PRIVATION, AND THE REPROACH, RESIGNING TO OTHERS THE PRAISE AND THE REWARD. His tomb has for many years past been cut off from the body of the nave by an iron railing equally meaningless and unsightly; which withdraws from the eyes of his fellow-countrymen an epitaph at least as provocative to patriotism as those of the in- numerable military and naval heroes of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries, who fell in wars the very objects of which are for the most part forgotten, or remembered only to be re- gretted. ' The first piece of business which Macaulay found waiting to be settled on his return to England was sufficiently disagreeable. 1 Since these lines were printed, the railing has been taken down by the orders of Dean Stanley, who is always ready to remove ecclesiastical barriers. 2 2 340 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vn. As far back as July 1835, he had reviewed Sir James Mackin- tosh's History of the Revolution of 1688. This valuable frag- ment was edited by a Mr. Wallace, who accompanied it with a biographical sketch of his author, whom he treated throughout with an impertinence which had an air of inexcusable disloyalty; but which in truth was due to nothing worse than self-sufficiency, thrown into unpleasant relief by the most glaring bad taste. Macaulay, who from a boy had felt for Mackintosh that reve- rence which is " Dearer to true young hearts than their own praise," fell upon the editor with a contemptuous vigour, of which some pretty distinct traces remain in the essay as it at present appears in the collected editions, where the following sentence may still be read : "It is plain that Thomas Burnet and his writings were never heard of by the gentleman who has been employed to edit this volume, and who, not content with deforming Sir James Mackintosh's text by such blunders, has prefixed to it a bad memoir, has appended to it a bad continuation, and has thus succeeded in expanding the volume into one of the thickest, and debasing it into one of the worst, that we ever saw." What the first vehemence of Macaulay's indignation was, may be es- timated by the fact that this passage, as it now stands, has been deprived of half its sting. One extract from the article, in its original form, merits to be reproduced here, because it explains, and in some degree justifies, Macaulay's wrath, and in itself is well worth reading. "He" (the editor) "affects, and for aught we know, feels, some- thing like contempt for the celebrated man whose life he has un- dertaken to write, and whom he was incompetent to serve in the capacity even of a corrector of the press. Our readers may form a notion of the spirit in which the whole narrative is composed from expressions which occur at the beginning. This biographer tells us that Mackintosh, on occasion of taking his medical degree at Edinburgh. ' not only put off the writing of his Thesis to the last moment, but was an hour behind his time on the day of exami- nation, and kept the Academic Senate waiting for him in full con- clave.' This irregularity, which no sensible professor would have thought deserving of more than a slight reprimand, is described by the biographer, after a lapse of nearly half a century, as an incre- dible instance ' not so much of indolence, as of gross negligence and bad taste.' But this is not all. Our biographer has contrived to procure a copy of the Thesis, and has sate down, with his As in praesenti and his Propria quas maribus at his side, to pick out blunders in a composition written by a youth of twenty-one on the 1838-39- LORD MACAU LAY. 341 occasion alluded to. He finds one mistake such a mistake as the greatest scholar might commit when in haste, and as the veriest schoolboy would detect when at leisure. He glories over this pre- cious discovery with all the exultation of a pedagogue. ' Deceived by the passive termination of the verb defungor, Mackintosh misuses it in a passive sense.' He is not equally fortunate in his other discovery. ' Laude conspurcarej whatever he may think, is not an improper phrase. Mackintosh meant to say that there are men whose praise is a disgrace. No person, we are sure, who has read this memoir, will doubt that there are men whose abuse is an honour." Mr. Wallace did not choose to rest quietly under a castiga- tion which even Macaulay subsequently admitted to have been in excess of his deserts. 3 Clarges Street, London : June 14, 1838. Dear Napier, I did not need your letter to satisfy me of your kindness, and of the pleasure which my arrival would give you. I have returned with a small independence, but still an independence. All my tastes and wishes lead me to prefer literature to politics. When I say this to my friends here, some of them seem to think that I am out of my wits, and others that I am coquetting to raise my price. I, on the other hand, believe that I am wise, and know that I am sincere. I shall be curious, when we meet, to see your correspon- dence with Wallace. Empson seemed to be a little uneasy lest the foolish man should give me trouble. I thought it impos- sible that he could be so absurd ; and, as I have now been in London ten days without hearing of him, I am confirmed in my opinion. In any event you need not be anxious. If it be absolutely necessary to meet him, I will. But I foresee no such necessity ; and, as Junius says, I never will give a proof of my spirit at the expense of my understanding. Ever yours most truly T. B. MACAULAY. London : August 14, 1838. Dear Napier, Your old friend Wallace and I have been pretty near exchanging shots. However, all is accommodated, and, I think, quite unexceptionably. The man behaved much better to me than he did to you. Perhaps time has composed his feelings. He had, at all events, the advantage of being in good hands. He sent me by Tom Steele, a furious O'Con- nellite, but a gentleman, a man of honour, and, on this occa- sion at least, a man of temper, a challenge very properly worded. He accounted, handsomely enough, for the delay by 342 LIFE AND LETTERS OF cH. VM. saying that my long absence, and the recent loss in my family, prevented him from applying to me immediately on my return. I put the matter into Lord Stafford's hands. I had, to tell you the truth, no notion that a meeting could be avoided ; for the man behaved so obstinately well that there was no possi- bility of taking Empson's advice, and sending for the police ; and, though I was quite ready to disclaim all intention of giving personal offence, and to declare that, when I wrote the review, I was ignorant of Mr. Wallace's existence, I could not make any apology, or express the least regret, for having used strong language in defence of Mackintosh. Lord Strafford quite ap- proved of my resolution. But he proposed a course which had never occurred to me ; which at once removed all scruples on my side ; and which, to my great surprise, Steele and Wallace adopted without a moment's hesitation. This was that Wallace should make a preliminary declaration that he meant, by his memoir, nothing disrespectful or unkind to Mackintosh, but the direct contrary ; and that then I should declare that, in consequence of Mr. Wallace's declaration, I was ready to ex- press my regret if I had used any language that could be deemed personally offensive. This way of settling the business appeared to both Lord Strafford and Rice perfectly honourable ; and I was of the same mind : for certainly the language which I used could be justified only on the ground that Wallace had used Mackintosh ill ; and, when Wallace made a preliminary declaration that he intended nothing but kindness and honour to Mackintosh, I could not properly refuse to make some con- cession. I was much surprised that neither Steele nor Wallace objected to Lord Strafford's proposition ; but, as they did not object, it was impossible for me to do so. In this way the matter was settled, much better settled than by refusing to admit Wallace to the privileges of a gentleman. I hope that you will be satisfied with the result. The kind anxiety which you have felt about me renders me very desirous to know that you approve of my conduct. Yours ever T. B. MACAULAV. 3 Clarges Street : June 26, 1838. Dear Napier, I assure you that I would willingly, and even eagerly, undertake the subject which you propose, if I thought that I should serve you by doing so. But, depend upon it, you do not know what you are asking for. I have done my best to ascertain what I can and what I cannot do. There are extensive classes of subjects which I think myself able to treat 1838-39. LORD MACAU LAY. 343 as few people can treat them. After this, you cannot suspect me of any affectation of modesty ; and you will therefore be- lieve that I tell you what I sincerely think, when I say that I am not successful in analysing the effect of works of genius. I have written several things on historical, political, and moral questions, of which, on the fullest re-consideration, I am not ashamed, and by which I should be willing to be estimated; but I have never written a page of criticism on poetry, or the fine arts, which I would not burn if I had the power. Hazlitt used to say of himself, " I am nothing if not critical." The case with me is directly the reverse. I have a strong and acute en- joyment of works of the imagination ; but I have never habitu- ated myself to dissect them. Perhaps I enjoy them the more keenly, for that very reason. Such books as Lessing's Laocoon, 1 such passages as the criticism on Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister, fill me with wonder and despair. Now, a review of Lockhart's book ought to be a review of Sir Walter's literary performances. I enjoy many of them ; nobody, I believe, more keenly ; but I am sure that there are hundreds who will criticise them far better. Trust to my knowledge of myself. I never in my life was more certain of anything than of what I tell you, and I am sure that Lord Jeffrey will tell you exactly the same. There are other objections of less weight, but not quite unimportant. Surely it would be desirable that some person who knew Sir Walter, who had at least seen him and spoken with him, should be charged with this article. Many people are living who had a most intimate acquaintance with him. I know no more of him than I know of Dryden or Addison, and not a tenth part so much as I know of Swift, Cowper, or John- son. Then again, I have not, from the little that I do know of him, formed so high an opinion of his character as most people seem to entertain, and as it would be expedient for the Edin- burgh Review to express. He seems to me to have been most carefully, and successfully, on his guard against the sins which most easily beset literary men. On that side he multiplied his precautions, and set double watch. Hardly any writer of note has been so free from the petty jealousies, and morbid irritabili- ties, of our caste. But I do not think that he kept himself equally pure from faults of a very different kind, from the faults of a man of the world. In politics, a bitter and unscrupulous partisan ; profuse and ostentatious in expense ; agitated by the hopes and fears of a gambler ; perpetually sacrificing the per- 1 "I began Lessing's Laocoon, and read forty or fifty pages : sometimes dissenting, but always admiring and learning." Macaulay's Journal for Sep- tember 21, 1851. 344 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vn. fection of his compositions, and the durability of his fame, to his eagerness for money ; writing with the slovenly haste of Dryden, in order to satisfy wants which were not, like those of Dryden, caused by circumstances beyond his control, but which were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious speculation ; this is the way in which he appears to me. I am sorry for it, for I sincerely admire the greater part of his works : but I cannot think him a high-minded man, or a man of very strict principle. Now these are opinions which, however soft- ened, it would be highly unpopular to publish, particularly in a Scotch Review. But why cannot you prevail on Lord Jeffrey to furnish you with this article ? No man could do it half so well. He knew and loved Scott ; and would perform the critical part of the work, which is much the most important, incomparably. I have said a good deal in the hope of convincing you that it is not without reason that I decline a task which I see that you wish me to undertake. I am quite unsettled. Breakfasts every morning, dinners every evening, and calls all day, prevent me from making any regular exertion. My books are at the baggage warehouse. My book-cases are in the hands of the cabinet-maker. What- ever I write at present I must, as Bacon somewhere says, spin like a spider out of my own entrails, and I have hardly a minute in the week for such spinning. London is in a strange state of excitement The western streets are in a constant ferment The influx of foreigners and rustics has been pro- digious, and the regular inhabitants are almost as idle and curious as the sojourners. Crowds assemble perpetually, no- body knows why, with a sort of vague expectation that there will be something to see ; and, after staring at each other, disperse without seeing anything. This will last till the Coro- nation is over. The only quiet haunts are the streets of the City. For my part I am sick to death of the turmoil, and almost wish myself at Calcutta again, or becalmed on the equator. Ever yours most truly T. B. MACAULAY. 3 Clarges Street, London : July 20, 1838. Dear Napier, As to Brougham, I understand and feel for your embarrassments. I may perhaps refine too much ; but I should say that this strange man, finding himself almost alone in the world, absolutely unconnected with either Whigs or Conservatives, and not having a single vote in either House of 1838-39. LORD MACAULAY. 345 Parliament at his command except his own, is desirous to make the Review his organ. With this intention, unless I am greatly deceived, after having during several years contributed little or nothing of value, he has determined to exert himself as if he were a young writer struggling into note, and to make himself important to the work by his literary services. And he certainly has succeeded. His late articles, particularly the long one in the April number, 1 have very high merit. They are, indeed, models of magazine writing as distinguished from other sorts of writing. They are not, I think, made for duration. Every- thing about them is exaggerated, incorrect, sketchy. All the characters are either too black, or too fair. The passions of the writer do not suffer him even to maintain the decent appear- ance of impartiality. And the style, though striking and ani- mated, will not bear examination through a single paragraph. But the effect of the first perusal is great ; and few people read an article in a review twice. A bold, dashing, scene-painting manner is that which always succeeds best in periodical writing ; and I have no doubt that these lively and vigorous papers of Lord Brougham will be of more use to you than more highly finished compositions. His wish, I imagine, is to establish in this way such an ascendency as may enable him to drag the Review along with him to any party to which his furious passions may lead him ; to the Radicals ; to the Tories ; to any set of men by whose help he may be able to revenge himself on old friends, whose only crime is that they could not help finding him to be an habitual and incurable traitor. Hitherto your caution and firmness have done wonders. Yet already he has begun to use the word " Whig " as an epithet of reproach, exactly as it is used in the lowest writings of the Tories, and of the extreme Radicals ; exactly as it is used in Blackwood, in Fraser, in the Age, in Tail's Magazine. There are several instances in the article on Lady Charlotte Bury. "The Whig notions of female propriety." "The Whig secret tribunal." I have no doubt that the tone of his papers will become more and more hostile to the Government ; and that, in a short time, it will be necessary for you to take one of three courses, to every one of which there are strong objections ; to break with him ; to admit his papers into the Review, while the rest of the Review continues to be written in quite a different tone ; or to yield to his dicta- tion, and to let him make the Review a mere tool of his ambition and revenge. 1 This is the article on the " Diary illustrative of the times of George the Fourth, interspersed with original letters from the late Queen Caroline, and from various other distinguished persons." 346 LIFE AND LETTERS OP cM. VM. As to Brougham's feelings towards myself, I know, and have known for a long time, that he hates me. If during the last ten years I have gained any reputation either in politics or in letters, if I have had any success in life, it has been with- out his help or countenance, and often in spite of his utmost exertions to keep me down. It is strange that he should be surprised at my not calling on him since my return. I did not call on him when I went away. When he was Chancellor, and I was in office, I never once attended his levee. It would be strange indeed if now, when he is squandering the remains of his public character in an attempt to ruin the party of which he was a member then, and of which I am a member still, I should begin to pay court to him. For the sake of the long intimacy which subsisted between him and my father, and of the mutual good offices which passed between them, I will not, unless I am compelled, make any public attack on him. But this is really the only tie which restrains me : for I neither love him, nor fear him. With regard to the Indian Penal Code, if you are satisfied that Empson really wishes to review it on its own account, and not merely out of kindness to me, I should not at all object to his doing so. The subject is one of immense importance. The work is of a kind too abstruse for common readers, and can be made known to them only through the medium of some popular exposition. There is another consideration which weighs much with me. The Press in India has fallen into the hands of the lower legal practitioners, who detest all law-reform ; and their scurrility, though mere matter of derision to a person accustomed to the virulence of English factions, is more for- midable than you can well conceive to the members of the Civil Service, who are quite unaccustomed to be dragged rudely before the public. It is, therefore, highly important that the members of the Indian Legislature, and of the Law Commission, should be supported against the clamorous abuse of the scrib- blers who surround them by seeing that their performances attract notice at home, and are judged with candour and dis- cernment by writers of a far higher rank in literature than the Calcutta editors. For these reasons I should be glad to see an article on the Penal Code in the Edinburgh Review. But I must stipulate that my name may not be mentioned, and that everything may be attributed to the Law Commission as a body. I am quite confident that Empson's own good taste, and regard for me, will lead him, if he should review the Code, to abstain most carefully from everything that resembles puffing. His regard to truth and the public interest will, of 1838-39- LORD MACAU LAY. 347 course, lead him to combat our opinions freely wherever he thinks us wrong. There is little chance that I shall see Scotland this year. In the autumn I shall probably set out for Rome, and return to London in the spring. As soon as I return, I shall seriously commence my History. The first part, (which, I think, will take up five octavo volumes,) will extend from the Revolution to the commencement of Sir Robert Walpole's long administra- tion ; a period of three or four and thirty very eventful years. From the commencement of Walpole's administration to the commencement of the American war, events may be despatched more concisely. From the commencement of the American war it will again become necessary to be copious. These, at least, are my present notions. How far I shall bring the narra- tive down I have not determined. The death of George the Fourth would be the best halting- place. The History would then be an entire view of all the transactions which took place, between the Revolution which brought the Crown into harmony with the Parliament, and the Revolution which brought the Parliament into harmony with the nation. But there are great and obvious objections to contemporary history. To be sure, if I live to be seventy, the events of George the Fourth's reign will be to rne then what the American war and the Coalition are to me now. Whether I shall continue to reside in London seems to me very uncertain. I used to think that I liked London ; but, in truth, I liked things which were in London, and which are gone. My family is scattered. I have no Parliamentary or official business to bind me to the capital. The business to which I propose to devote myself is almost incompatible with the distractions of a town life. I am sick of the monotonous succession of parties, and long for quiet and retirement. To quit politics for letters is, I believe, a wise choice. To cease to be a member of Parliament only to become a diner-out would be contemptible ; and it is not easy for me to avoid becoming a mere diner-out if I reside here. Ever yours T. B. M. London : September 15, 1838. Dear Ellis, On Monday I shall set off for Liverpool by the railroad, which will then be opened for the whole way. I shall remain there about a week. The chief object of my visit is to see my little nephew, the son of my sister Margaret. It is no visit of pleasure, though I hear everything most hopeful 348 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vil. and pleasing about the boy's talents and temper. ' Indeed, it is not without a great effort that I force myself to go. But I will say no more on this subject, for I cannot command myself when I approach it Empson came to London yesterday night, with his lady in high beauty and good humour. It is, you know, quite a proverbial truth that wives never tolerate an intimacy between their husbands and any old friends, except in two cases : the one, when the old friend was, before the marriage, a friend of both wife and husband ; the other, when the friendship is of later date than the marriage. I may hope to keep Empson's friendship under the former exception, as I have kept yours under the latter. Empson brings a sad account of poor Napier : all sorts of disquiet and trouble, with dreadful, wearing, complaints which give his friends the gravest cause for alarm. And, as if this were not enough, Brougham is persecuting him with the utmost malignity. I did not think it possible for human nature, in an educated civilised man, a man, too, of great intellect, to have become so depraved. He writes to Napier in language of the most savage hatred, and of the most extravagant vaunting. The Ministers, he says, have felt only his little finger. He will now put forth his red right hand. They shall have no rest. As to me, he says that I shall rue my baseness in not calling on him. But it is against Empson that he is most furious. He says that, in consequence of this new marriage, 2 he will make it the chief object of his life to prevent Jeffrey from ever being Lord President of the Court of Session. He thinks that there is some notion of making Empson editor of the Review. If that be done, he says, he will relinquish every other object in order to ruin the Review. He will lay out his last sixpence in that enterprise. He will make revenge on Empson the one business of the remaining years of his life. Empson says that nothing so demoniacal was ever written in the world. For my part, since he takes it into his head to be angry, I am pleased that he goes on in such a way ; for he is much less formidable in such a state than he would be if he kept his temper. I sent to Napier on Thursday a long article on Temple. It is superficial ; but on that account, among others, I shall be surprised if it does not take. 1 The boy died in 1847, having already shown as fair promise of remark- able ability, and fine character, as can be given at the age of thirteen. " I feel the calamity much," Macaulay wrote. " I had left the dear boy my library, little expecting that I should ever wear mourning for him." 2 Mr. Empson had married the daughter of Lord Jeffrey. 1838-39- LORD MACAU LAY. 349 Hayter has painted me for his picture of the House of Commons. I cannot judge of his performance. I can only say, as Charles the Second did on a similar occasion, " Odds fish, if I am like this, I am an ugly fellow." Yours ever T. B. M. In the middle of October Macaulay started for a tour in Italy. Just past middle life, with his mind already full, and his imagination still fresh and his health unbroken, it may be doubted whether any traveller had carried thither a keener ex- pectation of enjoyment since Winckelmann for the first time crossed the Alps. A diary, from which extracts will be given in the course of this chapter, curiously illustrates the feelings with which he regarded the scenes around him. He viewed the works, both of man and of nature, with the eyes of an his- torian, and not of an artist. The leading features of a tract of country impressed themselves rapidly and indelibly on his ob- servation ; all its associations and traditions swept at once across his memory ; and every line of good poetry, which its fame, or its beauty, had inspired, rose almost involuntarily to his lips. But, compared with the wealth of phrases on which he could draw at will when engaged on the description of human passions, catastrophes, and intrigues, his stock of epithets applicable to mountains, seas, and clouds was singularly scanty ; and he had no ambition to enlarge it. When he had recorded the fact that the leaves were green, the sky blue, the plain rich, and the hills clothed with wood, he had said all he had to say, and there was an end of it. He had neither the taste, nor the power, for rivalling those novelists who have more colours in their vocabulary than ever Turner had on his palette ; and who spend over the lingering phases of a single sunset as much ink as Richardson consumed in depicting the death of his villain, or the ruin of his heroine. " I have always thought," said Lady Trevelyan, " that your uncle was incomparable in showing a town, or the place where any famous event occurred ; but that he did not care for scenery merely as scenery. He enjoyed the country in his way. He liked sitting out on a lawn, and seeing grass and flowers around him. Occasionally a view made a great impression on him, such as the view down upon Susa, going over Mont Cenis ; but I doubt whether any scene pleased his eye more than his own beloved Holly Lodge, or Mr. Thornton's garden at Battersea Rise. When we were recalling the delights of an excursion among the Surrey hills, or in the byways at the English lakes, he would be inclined to ask ' What 350 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vii. went ye out for to see ? ' Yet he readily took in the points of a landscape ; and I remember being much struck by his de- scription of the country before you reach Rome, which he gives in Horatius. When I followed him over that ground many years after, I am sure that I marked the very turn in the road where the lines struck him : From where Cortona lifts to heaven Her diadem of towers ; and so on through ' reedy Thrasymene/ and all the other loca- lities of the poem." " Chalons-sur-Saone. Tuesday, October 23, 1838. The road from Autun is for some way more beautiful than anything I had yet seen in France ; or indeed, in that style, anywhere else, except, perhaps, the ascent to the tableland of the Neilgherries. I tra- versed a winding pass, near two miles in length, running by the side of a murmuring brook, and between hills covered with forest. The landscape appeared in the richest colouring of October, under a sun like that of an English June. The earth was the earth of autumn, but the sky was the sky of summer. The foliage, dark green, light green, purple, red, and yellow, seen by the evening sun, produced the effect of the plumage of the finest eastern birds. I walked up the pass exceedingly pleased. To enjoy scenery you should ramble amidst it ; let the feelings to which it gives rise mingle with other thoughts ; look around upon it in intervals of reading ; and not go to it as one goes to see the lions fed at a fair. The beautiful is not to be stared at, but to be lived with. I have no pleasure from books which equals that of reading over for the hundredth time great productions which I almost know by heart ; and it is just the same with scenery." ''Lyons. Thursday, October 25. My birthday. Thirty-eight years old. Thought of Job, Swift, and Antony. 1 Dressed and went down to the steamer. I was delighted by my first sight of the blue, rushing, healthful-looking Rhone. I thought, as I wandered along the quay, of the singular love and veneration which rivers excite in those who live on their banks ; of the feeling of the Hindoos about the Ganges ; of the Hebrews about the Jordan ; of the Egyptians about the Nile ; of the Romans, ' Cuique fuit rerum promissa potentia Tibrin ; ' of the Germans about the Rhine. Is it that rivers have, in a 1 " Swift early adopted," says Sir Walter Scott, " the custom of observing his birthday as a term, not of joy, but of sorrow, and of reading, when it an- nually recurred, the striking passage of Scripture in which Job laments and execrates the day upon which it was said in his father's house ' that a man child was born.' " "Antony" may possibly be an allusion to the nth scene of the 3rd act of " Antony and Cleopatra : " " It is my birthday. I had thought to have held it poor." I83&-39- LORD MACAU LAY. 351 greater degree than almost any other inanimate object, the appear- ance of animation, and something resembling character ? They are sometimes slow and dark-looking ; sometimes fierce and im- petuous ; sometimes bright, dancing, and almost flippant. The at- tachment of the French for the Rhone may be explained into a very natural sympathy. It is a vehement, rapid stream. It seems cheerful and full of animal spirits, even to petulance. But this is all fanciful." l " October 26. On board the steamer for Avignon. Saw the famous junction of the two rivers, and thought of Lord Chatham's simile. 2 But his expression ' languid, though of no depth,' is hardly just to the Saone, however just it may be to the Duke of Newcastle. We went down at a noble rate. The day, which had been dank and foggy, became exceedingly beautiful. After we had left Valence the scenery grew wilder ; the hills bare and rocky like the sides of Lethe water in Cumberland ; the mountains of Dauphine in the distance reminded me of the outline of Ceylon as I saw it from the sea ; and, here and there, I could catch a glimpse of white peaks which I fancied to be the summits of the Alps. I chatted with the French gentlemen on board, and found them intelligent and polite. We talked of their roads and public works, and they complimented me on my knowledge of French history and geography. ' Ah, monsieur, vous avez beaucoup approfondi ces choses-la.' The evening was falling when we came to the Pont St. Esprit, a famous work of the monks, which pretends to no orna- ment and needs none." " October 28. The day began to break as we descended into Marseilles. It was Sunday ; but the town seemed only so much the gayer. I looked hard for churches, but for a long time I saw none. At last I heard bells, and the noise guided me to a chapel, mean inside, and mean outside, but crowded as Simeon's church used to be crowded at Cambridge. The Mass was nearly over. A fine steamer sails to-morrow for Leghorn. I am going to lock this hulking volume up, and I shall next open it in Tuscany." " Wednesday, October 31. This was one of the most remarkable days of my life. After being detained, by the idle precautions which are habitual with these small absolute Govern- ments, for an hour on deck, that the passengers might be counted ; for another hour in a dirty room, that the agent of the police might write down all our names ; and for a third hour in another smoky den, while a custom-house officer opened razor-cases to se.e that they 1 On September 9, 1853, Macaulay writes at Geneva : " We walked to the junction of the Rhone and the Arve. My old friend the Rhone is what he is down at Pont St. Esprit, the bluest, brightest, swiftest, most joyous of rivers." 2 ' ' One fragment of this celebrated oration remains in a state of tolerable preservation. It is the comparison between the coalition of Fox and New- castle, and the junction of the Rhone and the Saone. 'At Lyons,' said Pitt, ' I was taken to see the place where the two rivers meet ; the one gentle, feeble, languid, and, though languid, yet of no depth ; the other a boisterous and im- petuous torrent. But, different as they are, they meet at last.'" Macaulay's Essay on Chatham. 352 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VH. concealed no muslin, and turned over dictionaries to be sure that they contained no treason or blasphemy, I hurried on shore, and by seven in the morning I was in the streets of Genoa. Never have I been more struck and enchanted. There was nothing mean or small to break the charm, as one huge, massy, towering palace succeeded to another. True it is- that none of these magnificent piles is a strikingly good architectural composition ; but the general effect is majestic beyond description. When the King of Sardinia became sovereign of Genoa, he bought the house of the Durazzo family, and found himself at once lodged as nobly as a great prince need wish to be. What a city, where a king has only to go into the market to buy a Luxembourg or a St. James's ! Next to the palaces, or rather quite as much, I admired the churches. Outside they are poor and bad, but within they dazzled and pleased me more than I can express. It was the awakening of a new sense, the discovery of an unsuspected pleasure. I had drawn all my notions of classical interiors from the cold, white, and naked walls of such buildings as St. Paul's or St. Genevieve's ; but the first church door that I opened at Genoa let me into another world. One harmonious glow pervaded the whole of the long Corinthian arcade from the entrance to the altar. In this way I passed the day, greatly excited and delighted." With this, perhaps the only jingling sentence which he ever left unblotted, Macaulay closes the account of his first, but far from his last, visit to the queen of the Tyrrhenian sea. To the end of his days, when comparing, as he loved to compare, the claims of European cities to the prize of beauty, he would place at the head of the list the august names of Oxford, Edin- burgh, and Genoa. " November 2. I shall always have an interesting recollection of Pisa. There is something pleasing in the way in which all the monuments of Pisan greatness lie together, in a place not unlike the close of an English cathedral, surrounded with green turf, still kept in the most perfect preservation, and evidently matters of ad- miration and of pride to the whole population. Pisa has always had a great hold on my mind : partly from its misfortunes, and partly, 1 believe, because my first notions about the Italian Republics were derived from Sismondi, whom I read while at school ; and Sismondi, who is, or fancies that he is, of Pisan descent, does all in his power to make the country of his ancestors an object of interest. 1 like Pisa, too, for having been Ghibelline. After the time of Frederick Barbarossa my preference, as far as one can have prefe- rences in so wretched a question, are all Ghibelline. " As I approached Florence, the day became brighter ; and the country looked, not indeed strikingly beautiful, but very pleasing. The sight of the olive-trees interested me much. I had, indeed, seen what I was told were olive-trees, as I was whirled down the Rhone from Lyons to Avignon -, but they might, for anything I saw, 1838-39- LORD MACAULAY. 353 have been willows or ash-trees. Now they stood, covered with berries, along the road for miles. I looked at them with the same sort of feeling with which Washington Irving says that he heard the nightingale for the first time when he came to England, after having read descriptions of her in poets from his childhood. I thought of the Hebrews, and their numerous images drawn from the olive ; of the veneration in which the tree was held by the Athenians ; of Lysias's speech ; of the fine ode in the (Edipus at Colonus ; of Virgil and Lorenzo de' Medici. Surely it is better to travel in mature years, with all these things in one's head, than to rush over the Continent while still a boy ! " "Florence, November 3. Up before eight, and read Boiardo, at breakfast. My rooms look into a court adorned with orange trees and marble statues. I never look at the statues without thinking of poor Mignon. ' Und Marmorbilder stehn und sehn mich an : Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, gethan?' I know no two lines in the world which I would sooner have written than those. I went to a Gabinetto Litterario hard by, sub- scribed, and read the last English newspapers. I crossed the river, and walked through some of the rooms in the Palazzo Pitti ; greatly admiring a little painting by Raphael from Ezekiel, which was so fine that it almost reconciled me to seeing God the Father on canvas. " Then to the Church of Santa Croce : an ugly mean outside ; and not much to admire in the architecture within, but consecrated by the dust of some of the greatest men that ever lived. It was to me what a first visit to Westminster Abbey would be to an Ameri- can. The first tomb which caught my eye, as I entered, was that of Michael Angelo. I was much moved, and still more so when, going forward, I saw the stately monument lately erected to Dante. The figure of the poet seemed to me fine and finely placed ; and the inscription very happy ; his own words, the proclamation which resounds through the shades when Virgil returns ' Onorate 1'altissimo poeta.' The two allegorical figures were not much to my taste. It is par- ticularly absurd to represent Poetry weeping for Dante. These weeping figures are all very well, when a tomb is erected to a per- son lately dead ; but, when a group of sculpture is set up over a man who has been dead more than five hundred years, such lamen- tation is nonsensical. Who can help laughing at the thought of tears of regret shed because a man who was born in the time of our Henry the Third is not still alive ? Yet I was very near shed- ding tears of a different kind as I looked at this magnificent monu- ment, and thought of the sufferings of the great poet, and of his incomparable genius, and of all the pleasure which I have derived from him, and of his death in exile, and of the late justice of pos- terity. I believe that very few people have ever had their minds more thoroughly penetrated with the spirit of any great work than A A 354 LIFE AND LET7ERS OF CH. vn. mine is with that of the Divine Comedy. His execution I take to be far beyond that of any other artist who has operated on the imagination by means of words ' O degli altri poeti onore e lume, Vagliami il lungo studio e '1 grande amore Che m' ban fatto cercar lo tuo volume.' 1 I was proud to think that I had a right to apostrophise him thus. I went on, and next I came to the tomb of Alfieri, set up by his mistress, the Countess of Albany. I passed forward, and in another minute my foot was on the grave of Machiavel." " November 7. While walking about the town, I picked up a little Mass-book, and read for the first time in my life strange, and almost disgraceful, that it should be so the service of the Mass from beginning to end. It seemed to me inferior to our Communion service in one most important point. The phraseology of Chris- tianity has in Latin a barbarous air, being altogether later than the age of pure Latinity But the English language has grown up in Christian times ; and the whole vocabulary of Christianity is in- corporated with it. The fine passage in the Communion Service : ' Therefore with Angels, and Archangels, and all the company of heaven,' is English of the best and most genuine description. But the answering passage in the Mass : ' Laudant Angeli, adorant dominationes, tremunt potestates, cceli Ccelorumque virtutes ac beati Seraphim,' would not merely have appeared barbarous, but would have been utterly unintelligible, a mere gibberish, to every one of the great masters of the Latin tongue, Plautus, Cicero, Caesar, and Catullus. I doubt whether even Claudian would have understood it. I intend to frequent the Romish worship till I come thoroughly to understand this ceremonial." Florence : November 4, 1838. Dear Napier, I arrived here the day before yesterday in very good health, after a journey of three weeks from London. I find that it will be absolutely impossible for me to execute the plan of reviewing Panizzi's edition of Boiardo in time for your next Number. I have not been able to read one half of Boiardo's poem, and, in order to do what I propose, I must read Berni's rifacimento too, as well as Pulci's Morgante ; and this, I fear, will be quite out of the question. The day is not long enough for what I want to do in it : and if I find this to be the case at Florence, I may be sure that at Rome I shall have still less leisure. However, it is my full intention to be in England in February, and, on the day on which I reach London, I will begin to work for you on Lord Clive. I know little English news. I steal a quarter of an hour in 1 ' ' Glory and light of all the tuneful train, May it avail me that I long with zeal Have sought thy volume, and with love immense Have conn'd it o'er ! " 1838-39. LORD MACAULAY. 355 the day from marbles and altar-pieces to read the Times, and the Morning Chronicle. Lord Brougham, I have a notion, will often wish that he had left Lord Durham alone. Lord Durham will be in the House of Lords, with his pugnacious spirit, and with his high reputation among the Radicals. In oratorical abilities there is, of course, no comparison between the men ; but Lord Durham has quite talents enough to expose Lord Brougham, and has quite as much acrimony and a great deal more nerve than Lord Brougham himself. I should very much like to know what the general opinion about this matter is. My own suspicion is that the Tories in the House of Lords will lose reputation, though I do not imagine that the Government will gain any. As to Brougham, he has reached that happy point at which it is equally impossible for him to gain character and lose it. Ever, dear Napier, Yours most truly T. B. MACAULAY. There was, indeed, very little reputation to be gained out of the business. No episode in our political history is more re- plete with warning to honest and public-spirited men, who, in seeking to serve their country, forget what is due to their own interests and their own security, than the story of Lord Durham. He accepted the Governorship of Canada during a supreme crisis in the affairs of that colony. He carried with him thither the confidence of the great body of his fellow-countrymen a confidence which he had conciliated by his earnest and coura- geous demeanour in the warfare of Parliament ; by the know- ledge that, when he undertook his present mission, he had stipulated for the largest responsibility, and refused the smallest emolument ; and, above all, by the appeal which, before leaving England, he made in the House of Lords to friends and foes alike. " I feel," he said, " that I can accomplish my task only by the cordial and energetic support, a support which I am sure I shall obtain, of my noble friends the members of her Majesty's Cabinet ; by the co-operation of the Imperial Parlia- ment ; and, permit me to say, by the generous forbearance of the noble lords opposite, to whom I have always been politi- cally opposed." From his political opponents, in the place of generous forbearance, he met with unremitting persecution ; and as for the character of the support which he obtained from those Ministers who had themselves placed him in the forefront of the battle, it is more becoming to leave it for Tory historians to recount the tale. To Lord Brougham's treatment of his A A 2 3S LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VH. former colleague justice is done in the last sentence of Macau- lay's letter. But on one point Macaulay was mistaken. Lord Durham never called his enemies to account, and still less his friends. His heart was broken, but not estranged. His tongue, which had too seldom, perhaps, refrained from speaking out what was brave and true, could keep silence when silence was demanded by the claims of past alliances and the memory of old friendships. During the remnant of his life, Lord Durham continued to support the Whig Cabinet with all the loyalty and modesty of a young Peer hopeful of an Under Secretaryship, or grateful for having been selected to second the Address. But none the less had the blow gone home ; and the Adminis- tration, which had so long been trembling and dying, was destined to survive by many months the most single-minded and high- natured among that company of statesmen who had wrought for our people the great deliverance of 1832. " Friday ', November 9. Went to Dante's ' bel San Giovanni,' and heard Mass there. Then to another church, and heard another Mass. I begin to follow the service as well as the body of the hearers, which is not saying much. I paid a third visit to Santa Croce, and noticed in the cloister a monument to a little baby, ' II piu bel bambino che mai fosse ; ' not a very wise inscription for parents to put up ; but it brought tears into my eyes. I thought of the little thing who lies in the cemetery at Calcutta. 1 I meditated some verses for my ballad of Romulus, 2 but made only one stanza to my satisfaction. I finished Casti's Giuli Tre, and have liked it less than I expected. The humour of the work consists in endless repetition. It is a very hazardous experiment to attempt to make fun out of that which is the great cause of yawning, per- petual harping on the same topic. Sir Walter Scott was very fond of this device for exciting laughter : as witness Lady Margaret, and ' his Sacred Majesty's disjune ; ' Claude Halcro, and Glorious John ; Sir Dugald Dalgetty, and the Marischal College of Aberdeen ; the Baillie, and his father, the deacon ; old Trapbois, and 'for a consideration.' It answered, perhaps, once, for ten times that it failed." "Saturday, November 10, 1838. A letter from Mr. Aubin, our Charge d' Affaires here, to say that he has a confidential message for me, and asking when he might call. I sent word that I would call on him as soon as I had breakfasted. I had little doubt that the Ministers wanted my help in Parliament. I went to him, and he delivered to me two letters one from Lord Melbourne, and the other from Rice. They press me to become Judge Advocate and assure me that a seat in Parliament may be procured for me with little expense. Rice dwells much on 1 A little niece, who died in 1837, three months old. * The poem which was published as "The Prophecy of Capys." 1838-39- LORD MACAULAY. 357 the salary, which he says is 2, SOD/, a year. I thought it had been cut down ; but he must know. He also talks of the othei advantages connected with the place. The offer did not strike me as even tempting. The money I do not want. I have little ; but I have enough. The Right Honourable before my name is a bauble which it would be far, very far indeed, beneath me to care about. The power is nothing. As an independent Member of Parliament I should have infinitely greater power. Nay, as I am, I have far greater power. I can now write what I choose; and what I write may produce considerable effect on the public mind. In office I must necessarily be under restraint. If, indeed I had a Cabinet Office I should be able to do something in support of my own views of government ; but a man in office, and out of the Cabinet, is a mere slave. I have felt the bitterness of that slavery once. Though I hardly knew where to turn for a morsel of bread, my spirit rose against the intolerable thraldom. I was mutinous, and once actually resigned. I then went to India to get in- dependence, and I have got it, and I will keep it. So I wrote to Lord Melbourne and Rice. I told them that I would cheerfully do anything to serve them in Parliament ; but that office, except indeed office of the highest rank, to which I have no pretensions, had not the smallest allurements for me ; that the situation of a subordinate was unsuited to my temper ; that I had tried it, that I had found it insupportable, and that I would never make the ex- periment again. I begged them not to imagine that I thought a place which Mackintosh had been anxious to obtain beneath me. Very far from it. I admitted it to be above the market price of my services ; but it was below the fancy price which a peculiar turn of mind led me to put on my liberty and my studies. The only thing that would ever tempt me to give up my liberty and my studies was the power to effect great things ; and of that power, as they well knew, no man had so little as a man in office out of the Cabinet. " I never in my life took an important step with greater confi- dence in my own judgment, or with a firmer conviction that I was doing the best for my own happiness, honour, and usefulness. I have no relentings. If they take me at my word, and contrive to bring me into Parliament without office, I shall be, I think, in the most eligible of situations : but this I do not much expect." On the 1 2th of November Macaulay set out from Florence, by way of Cortona and Perugia. " Tuesday ; November 13. My journey lay over the field of Thrasymenus, and, as soon as the sun rose, I read Livy's descrip- tjon of the scene, and wished that I had brought Polybius too. However, it mattered little, for I could see absolutely nothing. I was exactly in the situation of the consul Flaminius ; completely hid in the morning fog. I did not discern the lake till the road came quite close to it, and then my view extended only over a few yards of reedy mud and shallow water, so that I can truly say that I 358 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vil. have seen precisely what the Roman army saw on that day. After some time we began to ascend, and came at last, with the help of oxen, to an eminence on which the sun shone bright. All the hill tops round were perfectly clear, and the fog lay in the valley below like a lake winding among mountains. I then understood the immense advantage which Hannibal derived from keeping his divisions on the heights, where he could see them all, and where they could all see each other, while the Romans were stumbling and groping, without the possibility of concert, through the thick haze below. Towards evening I began to notice the white oxen ot Clitumnus. ''November 14. Up and off by half-past four. The sun tri- umphed over the mist just as I reached Narni. The scenery was really glorious : far finer than that of Matlock or the Wye, in some- thing of the same style. The pale line of the river which brawled below, though in itself not agreeable, was interesting from classical recollections. I thought how happily Virgil had touched the most striking and characteristic features of Italian landscape. As the day wore on, I saw the Tiber for the first time. I saw Mount Soracte, and, unlike Lord Byron, I loved the sight for Horace's sake. 1 And so I came to Civita Castellana, where I determined to stop, though it was not much after two. I did not wish to enter Rome by night. I wanted to see the dome of St. Peter's from a distance, and to observe the city disclosing itself by degrees." " November 1 5. On arriving this morning, I walked straight from the hotel door to St. Peter's. I was so much excited by the expectation of what I was to see that I could notice nothing else. I was quite nervous. The colonnade in front is noble very, very noble : yet it disappointed me ; and would have done so had it been the portico of Paradise. In I went, and I was for a minute fairly stunned by the magnificence and harmony of the interior. I never in my life saw, and never, I suppose, shall again see, anything so astonishingly beautiful. I really could have cried with pleasure. I rambled about for half an hour or more, paying little or no atten- tion to details, but enjoying the effect of the sublime whole. " In rambling back to the Piazza di Spagna I found myself be- fore the portico of the Pantheon. I was as much struck and affected as if I had not known that there was such a building in Rome. There it was, the work of the age of Augustus ; the work of men who lived with Cicero, and Caesar, and Horace, and Virgil. What would they have said if they had seen it stuck all over with ' Invito Sacro,' and ' Indulgenza perpetua ' ? " " November 16. As soon as it cleared up I hastened to St. Peter's again. There was one spot near which an Englishman could not help lingering for a few minutes. In one of the side aisles, a monument by Canova marks the burial-place of the latest princes of the House of Stuart ; James the Third ; Charles Edward ; and Cardinal York, whom the last of the Jacobites affected to call Henry the Ninth. I then went towards the river, 1 See Canto IV. of "Childe Harold," stanzas 74 to 77. 1838-39. LORD MACAU LAY. 359 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 Palatine ; for he would never see Mount Ccelius from the spot where he fought. 1 Thence to the Capitol, and wandered through the gallery of paintings placed there by Benedict the Fourteenth, my favourite Pope." " November 22. I went to see a famous relic of antiquity lately discovered ; the baker's tomb. This baker and his wife, and the date of his baking performances, and the meaning of that mysterious word ' apparet,' are now the great subjects of discussion amongst the best circles of Rome. Strange city ; once sovereign of the world, whose news now consists in the discovery of the buried tomb of a tradesman who has been dead at least fifteen hundred years ! The question whether ' apparet ' is the short for ' appari- toris' is to them what the Licinian Rogations and the Agrarian Laws were to their fathers ; what the Catholic Bill and the Reform Bill have "been to us. Yet, to indulge in a sort of reflection which I often fall into here, the day may come when London, then dwindled to the dimensions of the parish of St. Martin's, and sup- ported in its decay by the expenditure of wealthy Patagonians and New Zealanders, 2 may have no more important questions to decide than the arrangement of ' Afflictions sore long time I bore ' on the grave-stone of the wife of some baker in Houndsditch." ''November 26. At ten Colyar came, and we set out. 3 The day would furnish matter for a volume. We went to the English College, and walked about the cloisters ; interesting cloisters to an Englishman. There lie several of our native dignitaries who died at Rome before the Reformation. There lie, too, the bones of many Jacobites, honest martyrs to a worthless cause. We looked into the refectory, much like the halls of the small colleges at Cam- bridge in my time, that of Peterhouse for example, and smelling strongly of yesterday's supper, which strengthened the resemblance. We found the principal, Dr. Wiseman, a young ecclesiastic full of health and vigour, much such a ruddy, strapping divine as I re- member Whewell eighteen years ago, in purple vestments stand- ing in the cloister. With him was Lord Clifford, in the uniform of a Deputy Lieutenant of Devonshire, great from paying his court to Pope Gregory. He was extremely civil, and talked with gratitude of General Macaulay's kindness to him in Italy. Wiseman chimed 1 ' ' 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." 2 It may be worth mention that the celebrated New Zealander appears at the end of the third paragraph of the essay on Von Ranke's History of the Popes. 3 Mr. Colyar was an English Catholic gentleman, residing in Rome, who was particularly well-informed with regard to everything concerning the city, ancient and modern. He was in high favour with priests and prelates, and was therefore an invaluable acquaintance for English travellers ; at whose disposal be was very ready to place both his knowledge and his influence. 360 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vn. in. Indeed, I hear my uncle's praises wherever I go. Lord Clif- ford is not at all like my notion of a great Catholic Peer of old family. I always imagine such an one proud and stately, with the air of a man of rank, but not of fashion ; such a personage as Mrs. Inchbald's Catholic Lord in the Simple Story, or as Sir Walter's Lord Glenallan without the remorse. But Lord Clifford is all quicksilver. He talked about the Pope's reception of him and Lord Shrewsbury. His Holiness is in high health and spirits, and is a little more merry than strict formalists approve. Lord Shrews- bury says that he seems one moment to be a boy eager for play, and the next to be another Leo arresting the march of Attila. The poor King of Prussia, it seems, is Attila. We went into Dr. Wise- man's apartments, which are snugly furnished in the English style, and altogether are very like the rooms of a senior Fellow of Trinity. After visiting the library, where I had a sight of the identical copy of Fox's Book of Martyrs in which Parsons made notes for his answer, I took leave of my countrymen with great good-will. " We then crossed the river, and turned into the Vatican. I had walked a hundred feet through the library without the faintest notion that I was in it. No books, no shelves were visible. All was light and brilliant ; nothing but white, and red, and gold ; blazing arabesques, and paintings on ceiling and wall. And this was the Vatican Library ; a place which I used to think of with awe as a far sterner and darker Bodleian ! The books and manu- scripts are all in low wooden cases ranged round the walls ; and, as these cases are painted in light colours, they harmonise with the gay aspect of everything around them, and might be supposed to contain musical instruments, masquerade dresses, or china for the dances and suppers for which the apartments seem to be meant. They bore inscriptions, however, more suited to my notions of the place. " Thence I went through the Museum, quite distracted by the multitude and magnificence of the objects which it contained. The splendour of the ancient marbles, the alabaster, the huge masses of porphyry, the granites of various colours, made the whole seem like a fairy region. I wonder that nobody in this moneyed and luxurious age attempts to open quarries like those which supplied the ancients. The wealth of modern Europe is far greater than that of the Roman Empire ; and these things are highly valued, and bought at enormous prices. And yet we content ourselves with digging for them in the ruins of this old city and its suburbs, and never think of seeking them in the rocks from which the Romans extracted them. Africa and Greece were the parts of the world which afforded the most costly marbles ; and, perhaps, now that the French have settled in Africa, and that a Bavarian prince reigns in Greece, some researches may be made. " I looked into the apartments where the works in mosaic are carried on. A noble figure of Isaiah by Raphael had just been completed. We ought to have a similar workshop connected with the National Gallery. What a glorious vestibule to a palace might 1838-39- LORD MACAULAY. 361 be made with the Cartoons in mosaic covering the walls ! The best portraits of the great men of England, reproduced in the same material, beginning with Holbein's Wolsey and More, and coming down to Lawrence's Wellington and Canning, would be worthy decorations to the new Houses of Parliament. I should like to see the walls of St. Paul's encrusted with porphyry and verde antique, and the ceiling and dome glittering with mosaics and gold. " The Demosthenes is very noble. There can be no doubt about the face of Demosthenes. There are two busts of him in the Vatican, besides this statue. They are all exactly alike, being dis- tinguished by the strong projection of the upper lip. The face is lean, wrinkled, and haggard ; the expression singularly stern and intense. You see that he was no trifler, no jester, no voluptuary ; but a man whose soul was devoured by ambition, and constantly on the stretch. The soft, sleek, plump, almost sleepy, though hand- some, face of yEschines presents a remarkable contrast. I was much interested by the bust of Julius, with the head veiled. It is a most striking countenance, indeed. He looks like a man meant to be master of the world. The endless succession of these noble works bewildered me, and I went home almost exhausted with pleasurable excitement." In a letter written during the latter half of December, Macaulay gives his impressions of the Papal Government at greater length than in his diary. " Rome was full enough of English when I arrived, but now the crowd is insupportable. I avoid society, as much as I can without being churlish : for it is boyish to come to Italy for the purpose of mixing with the set, and hearing the tattle, to which one is accustomed in May- fair. The Government treats us very well The Pope winks at a Protestant chapel, and indulges us in a reading-room, where the Times and Morning Chronicle make their appearance twelve days after they are published in London. It is a pleasant city for an English traveller. He is not harassed or restrained. He lives as he likes, and reads what he likes, and suffers little from the vices of the administration ; but I can conceive nothing more insupportable than the situation of a layman who should be a subject of the Pope. In this government there is no avenue to distinction for any but priests. Every office of im- portance, diplomatic, financial,and judicial, is held by the clergy. A prelate, armed with most formidable powers, superintends the police of the streets. The military department is directed by a Commission, over which a Cardinal presides. Some petty magistracy is the highest promotion to which a lawyer can look forward ; and the greatest nobles of this singular State can expect nothing better than some place in the Pope's household, which may entitle them to walk in procession on the great 362 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vii. festivals. Imagine what England would be if all the mem- bers of Parliament, the Ministers, the Judges, the Ambas- sadors, the Governors of Colonies, the very Commanders-in- Chief and Lords of the Admiralty, were, without one exception, bishops or priests ; and if the highest post open to the noblest, wealthiest, ablest, and most ambitious layman were a Lordship of the Bedchamber ! And yet this would not come up to the truth, for our clergy can marry ; but here every man who takes a wife cuts himself off for ever from all dignity and power, and puts himself into the same position as a Catholic in Eng- land before the Emancipation Bill. The Church is therefore filled with men who are led into it merely by ambition, and who, though they might have been useful and respectable as laymen, are hypocritical and immoral as churchmen : while on the other hand the State suffers greatly, for you may guess what sort of Secretaries at War and Chancellors of the Exchequer are likely to be found among bishops and canons. Corruption infects all the public offices. Old women above, liars and cheats below that is the Papal administration. The States of the Pope are, I suppose, the worst governed in the civilised world ; and the imbecility of the police, the venality of the public servants, the desolation of the country, and the wretchedness of the people, force themselves on the observation of the most heedless traveller. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the population seems to consist chiefly of foreigners, priests, and paupers. Indeed, whenever you meet a man who is neither in canonicals nor rags, you may bet two to one that he is an Englishman." " Tuesday, December 4. I climbed the Janiculan Hill to the Convent of St. Onofrio, and went into the church. It contains only one object of interest ; a stone in the pavement, with the words ' Hie jacet Torquatus Tassus.' He died in this convent, just before the day fixed for his coronation at the Capitol. I was not quite in such raptures as I have heard other people profess. Tasso is not one of my favourites, either as a man or a poet. There is too little of the fine frenzy in his verses, and too much in his life. " I called on the American Consul. He was very civil, and, a la mode d'Ame'rique, talked to me about my writings. 1 I turned the conversation instantly. No topic, I am glad to say, is less to 1 An injury of this nature was still fresh in Macaulay's mind. Writing from Florence he says : " I do not scamper about with a note-book in my hand, and a cicerone gabbling in my ear ; but I go often and stay long at the places which interest me. I sit quietly an hour or two every morning in the finest churches, watching the ceremonial, and the demeanour of the congregation. I seldom pass less than an hour daily in the Tribune, where the Venus de Medici stands, surrounded by other master-pieces in sculpture and painting. Yester- day, as I was looking at some superb portraits by Raphael and Titian, a 1838-39- LORD MACAULAY. 363 my taste. I dined by myself, and read an execrably stupid novel called Tylney Hall. Why do I read such stuff? " " Saturday, December 8. No letters at the post-office ; the reading-room shut ; and the churches full. It is the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary ; a day held in prodigious honour by the Franciscans, who first, I believe, intro- duced this absurd notion, which even within the Catholic Church the Dominicans have always combated, and which the Council of Trent, if I remember Fra Paolo right, refused to pronounce orthodox. I spent much of the day over Smollett's History. It is exceed- ingly bad : detestably so. 1 I cannot think what had happened to him. His carelessness, partiality, passion, idle invective, gross igno- rance of facts, and crude general theories, do not surprise me much. But the style wherever he tries to be elevated, and wherever he attempts to draw a character, is perfectly nauseous ; which I cannot understand. He says of old Horace Walpole that he was an ambassador without dignity, and a plenipotentiary without address. I declare I would rather have a hand cut off than publish such a precious antithesis." " Tuesday, December 1 8. I stayed at home till late, reading and meditating. I have altered some parts of Horatius to my mind ; and I have thought a good deal during the last few days about my History. The great difficulty of a work of this kind is the begin- ning. How is it to be joined on to the preceding events ! Where am I to commence it ? I cannot plunge, slap dash, into the middle of events and characters. I cannot on the other hand, write a history of the whole reign of James the Second as a preface to the history of William the Third ; and, if I did, a history of Charles the Second would still be equally necessary as a preface to that of the reign of James the Second. I sympathise with the poor man who began the war of Troy ' gemino ab ovo.' But, after much consideration, I think that I can manage, by the help of an introductory chapter or two, to glide imperceptibly into the full current of my narrative. I am more and more in love with the Yankee clergyman introduced himself to me ; told me that he had heard who I was ; that he begged to thank me for my writings in the name of his country- men ; that he had himself reprinted my paper on Bacon ; that it had a great run in the States ; and that my name was greatly respected there. I bowed, thanked him, and stole away ; leaving the Grand Duke's pictures a great deal sooner than I had intended." The same scene, with the same actors, was repeated on the next day beneath the frown of the awful Duke who sits aloft in the Chapel of the Medici, adjoining the Church of San Lorenzo ; whither Macaulay had repaired " to snatch a Mass, as one of Sir Walter's heroes says." 1 Even Charles Lamb, who was far too chivalrous to leave a favourite author in the lurch, can find nothing to say in defence of Smollett's History except a delightful, but perfectly gratuitous, piece of impertinence to Hume. " Smollett they " (the Scotch) "have neither forgotten nor forgiven for his de- lineation of Rory and his companion upon their first introduction to our metro- polis. Speak of Smollett as a great genius, and they will retort upon you Hume's History compared with his Continuation of it. What if the historian had continued Humphrey Clinker?" 364 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. v. subject. I really think that posterity will not willingly let my book die. " To St. Peter's again. This is becoming a daily visit" Rome : December 19, 1838. Dear Lord Lansdowne I have received your kind letter, and thank you for it I have now had ample time to reflect on the determination which I expressed to Lord Melbourne and Rice ; and I am every day more and more satisfied that the course which I have taken is the best for myself, and the best also for the Government. If I thought it right to follow alto- gether my own inclinations, I should entirely avoid public life. But I feel that these are not times for flinching from the Whig banner. I feel that at this juncture no friend of toleration and of temperate liberty is justified in withholding his support from the Ministers ; and I think that, in the present unprecedented and inexplicable scarcity of Parliamentary talent among the young men of England, a little of that talent may be of as much service as far greater powers in times more fertile of eloquence. I would therefore make some sacrifice of ease, leisure, and money, in order to serve the Government in the House of Commons. But I do not think that public duty at all requires me to overcome the dislike which I feel for official life. On the contrary, my duty and inclination are here on one side. For I am certain that, as an independent Member of Parliament, I should have far more weight than as Judge Advo- cate. It is impossible for me to be ignorant of my position in the world, and of the misconstructions to which it exposes me. Entering Parliament as Judge Advocate, I should be considered as a mere political adventurer. My speeches might be compli- mented as creditable rhetorical performances ; but they would never produce the sort of effect which I have seen produced by very rude sentences stammered by such men as Lord Spencer and Lord Ebrington. If I enter Parliament as a placeman, nobody will believe, what nevertheless is the truth, that I am quite as independent, quite as indifferent to salary, as the Duke of Northumberland can be. As I have none of that authority which belongs to large fortune and high rank, it is absolutely necessary to my comfort, and will be greatly conducive to my usefulness, that I should have the authority which belongs to proved disinterestedness. I should also, as a Member of Parliament not in office, have leisure for other pursuits, which I cannot bear to think of quitting, and which you kindly say you do not wish me to quit. A life of literary repose would be most to my own taste. Of my literary repose I am, however, 1838-39- LORD MACAU LAY. 365 willing to sacrifice exactly as much as public duty requires rne to sacrifice ; but I will sacrifice no more ; and by going into Parliament without office I both make a smaller personal sacrifice, and do more service to the public, than by taking office. I hope that you will think these reasons satisfactory ; for you well know that, next to my own approbation, it would be my first wish to have yours. I have been more delighted than I can express by Italy, and above all by Rome. I had no notion that an excitement so powerful and so agreeable, still untried by me, was to be found in the world. I quite agree with you in thinking that the first impression is the weakest ; and that time, familiarity, and reflection, which destroy the charm of so many objects, heighten the attractions of this wonderful place. I hardly know whether I am more interested by the old Rome or by the new Rome by the monuments of the extraordinary empire which has perished, or by the institutions of the still more ex- traordinary empire which, after all the shocks which it has sus- tained, is still full of life and of perverted energy. If there were not a single ruin, fine building, picture, or statue in Rome, I should think myself repaid for my journey by having seen the head-quarters of Catholicism, and learned something of the nature and effect of the strange Brahminical government established in the Ecclesiastical State. Have you read Von Ranke's History of the Papacy since the Reformation ? I have owed much of my pleasure here to what I learned from him. Rome is full of English. We could furnish exceedingly respectable Houses of Lords and Commons. There are at present twice as many coroneted carriages in the Piazza di Spagna as in St James's parish. Ever, my dear Lord, Yours most faithfully T. B. MACAULAY. " Saturday, December 22. The Canadian insurrection seems to be entirely crushed. I fear that the victorious caste will not be satisfied without punishments so rigorous as would dishonour the English Government in the eyes of all Europe, and in our own eyes ten years hence. I wish that Ministers would remember that the very people who bawl for wholesale executions now will be the first to abuse them for cruelty when this excitement is gone by. The Duke of Cumberland in Scotland did only what all England was clamouring for ; but all England changed its mind, and the Duke became unpopular for yielding to the cry which was set up in a moment of fear and resentment. As to hanging men by the hundred, it really is not to be thought of with patience. Ten or twelve examples well selected would be quite sufficient, together with 366 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. VII. the slaughter and burning which have already taken place. If the American prisoners are transported, or kept on the roads at hard labour, their punishment will do more good than a great wholesale execution. The savage language of some of the newspapers, both in Canada and London, makes me doubt whether we are so far beyond the detestable Carlists arid Christines of Spain as I had hoped. " I read a good deal of Gibbon. He is grossly partial to the pagan persecutors ; quite offensively so. His opinion of the Christian fathers is very little removed from mine ; but his excuses for the tyranny of their oppressors give to his book the character which Porson describes. 1 He writes like a man who had received some personal injury from Christianity, and wished to be revenged on it, and all its professors. I dined at home, and read some more of Pelham in the evening. I know few things of the kind so good as the character of Lord Vincent." Macaulay, who had not yet lost his taste for a show, took full advantage of his presence at Rome during the Christmas festivals. He pronounced the procession in St. Peter's to be the finest thing of the kind that he had ever seen : but it would be unfair on him to expose to general criticism his off-hand description of a pageant, which no written sentences, however carefully arranged and polished, could depict one-tenth as vividly as the colours in which Roberts loved to paint the swarming aisles of a stately cathedral. And yet, perhaps, not even Titian himself (although in a picture at the Louvre, according to Mr. Ruskin, he has put a whole scheme of dogmatic theology into the backs of a row of bishops) could find means to represent on canvas the sentiments which suggest themselves to the spec- tators of this the most impressive of earthly ceremonies. " I was deeply moved," says Macaulay, " by reflecting on the im- mense antiquity of the Papal dignity, which can certainly boast of a far longer, clear, known, and uninterrupted succession than any dignity in the world ; linking together, as it does, the two great ages of human civilisation. Our modern feudal kings are mere upstarts compared with the successors in regular order, 1 The passage alluded to occurs in the Preface to the letters to Archdeacon Travis, which Macaulav regarded as a work of scholarship second only to Bentley's Phalaris. "His" (Gibbon's) "reflections are often just and pro found. He pleads eloquently for the rights of mankind, and the duty of tole- ration ; nor does his humanity ever slumber unless when women are ravished or the Christians persecuted.* * t He often makes, when he cannot readily find, an occasion to insult our religion ; which he hates so cordially that he might seem to revenge some personal insult. Such is his eagerness in the cause, that he stoops to the most despicable pun, or to the most awkward perversion of language, for the pleasure of turning the Scriptures into ribaldry, or of calling Jesus an impostor. " 1838-39- LORD MACAULAY. 367 not, to be sure, of Peter, but of Sylvester and Leo the Great" There was one person among the bystanders, through whose brain thoughts of this nature were doubtless coursing even more rapidly than through Macaulay's own. " On Christmas eve I found Gladstone in the throng ; and I accosted him ; as we had met, though we had never been introduced to each other. He received my advances with very great empressement indeed, and we had a good deal of pleasant talk." " December 29. I went to Torlonia's to get money for my journey. What a curious effect it has to see a bank in a palace, among orange trees, colonnades, marble statues, and all the signs of the most refined luxury ! It carries me back to the days of the merchant princes of Florence ; when philosophers, poets, and painters crowded to the house of Cosmo de' Medici. I drew one hundred pounds worth of scudi, and had to lug it through the streets in a huge canvas bag, muttering with strong feeling Pope's ' Blest paper credit.' I strolled through the whole of the vast collection of the Vatican with still increasing pleasure. The Communion of St. Jerome seems to me finer and finer every time that I look at it ; and the Transfiguration has at last made a complete conquest of me. In spite of all the faults of the plan, I feel it to be the first picture in the world. Then to St. Peter's for the last time, and rambled about it quite sadly. I could not have believed that it would have pained me so much to part from stone and mortar." ''January i, 1839. I shall not soon forget the three days which I passed between Rome and Naples. As I descended the hill of Velletri, the huge Pontine Marsh was spread out below like a sea. I soon got into it ; and, thank God, soon got out of it. If the Government has not succeeded in making this swamp salubrious, at any rate measures have been taken for enabling people to stay in it as short a time as possible. The road is raised, dry, and well paved ; as hard as a rock, and as straight as an arrow. It reminded me of the road in the Pilgrim's Progress, running through the Slough of Despond, the quagmire in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and the Enchanted Land. At the frontier the custom- house officer begged me to give him a place in my carriage to Mola. I refused, civilly, but firmly. I gave him three crowns not to plague me by searching my baggage, which indeed was protected by a lascia passare. He pocketed the three crowns, but looked very dark and sullen at my refusal to accept his company. Precious fellow ; to think that a public functionary to whom a little silver is a bribe is fit society for an English gentleman ! " I had a beautiful view of the Bay of Gaeta, with Vesuvius at an immense distance. The whole country is most interesting histori- cally. They pretend to point out on the road the exact spot where Cicero was murdered. I place little more faith in these localities 368 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vn. than in the head of St. Andrew or the spear of Longinus ; but it is certain that hereabouts the event took place. The inn at Mola, in which I slept, is called the Villa di Cicerone. The chances are in- finite that none of the ruins now extant belonged to Cicero ; but it pleased me to think how many great Romans, when Rome was what England is now, loved to pass their occasional holidays on this beautiful coast. I travelled across the low country through which Horace's Liris flows; by the marshes of Minturnae, where Marius hid himself from the vengeance of Sulla ; over the field where Gonsalvo de Cordova gained the great victory of Garigliano. The plain of Capua seemed to retain all its old richness. Since I have been in Italy, I have often thought it very strange that the English have never introduced the olive into any of those vast regions which they have colonised. I do not believe that there is an olive tree in all the United States, or in South Africa, or in Australasia. " On my journey through the Pontine Marshes I finished Bulwer's Alice. It affected me much, and in a way in which I have not been affected by novels these many years. Indeed, I generally avoid all novels which are said to have much pathos. The suffer- ing which they produce is to me a very real suffering, and of that I have quite enough without them. I think of Bulwer, still, as I have always thought. He has considerable talent and eloquence ; but he is fond of writing about what he only half understands, or under- stands not at all. His taste is bad ; and bad from a cause which lies deep and is not to be removed : from want of soundness, manli- ness, and simplicity of mind. This work, though better than any thing of his that I have read, is far too long." * " Thursday, January 3. I must say that the accounts which I had heard of Naples are very incorrect. There is far less beggary than at Rome, and far more industry. Rome is a city of priests. It reminded me of the towns in Palestine which were set apart to be inhabited by the Levites. Trade and agriculture seem only to be tolerated as subsidiary to devotion. Men are allowed to work ; be- cause, unless somebody works, nobody can live ; and, if nobody lives, nobody can pray. But, as soon as you enter Naples, you notice a striking contrast. It is the difference between Sunday and Monday. Here the business of civil life is evidently the great thing, and religion is the accessory. A poet might introduce Naples as Martha, and Rome as Mary. A Catholic may think Mary's the better employment ; but even a Catholic, much more a Protestant, would prefer the table of Martha. I must ask many questions about these matters. At present, my impressions are very favourable to Naples. i < Windsor ] Maconkey, Right Honourable T. B. 503 MurderoftheBabesintheTower. { ^jj?^. 1 Rfeht ""' 504 A little Agitation . . . O'Carroll, Daniel. M.R.I. A. Fancy, I say, such names as these figuring in the Catalogue of the Academy J " 1839-41- LORD MACAULAY. 389 usual in the columns of a leading newspaper, when the subject of attack is a man of acknowledged eminence, and blameless character. He was just now less disposed than ever to trouble him- self about the justice, or injustice, of the treatment which he met with from the outside world. An event had occurred, most unexpectedly, which opened to him a long and secure prospect of domestic happiness. At the end of the year 1839, his brother-in-law, Mr. Charles Trevelyan, was appointed to the Assistant Secretaryship of the Treasury ; one of the few posts in the English Civil Service which could fully compensate a man of energy and public spirit for renouncing the intensely interesting work, and the rare opportunities of distinction, pre sented by an Indian career. " This event," writes my mother, " of course made England our home during your uncle's life. He could never afterwards speak of it without emotion. Throughout the autumn of 1839, his misery at the prospect of our return to India was the most painful and hourly trial ; and, when the joy and relief came upon us, it restored the spring and flow of his spirits. He took a house in Great George Street, and insisted on our all living together, and a most happy year 1840 was." Like other happy years, it was a busy year too. Macaulay, who had completely laid aside his History for the present, de- voted his powers to his official work. He conducted the busi- ness of his department in Parliament with the unobtrusive assiduity, and the unvaried courtesy, by which a prudent Minister may do so much to shorten discussion and to depre- cate opposition. And, indeed, the spirit of the age was such that he had every chance of an easy life. The House of Com- mons of 1840 spent upon the army very little of its own time, or of the nation's money. The paucity and insignificance of the questions, which it fell to Macaulay's lot to master, might well rouse the envy of a Secretary of State for War in these troubled days of alternate military reorganisation and reaction. He passed his Estimates, which were of an amount to make a modern reformer's mouth water, after a short grumble from Hume, and a single division, in which that implacable econo- mist took with him into the lobby hardly as many adherents as the Government asked for millions. Mr. Charles Macaulay, who at this time was his brother's private secretary, is the authority for an anecdote which is worth recording. He re- members being under the gallery with Sulivan, the Assistant Secretary at War, and with the Estimate clerk of the War Office, when Macaulay was submitting to the House his first Army 390 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. vin. Estimate. In the course of his speech he made a statement to which the Estimate clerk demurred. " That is a mistake," said the clerk. "No, it isn't," said Sulivan, "for a hundred pounds ! I never knew him make a blunder in anything which he had once got up ; " and it turned out that Sulivan was right. On the 1 4th of March, 1840, Macaulay writes to Mr. Ellis : " I have got through my estimates with flying colours ; made a long speech of figures and details without hesitation, or mistake, of any sort ; stood catechising on all sorts of questions ; and got six millions of public money in the course of an hour or two. I rather like the sort of work, and I have some aptitude for it I find business pretty nearly enough to occupy all my time ; and, if I have a few minutes to myself, I spend them with my sister and niece ; so that, except while I am dressing and undressing, I get no reading at all. I do not know but that it is as well for me to live thus for a time. I became too mere a bookworm in India, and on my voyage home. Exer- cise, they say, assists digestion ; and it may be that some months of hard official and Parliamentary work may make my studies more nourishing." But Macaulay's course in Parliament was not all plain-sail- ing when he ventured from the smooth waters of the War Office into the broken seas of general politics. The session of 1840 had hardly commenced, when Sir John Yarde Buller moved a Resolution professing want of confidence in the Min- istry, a motion which the Tories supported with all their strength both of vote and lung. For the first, and, as he him- self willingly confessed, for the last time in his life Macaulay did not get a fair hearing. On the second night of the debate, Sir James Graham, speaking with the acrimony which men of a certain character affect when they are attacking old allies, by a powerful invective, spiced with allusions to the Windsor Castle address, had goaded the Opposition ranks into a fit of somewhat insolent animosity. When Macaulay rose to reply, the indications of that animosity were so manifest that he had almost to commence his remarks with an appeal for tolerance. " I trust," he said, " that the first Cabinet Minister who, when the question is, whether the Government be or be not worthy of confidence, offers himself in debate, will find some portion of that generosity and good feeling which once distinguished English gentlemen." The words "first Cabinet Minister" were no sooner out of his mouth than the honourable gentle- men opposite, choosing wilfully to misconstrue those words as ii he were putting forward an absurd claim to the leading place 1839-41- LORD MACAULAV. 391 in the Cabinet, burst forth into a storm of ironical cheering which would have gone far to disconcert O'Connell. Macau- lay, (who to speak his best, required the sympathy, or, at any rate, the indulgence of his audience,) said all that he had to say, but said it without spirit or spontaneity : and did not suc- ceed in maintaining the enthusiasm either of himself, or his hearers, at the too high-pitched level of the only one of his Parliamentary efforts which could in any sense be described as a failure. 1 Some days afterwards he met Sir James Graham in the Park, who expressed a hope that nothing which appeared rude or offensive had escaped his lips. " Not at all," said Mac- aulay ; " only I think that your speech would have been still more worthy of you, if you had not adopted the worn-out newspaper jests about my Windsor letter." On the 7th of April, Sir James himself brought forward a vote of censure on the Government for having led the country into war with China ; and Macaulay, who again followed him in the debate, achieved a brilliant and undoubted success in an oration crowned by a noble tribute to the majesty of the British flag, quite incomparable as an example of that sort of rhetoric which goes straight to the heart of a British House of Com- mons. 2 When they met again, Sir James said to him : " In our last encounter none but polished weapons were used on both sides ; and I am afraid that public opinion rather inclines 1 In 1853 Macaulay was correcting his speeches for publication. On the 28th of July of that year he writes in his journal : " I worked hard, but with- out much heart ; for it was that unfortunate speech on Buller's motion in 1840 ; one of the few unlucky things in a lucky life. I cannot conceive why it failed. It is far superior to many of my speeches which have succeeded. But, as old Demosthenes said, the power of oratory is as much in the ear as in the tongue." * " I was much touched, and so, I dare say, were many other gentlemen, by a passage in one of Captain Elliot's despatches. I mean that passage in which he describes his arrival at the factory in the moment of extreme danger. As soon as he landed he was surrounded by his countrymen, all in an agony of distress and despair. The first thing which he did was to order the British flag to be brought from his boat, and planted in the balcony. The sight imme- diately revived the hearts of those who had a minute before given themselves up for lost. It was natural that they should look up with hope and confidence to that victorious flag. For it reminded them that they belonged to a country unaccustomed to defeat, to submission, or to shame ; to a country which had exacted such reparation for the wrongs of her children as had made the ears of all who heard it to tingle ; to a country which had made the Dey of Algiers humble himself to the dust before her insulted consul ; to a country which had avenged the victims of the Black Hole on the field of Plassey ; to a country which had not degenerated since the great Protector vowed that he would make the name of Englishman as much respected as ever had been the name of Roman citizen. They knew that, surrounded as they were by enemies, and separated by great oceans and continents from all help, not a hair of their heads would be harmed with impunity." 392 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vm. to the belief that you had the best of it." " As to the polished weapons," said Macaulay, " my temptations are not so mislead- ing as yours. You never wrote a Windsor letter." His adversaries paid him a high compliment when they were reduced to make so much of a" charge, which was the gravest that malice itself ever brought against him in his character of a public man. Throughout the sessions of 1840, and 1841, a series of confused and angry discussions took place over a multitude of bills dealing with the Registration of Voters in Ireland, which were brought forward from every quarter of the House, and with every possible diversity of view. In these debates Mac- aulay gave marked proof of having profited by the severe legal training, which was not the least valuable and enduring reward of his Indian labours. Holding his own against Sugden in technical argument, he enforced his points with his custo- mary wealth of language and illustration, much of which un- fortunately perished between his lips and the reporters' gallery. " Almost every clause of this Bill which is designed for keeping out the wrongful, acts just as effectually against the rightful, claimant Let me suppose the case of a man of great wealth, and of imperious, obstinate, and arbitrary temper : one of those men who thinks much of the rights of property, and little of its duties. Let me suppose that man willing to spend six or seven thousand a year in securing the command of a county, an ambition, as every one knows, not impossible even in England. I will not mention any recent transaction ; nor do I wish to mix up personalities with this serious debate ; but no one is ignorant how a certain man now dead, provoked by the opposition he received in a certain town, vowed that he would make the grass grow in its streets, and how that vow was kept. Another great person ejected four hundred voters in one shire, and entered two hundred and twenty-five civil actions. Such a man could easily command an Irish county. It would only be a picture the less in his gallery, or an antique gem the less in his collection." The conflict was not always carried on with such scrupulous abstinence from personalities. " Thursday, June ir. I went from the Office to the House, which was engaged upon Stanley's Irish Registration Bill. The night was very stormy. I have never seen such unseemly demeanour, or heard such scurrilous language in Parliament. Lord Norreys was whistling, and making all sorts of noises. Lord Maidstone was so ill-mannered that I hope he was drunk. At last, after much grossly indecent conduct, at which Lord Eliot expressed 1839-41- LORD MACAU LAY. 393 his disgust to me, a furious outbreak took place. O'Connell was so rudely interrupted that he used the expression ' beastly bellowings.' Then rose such an uproar as no O. P. mob at Covent Garden Theatre, no crowd of Chartists in front of a hustings, ever equalled. Men on both sides stood up, shook their fists, and bawled at the top of their voices. Freshfield, who was in the chair, was strangely out of his element. Indeed, he knew his business so little that, when first he had to put a question, he fancied himself at Exeter Hall, or the Crown and Anchor, and said : ' As many as are of that opinion please to signify the same by holding up their hands.' He was quite unable to keep the smallest order when the storm came. O'Connell raged like a mad bull ; and our people I for one while regretting and condemning his violence, thought it much extenuated by the provocation. Charles Buller spoke with talent, as he always does ; and with earnestness, dignity, and propriety, which he scarcely ever does. A short and most amusing scene passed between O'Connell and Lord Maidstone, which in the tumult escaped the observation of many, but which I watched carefully. ' If,' said Lord Maidstone, ' the word beastly is retracted, I shall be satisfied. If not, I shall not be satisfied.' ' I do not care whether the noble Lord be satis- fied or not.' ' I wish you would give me satisfaction.' ' I advise the noble Lord to carry his liquor meekly.' At last the tumult ended from absolute physical weariness. It was past one, and the steady bellowers of the Opposition had been howling from six o'clock with little interruption. I went home with a headache, and not in high spirits. But how different my frame of mind from what it was two years ago ! How profoundly domestic happiness has altered my whole way of looking at life ! I have my share of the anxieties, and vexations, of ambition ; but it is only a secondary passion now." November 1839. Dear Napier, I send back the paper on Clive. Remember to let me have a revise. I have altered the last sentence, so as to make it clearer and more harmonious ; but I cannot consent to leave out the well-earned compliment to my dear old friend, Lord William Bentinck, of whom Victor Jacquemont said, as truly as wittily, that he was William Penn on the throne of the Mogul, and at the head of two hundred thousand soldiers. 1 Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Lord William Bentinck, since his return from India, had taken an active, and sometimes even a turbid, part in politics as member for Glasgow. Those who will turn to the last words of 1 "To the warrior, history will assign a place in the same rank with Lucullus and Trajan. Nor will she deny to the reformer a share of that venera- tion with which France cherishes the memory of Turgot, and with which the latest generations of Hindoos will contemplate the statue of Lord William Bentinck." 394 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. via. the Essay on Lord Give, will understand Mr Napier's uneasi- ness at the notion of placing on so conspicuous a literary pede- stal the effigy of one who, for the time, had come to be regarded as the Radical representative of a large Scotch constituency is apt to be regarded during a period of Conservative reaction. London : October 14, 1840. Dear Napier, I am glad that you are satisfied. 1 I dare say that there will be plenty of abuse ; but about that I have long ceased to care one straw. I have two plans, indeed three, in my head. Two might, I think, be executed for the next number. Gladstone advertises another book about the Church. That subject belongs to me ; particularly as he will very probably say something concerning my former article. Leigh Hunt has brought out an edition of Congreve, Wycherley, and Farquhar. I see it in the windows of the book- sellers' shops ; but I have not looked at it. I know their plays, and the literary history of their time, well enough to make an amusing paper. Collier's controversy with Congreve, on the subject of the Drama, deserves to be better known than it is ; and there is plenty of amusing and curious anecdote about Wycherley. If you will tell Longman to send rne the book, I will see whether I can give you a short, lively, article on it My third plan cannot yet be executed. It is to review Capefigue's history of the Consulate and Empire of Napoleon. A character both of the man, and of the government, such as the subject deserves, has not yet, in my opinion, appeared. But there are still two volumes of Capefigue's book to come, if not more ; and, though he writes with wonderful rapidity, he can hardly bring them out till the beginning of next year. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. London : October 29, 1840. Dear Napier, I have received Hunt's book, and shall take it down with me to Southampton, whither I hope to be able to make a short trip. I shall give it well to Hunt about Jeremy Collier, to whom he is scandalously unjust. I think Jeremy one of the greatest public benefactors in our history. Poor Lord Holland I It is vain to lament. A whole gen- eration is gone to the grave with him. While he lived, all the great orators and statesmen of the last generation were living 1 This refers to the article on Von Ranke's History of the Popes. 1839-4' LORD MACAU LAY. 395 too. What a store of historical information he has carried away ! But his kindness, generosity, and openness of heart, were more valuable than even his fine accomplishments. I loved him dearly. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. London : November 13, 1840. Dear Napier, Yesterday evening I received Gladstone's book, and read it I do not think that it would be wise to review it. I observed in it very little that had any reference to politics, and very little indeed that might not be consistently said by a supporter of the Voluntary system. It is, in truth, a theological treatise ; and I have no mind to engage in a controversy about the nature of the sacraments, the operation of holy orders, the visibility of the Church, and such points of learning ; except when they are connected, as in his former work they were con- nected, with questions of government. I have no disposition to split hairs about the spiritual reception of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, or about baptismal regenera- tion. I shall try to give you a paper on a very different sub- ject, Wycherley, and the other good-for-nothing fellows, whose indecorous wit Leigh Hunt has edited. I see that a Life of Warren Hastings is just coming out. I mark it for mine. I will try to make as interesting an article, though I fear not so flashy, as that on Clive. The state of things at Edinburgh has greatly vexed me. Craig advises me not to go down, at least for some time. But, if I do not go soon, I shall not be able to go at all this year. What do you think about the matter ? Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. There was, indeed, little to tempt him northwards. All Scotland was in a ferment between two great controversies; and the waves of religious passion, still surging with the excitement of the Church Extension agitation, already felt the first gusts of the rising storm which was soon to rage over the more mo- mentous question of Patronage. Lord Melbourne and his col- leagues were ignorant of the strength and meaning either of the one movement or the other. Incapable of leading the opinion of the country, they meddled from time to time only to make discords more pronounced, and difficulties more insoluble, than ever. The nation was split up into ill-defined, but not, on that account, less hostile, camps. On the platform and at the 396 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vin. polling-booth, in the pulpit, the press, the presbyteries, and the law courts, churchmen were arrayed against dissenters, and against each other. The strife was one whose issues could never be finally determined, except in accordance with prin- ciples which Paisley weavers and Perthshire shepherds were beginning to understand much more clearly than ever did Her Majesty's Ministers. It was the general opinion of Macaulay's friends at Edinburgh that he would do well to avoid exposing himself to the blows, which were sure to fall about the head of a Parliamentary representative, at a time when his constituents were engaged in such fierce cross-fighting. He certainly con- sulted his comfort, and possibly his political interests, when he decided on refraining from an interference which would have offended most parties and satisfied none. London : December 8, 1840. Dear Napier, I shall work at my article on Hunt whenever I have a leisure hour, and shall try to make it amusing to lovers of literary gossip. I will not plague you with arguments about the Eastern question. My own opinion has long been made up. Unless England meant to permit a virtual partition of the Ottoman Empire between France and Russia, she had no choice but to act as she has acted. Had the treaty of July not been signed, Nicholas would have been really master of Constantinople, and Thiers of Alexandria. The treaty once made, I never would have consented to flinch from it, whatever had been the danger. I am satisfied that the War party in France is insatiable and unappeasable ; that concessions would only have strengthened and emboldened it ; and that, after stooping to the lowest humiliations, we should soon have had to fight without allies, and at every disadvantage. The policy which has been followed I believe to be not only a just and honourable, but eminently a pacific policy. Whether the peace of the world will long be preserved I do not pretend to say ; but I firmly hold that the best chance of preserving it was to make the treaty of July, and, having made it, to execute it resolutely. For my own part, I will tell you plainly that, if the course of events had driven Palmerston to resign, I would have resigned with him, though I stood alone. Look at what the late Ministers of Louis Philippe have avowed with respect to the Balearic Islands. Were such designs ever proclaimed before, except in a crew of pirates, or a den of robbers ? Look at Barrot's speeches about England. Is it for the sake of such friendships as this that our country is to abdicate her rank, and sink into a dependency ? 1839-41- LORD MACAU LAV. 397 I like war quite as little as Sir William Molesworth, or Mr. Fon- blanque. It is foolish and wicked to bellow for war, merely for v/ar's sake, like the rump of the Mountain at Paris. I would never make offensive war. I would never offer to any other power a provocation which might be a fair ground for war. But I never would abstain from doing what I had a clear right to do, because a neighbour chooses to threaten me with an unjust war ; first, because I believe that such a policy would, in the end, inevitably produce war ; and secondly, because I think war, though a very great evil, by no means so great an evil as subjugation, and national humiliation. In the present case, I think the course taken by the Government unexceptionable. If Guizot prevails, that is to say, if reason, justice, and public law prevail, we shall have no war. If the writers of the National, and the singers of the Marseillaise, prevail, we can have no peace. At whatever cost, at whatever risk, these banditti must be put down ; or they will put down all commerce, civilisation, order, and the inde- pendence of nations. Of course what I write to you is confidential : not that I should hesitate to proclaim the substance of what I have said on the hustings, or in the House of Commons; but because I do not measure my words in pouring myself out to a friend. But I have run on too long, and should have done better to have given the last half-hour to Wycherley. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. London : January n, 1841. Dear Napier, As to my paper on the Dramatists, if you are content, so am I. I set less value on it than on anything I have written since I was a boy. I have hardly opened Gleig's book on Warren Hastings, and I cannot yet judge whether I can review it before it is com- plete. I am not quite sure that so vast a subject may not bear two articles. The scene of the first would lie principally in India. The Rohilla War, the disputes of Hastings and his Council, the character of Francis, the death of Nuncomar, the rise of the Empire of Hyder, the seizure of Benares, and many other interesting matters, would furnish out such a paper. In the second, the scene would be changed to Westminster. There we should have the Coalition ; the India Bill ; the im- peachment ; the characters of all the noted men of that time, from Burke, who managed the prosecution of Hastings, down to the wretched Tony Pasquin, who first defended, and then 398 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vill. libelled him. I hardly know a story so interesting, and of such various interest. And the central figure is in the highest degree striking and majestic. I think Hastings, though far from faultless, one of the greatest men that England ever pro- duced. He had pre-eminent talents for government, and great literary talents too ; fine taste, a princely spirit, and heroic equa- nimity in the midst of adversity and danger. He was a man for whom nature had done much of what the Stoic philosophy pretended, and only pretended, to do for its disciples. " Mens aequa in arduis" is the inscription under his picture in the Government House at Calcutta ; and never was there a more appropriate motto. This story has never been told as well as it deserves. Mill's account of Hastings's administration is indeed very able ; the ablest part, in my judgment, of his work ; but it is dry. As to Gleig, unless he has greatly im- proved since he wrote Sir Thomas Munro's life, he will make very little of his subject. I am not so vain as to think that I can do it full justice; but the success of my paper on Clivehas emboldened me, and I have the advantage of being in hourly intercourse with Trevelyan, who is thoroughly well acquainted with the languages, manners, and diplomacy of the Indian Courts. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. London : April 26, 1841. Dear Napier, I have arranged with Leigh Hunt for a paper on the Colmans, which will be ready for the July number. He has written some very pretty lines on the Queen, who has been very kind to him, both by sending him money, and by coun- tenancing his play. It has occurred to me that, if poor Southey dies, (and his best friends must now pray for his death,) Leigh Hunt might very fitly have the laurel, if that absurd custom is to be kept up ; or, at all events, the pension and the sack. I wish that you could move Rogers to write a short charac- ter of Lord Holland for us. Nobody knew his house so well ; and Rogers is no mean artist in prose. l As to Lord Cardigan, he has deserved some abuse ; he has had ten times as much as he deserved ; and, as I do not choose to say a word more than I think just against him, I come in for 1 In a letter of May 4th, 1841, Macaulay writes : " Lady Holland is so earnest with me to review her husband's ' Protests in the House of Lords ' that I hardly know what to do. I cannot refuse her." 1839-41. LORD MACAU LAY. 399 a share. You may easily suppose that it troubles me very little. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. During the session of 1841 Macaulay, as Secretary at War, had very little to do in the House of Commons except to de- fend Lord Cardigan ; but that in itself was quite sufficient occupation for one Minister. Mr. Kinglake, who enjoyed large, and even over-abundant, opportunities for studying his Lord- ship, has described -his character in a passage almost too well known for quotation. " Having no personal ascendency, and no habitual consideration for the feelings of others, he was not, of course, at all qualified to exert easy rule over English gentle- men. There surely was cruelty in the idea of placing human beings under the military control of an officer at once so arbi- trary and so narrow ; but the notion of such a man having been able to purchase for himself a right to hold Englishmen in military subjection is, to my mind, revolting." Lord Cardigan bought himself up from Cornet to Lieutenant-Colonel in the course of seven years ; and by an expenditure, it is said, of four times as many thousand pounds. So open-handed a dealer had, of course, the pick of the market. He selected a fine cavalry regiment, which he proceeded to drag through a slough of scandal, favouritism, petty tyranny, and intrigue, into that glare of notoriety which to men of honour is even more painful than the misery which a commanding officer of Lord Cardigan's type has such unbounded power of inflicting upon his subordinates. Within the space of a single twelvemonth one of his captains was cashiered for writing him a challenge ; he sent a coarse and insulting verbal message to another, and then punished him with prolonged arrest, because he respect- fully refused to shake hands with the officer who had been em- ployed to convey the affront ; he fought a duel with a lieutenant who had left the corps, and shot him through the body ; and he flogged a soldier on Sunday, between the services, on the very spot where, half an hour before, the man's comrades had been mustered for public worship. The Secretary at War had to put the best face he could on these ugly stories. When it was pro- posed to remove Lord Cardigan from the command of his regiment, Macaulay took refuge in a position which he justly regarded as impregnable. " Honourable gentlemen should be- ware how they take advantage of the unpopularity of an indi- vidual to introduce a precedent which, if once established, would lead to the most fatal effects to the whole of our military 400 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vm. system, and work a great injustice to all officers in Her Majesty's service. What is the case with officers in the army ? They buy their commissions at a high price, the interest of which would be very nearly equal to the pay they receive ; they devote the best years of their lives to the service, and are liable to be sent to the most unhealthy parts of the globe, where their health, and sometimes their lives, fall a sacrifice. Is it to be ex- pected that men of spirit and honour will consent to enter this service, if they have not, at least, some degree of security for the permanence of their situations : " in other words, if they are not allowed to do as they will with their own. Meanwhile the political crisis was approaching its agony. The Whig Government was now in such a plight that it could neither stand with decency nor fall with grace. Their great measure of the year, the Irish Registration Bill, narrowly escaped the perils of a second reading, and was ingloriously wrecked in Committee. Their last year's deficit, of some- thing under one million, had this year grown to something over two ; and they could no longer rely upon the wave of popular favour to tide them over their troubles. All the enthusiasm for progress which still survived had been absorbed into the ranks of those fiery reformers, who were urging the crusade against the Corn Laws under the guidance of leaders who sate elsewhere than on the Treasury bench, or did not sit in Parliament at all. As far back as 1839 Macaulay was writing in his diary : "The cry for free-trade in corn seems to be very formidable. The Times has joined in it. I was quite sure that it would be so. If the Ministers play their game well, they may now either triumph completely or retire with honour. They have excellent cards, if they know how to use them." Dire necessity had gradually brought even the most timid members of the Cabinet to acquiesce in these heroic sentiments, and the Whigs at length made up their minds to come before the country in the charac- ter of Freetraders. In a letter to Mr. Napier, on the 3oth day of April, 1841, Macaulay says : "All the chances of our party depend on to-night. We shall play double or quits. I do not know what to expect ; and as far as I am concerned I rather hope for a defeat. I pine for liberty and ease, freedom of speech, and freedom of pen. I have all that I want ; a small competence, domestic happiness, good health and spirits. If at forty I can get from under this yoke, I shall not easily be in- duced to bear it again." So wrote the Secretary at War in the morning ; and, at four o'clock in the afternoon of the same day, Lord John Russell gave notice that, on the 3ist of May, he should move that the House resolve itself into a Corn* mittee to consider the Acts relating to the trade in corn, 1839-41- LORD MA CAUL AY. 401 But it was too late to make a change of front in the face of the greatest Parliamentary captain of the age, and of a whole phalanx of statesmen, who were undoubtedly superior to the Ministers in debate, and who were generally believed to be far abler as administrators. A great deal was to happen between the 3oth of April and the 3151 of May. One main feature in the Budget was a proposal to reduce the duty on foreign sugar; a serious blow to the privilege which the free labour of our own colonies enjoyed, as against the slave labour of the Spanish plantations. Lord Sandon moved an amend- ment, skilfully framed to catch the votes of Abolitionist mem- bers of the Liberal party, and the discussion was discussed through eight livelong nights, with infinite repetition of argu- ment, and dreariness of detail. Mr. Gladstone, who had early learned that habit of high-toned courtesy which is the surest presage of future greatness, introduced into the last sentences of a fine speech an allusion that pleased no one so much as him against whom it was directed. " There is another name," said he, " strangely associated with the plan of the Ministry. I can only speak from tradition of the struggle for the abolition of slavery ; but, if I have not been misinformed, there was engaged in it a man who was the unseen ally of Mr. Wilberforce, and the pillar of his strength ; a man of profound benevolence, of acute understanding, of indefatigable industry, and of that self-denying temper which is content to work in secret, to forego the recompense of present fame, and to seek for its reward beyond the grave. The name of that man was Zachary Macaulay, and his son is a member of the existing Cabinet" In the early morning of the igth of May Lord Sandon's amendment was carried by thirty-six votes ; and, on the morrow, the House was crammed inside and out, in the confident expectation of such an announcement as generally follows upon a crushing Ministerial defeat. Neither the friends of the Government, nor its enemies, could believe their ears, when the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with the self-possessed air of a Minister who has a working majority and a financier who has an available surplus, gave notice that he should bring for- ward the usual sugar duties in Committee of Ways and Means ; and, before the audience could recover its breath, Lord John Russell followed him with a motion that this House, on its rising, do adjourn to Monday. The Earl of Darlington, in a single sentence of contemptuous astonishment, asked on what day the noble Lord proposed to take the question of the Corn Laws. When that day had been ascertained to be the 4th of D D 402 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vm. June, the subject dropped at once ; and an unhappy Member began upon the grievances of the Royal Marines, amidst the buzz of conversation, expressive of gratified or disappointed curiosity, with which, after a thrilling episode, the House relieves its own nerves, and torture's those of the wretch whose ambition or ill-luck has exposed him to the most formidable ordeal which can be inflicted on a public speaker. But the matter was not to end thus. The 4th of June, instead of being the first day of the debate on the Corn Laws, was the fifth and last of an obstinate and dubious conflict waged over a direct vote of want of confidence ; which was proposed by the Conservative leader in a quiet and carefully reasoned speech, admirably worthy of the occasion and of himself. Macaulay, who had shown signs of immense interest while Sir Robert was unfolding his budget of historical parallels and ruling cases, replied on the same night with an ample roll of the instances in which Lord Sunderland, and Mr. Pitt, and Lord Liverpool had accepted defeat without resorting either to Resignation or Dissolution. But all the precedents in the Journals of Parliament, though collected by Hallam and set forth by Canning, would have failed to prove that the country had any interest whatsoever in the continued existence of a Ministry, which had long been powerless, and was rapidly becoming discredited. When Sir James Graham rose, there was a break in that tone of mutual forbearance which the principal speakers, on either side, had hitherto maintained. The Right Honourable Baronet could not resist the temptation of indulging himself in an invective which, as he proceeded towards his peroration, degenerated into a strain of downright ribaldry ; l but the Government was already too far gone to profit by the mistakes, or the excesses, of its adversaries ; and the Opposition triumphed by one vote, in a House fuller by twenty than that which, ten years before, had carried the second reading of the Reform Bill by exactly the same majority. Within three weeks Parliament was dissolved, and the Minis- ters went to the country on the question of a fixed duty on foreign wheat. There could be but one issue to a general election which followed upon such a session, and but one fate 1 "I cannot address the people of this country in the language of the quo- tation used by the noble Lord : ' O passi graviora ; ' for never was a country cursed with a worse, a more reckless, or a more dangerous Government. The noble Lord, the Secretary for Ireland, talks of ' lubricity ; ' but, thank God, we have at last pinned you to something out of which you cannot wriggle ; and, as we have the melancholy satisfaction to know that there is an end to all things, so I can now say with the noble Lord : ' Dabit Deus his quoque finem ; thank God we have at last got rid of such a. Government as this.' " 1839-41- LORD MACAULAY. 403 in store for a party whose leaders were fain to have recourse to so feeble and perfunctory a cry. Lord Melbourne and his colleagues had touched the Corn Laws too late and too timidly for their reputation, and too soon for the public opinion of the constituencies. They sent their supporters on what was indeed a forlorn hope, when, as a sort of political afterthought, they bade them attack the most powerful interest in the nation. North of Trent the Whigs held their ground ; but, throughout the southern districts of England, they were smitten hip and thigh from Lincoln to St. Ives. The adherents of the Govern- ment had to surrender something of their predominance in the boroughs, while those who sate for the counties were turned out by shoals. There were whole shires which sent back their writs inscribed with an unbroken tale of Protectionists. All the ten Essex members were Conservatives, in town and country alike ; and so were all the twelve members for Shropshire. Before the Irish returns had come to hand, it was already evident that the Ministerial loss would be equivalent to a hundred votes on a stand and fall division. The Whigs had experienced no equally grave reverse since, in 1784, Pitt scat- tered to the winds the Coalition majority ; and no such other was destined again to befall them, " Until a day more dark and drear, And a more memorable year," should, after the lapse of a generation, deliver over to misfortune and defeat " A mightier host and haughtier name." Scotland, as usual, was not affected by the contagion of re- action. Indeed, the troubles of candidates to the north of the Border proceeded rather from the progressive, than the retro- gressive, tendencies of the electors. Macaulay was returned un- opposed, in company with Mr. William Gibson Craig : though he had been threatened with a contest by the more ardent members of that famous party in the Scotch Church which, within two years from that time, was to give such a proof as history will not forget of its willingness to sacrifice, for conscience sake, things far more precious even than the honour of sending to St. Stephen's an eloquent and distinguished representative. 1 To Miss F. Macaulay. Edinburgh : June 28, 1841. Dearest Fanny, We have had a meeting a little stormy when church matters were touched on, but perfectly cordial on 1 The disruption of the Scotch Church took place on the i8th of May, 1843- D D 2 404 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vin. other points. I took the bull by the horns, and have reason to believe that I was right, both in principle, and in policy. A Non-intrusion opposition has been talked of. My language at the meeting displeased the violent churchmen, and they were at one time minded even to coalesce with the Tories against me. The leading Non-intrusionists, however, have had a con- ference with me ; and, though we do not exactly agree, they own that they shall get more from me than from a Tory. I do not think that there is now any serious risk of a contest, and there is none at all of a defeat ; but in the meantime I am sur- rounded by the din of a sort of controversy which is most dis- tasteful to me. " Yes, Mr. Macaulay ; that is all very well for a statesman. But what becomes of the headship of our Lord Jesus Christ ? " And I cannot answer a constituent quite as bluntly as I should answer any one else who might reason after such a fashion. Ever yours T. B. M. London : Tuly 12. 1841. J Dear Ellis, I cannot send you Virginius, for I have not a copy by me at present, and have not time to make one. When you return, I hope to have finished another ballad, on the Lake Regillus. I have no doubt that the author of the original ballad had Homer in his eye. The battle of the Lake Regil- lus is a purely Homeric battle. I am confident that the ballad- maker has heard of the fight over the body of Patroclus. We will talk more about this. I may, perhaps, publish a small volume next spring. I am encouraged by the approbation of all who have seen the little pieces. I find the unlearned quite as well satisfied as the learned. I have taken a very comfortable suite of chambers in the Albany ; and I hope to lead, during some years, a sort of life peculiarly suited to my taste, college life at the West-end of London. I have an entrance hall, two sitting-rooms, a bed- room, a kitchen, cellars, and two rooms for servants, all for ninety guineas a year ; and this in a situation which no younger son of a Duke need be ashamed to put on his card. We shall have, I hope, some very pleasant breakfasts there, to say nothing of dinners. My own housekeeper will do very well for a few plain dishes, and the Clarendon is within a hundred yards. I own that I am quite delighted with our prospects. A strong opposition is the very thing that I wanted. I shall be heartily glad if it lasts till I can finish a History of England, from the Revolution, to the Accession of the House of Han- 1839-41- LORD MACAULAY. 405 over. Then I shall be willing to go in again for a few years. It seems clear that we shall be just about 300. This is what I have always supposed. I got through very triumphantly at Edinburgh, and very cheap. I believe I can say what no other man in the kingdom can say. I have been four times returned to Parliament by cities of more than a hundred and forty thousand inhabitants ; and all those four elections together have not cost me five hundred pounds. Your ballads are delightful. I like that of Ips, 1 Gips, and Johnson best. " Napoleon " is excellent, but hardly equal to the " Donkey wot wouldn't go." Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Macaulay's predilection for the muse of the street has al- ready furnished more than one anecdote to the newspapers. 2 It is indeed, one of the few personal facts about him which up to this time has taken hold of the public imagination. He 1 Ips, Gips, and Johnson were three Northumbrian butchers ; who, when riding from market, heard a cry for help, and came upon a woman who had been reduced to the distressful plight in which ladies were so often discovered by knights errant. Then Johnson, being a valiant man, a man of courage bold, He took his coat from off his back to keep her from the cold. As they rode over Northumberland, as hard as they could ride, She put her fingers in her ears, and dismally she cried. Then up there start ten swaggering blades, with weapons in their hands, And riding up to Johnson they bid him for to stand. "It's I'll not stand," says Ipson : " then no indeed not I." " N'or I'll not stand," says Gipson : " I'll sooner live than die." "Then I will stand," says Johnson : " I'll stand the while I can. I never yet was daunted, nor afraid of any man." Johnson thereupon drew his sword, and had disposed of eight out of his ten assailants, when he was stabbed from behind by the woman, and died, upbraid- ing her with having killed "The finest butcher that ever the sun shone on." It is not so easy to identify "Napoleon" among a sheaf of ballads entitled "The Island of St. Helena," "Maria Louisa's Lamentation," and "Young Napoleon, or the Bunch of Roses ; " though from internal evidence there is reason to believe that the song in question was " Napoleon's Farewell to Paris," which commences with an apostrophe so gorgeous as to suggest the idea that the great Emperor's curious popularity with our troubadours of the kerbstone is of Irish origin. " Farewell, ye splendid citadel, Metropolis, called Paris, Where Phoebus every morning shoots refulgent beams ; Where Flora's bright Aurora advancing from the Orient With radiant light illumines the pure shining streams." 3 Of these anecdotes the best known is the story of his being followed from the bookstall, where he had bought a parcel of ballads, by a crowd of children, whom he overheard discussing among themselves whether or not the gentle- man was going to sing. 406 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. vm. bought every half-penny song on which he could lay his hands ; if only it was decent, and a genuine, undoubted poem of the people. He has left a scrap-book containing about eighty ballads ; for the most part vigorous and picturesque enough, however defective they may be in rhyme and gram- mar ; printed on flimsy, discoloured paper, and headed with coarsely executed vignettes, seldom bearing even the most re- mote reference to the subject which they are supposed to illustrate. Among the gems of his collection he counted " Plato, a favourite song," commencing with a series of ques- tions in which it certainly is not easy to detect traces of the literary style employed by the great dialectician : " Says Plato, ' Why should man be vain, Since bounteous heaven has made him great ? Why look with insolent disdain On those not decked with pomp or state ?'" It is hardly too much to say that Macaulay knew the loca- lity, and, at this period of his life, the stock in trade, of every book-stall in London. ' " After office hours," says his brother Charles, " his principal relaxation was rambling about with me in the back lanes of the City. It was then that he began to talk of his idea of restoring to poetry the legends of which poetry had been robbed by history ; and it was in these walks that I heard for the first time from his lips the Lays of Rome, which were not published until some time afterwards. In fact, I heard them in the making. I never saw the hidden mecha- nism of his mind so clearly as in the course of these walks. He was very fond of discussing psychological and ethical ques- tions ; and sometimes, but more rarely, would lift the veil be- hind which he habitually kept his religious opinions." On the igth of August Parliament met, to give effect to the verdict of the polling booths. An amendment on the Address, half as long as the Address itself, the gist of which lay in a respectful representation to Her Majesty that her present ad- visers did not possess the confidence of the country, was moved simultaneously in both Houses. It was carried on the first night of the debate by a majority of seventy-two in the Lords, and on the fourth night by a majority of ninety-one in the Commons. Macaulay of course voted with his colleagues ; but he did not raise his voice to deprecate a consummation which on public grounds he could not desire to see postponed, and which, as far as his private inclinations were concerned, he had for some time past anticipated with unaffected, and all but un- alloyed, delight. 1 See Appendix III. at the end of the volume. i839-4t- LORD MACAULAY. 407 London : July 27, 1841. Dear Napier, I am truly glad that you are satisfied. I do not know what Brougham means by objecting to what I have said of the first Lord Holland. I will engage to find chapter and verse for it all. Lady Holland told me that she could hardly conceive where I got so correct a notion of him. 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, perhaps for ever, with my dearest sister and her child- ren. 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. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. 408 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CK. IX. CHAPTER IX. 18411844. Macaulay settles in the Albany Letters to Mr. Napier Warren Hastings, and the Vicar of Wakefield Leigh Hunt Macaulay's doubts about the wisdom of publishing his Essays Lord Palmerston as a writer The Lays of Rome Handsome conduct of Professor Wilson Re- publication of the Essays Miss Aikin's Life of Addison Macaulay in opposition The Copyright Question Recall of Lord Ellenborough Macaulay as a public speaker : opinions of the Reporters' Gallery Tour on the Loire Letters to Mr. Napier Payment of the Irish Roman Catholic Clergy Barere. THE change of Government was anything but a misfortune to Macaulay. He lost nothing but an income, which he could well do without, and the value of which he was ere long to replace many times over by his pen ; and he gained his time, his liberty, the power of speaking what he thought, writing when he would, and living as he chose. The plan of life which he selected was one eminently suited to the bent of his tastes, and the nature of his avocations. Towards the end of the year 1840, Mr. and Mrs. Trevelyan removed to Clapham; and, on their departure, Macaulay broke up his establishment in Great George Street, and quartered himself in a commodious set of rooms on a second floor in the Albany ; that luxurious cloister, whose inviolable tranquillity affords so agreeable a relief from the roar and flood of the Piccadilly traffic. His chambers, every corner of which was library, were comfortably, though not very brightly, furnished. The ornaments were few, but choice : half a dozen fine Italian engravings from his favourite great masters ; a handsome French clock, provided with a singularly melodious set of chimes, the gift of his friend and publisher, Mr. Thomas Longman ; and the well-known bronze statuettes of Voltaire and Rousseau, (neither of them heroes of his own,) 1 which had been presented to him by Lady Holland as a remembrance of her husband. 1 Macaulay says in a letter to Lord Stanhope : " I have not made up.my mind about John,' Duke of Bedford. Hot-headed he certainly was. That is a 1841-44- LORD MACAULAY. 409 The first use which Macaulay made of his freedom was in the capacity of a reviewer. Mr. Gleig, who had served with distinction during the last years of the great French war as a regimental officer, after having been five times wounded in action, had carried his merit into the Church, and his cam- paigning experiences into military literature. The author of one book which is good, and of several which are not amiss, he flew at too high game when he undertook to compile the Memoirs of Warren Hastings. In January 1841, Macaulay, who was then still at the War Office, wrote to the editor of the Edinburgh Review in these terms : " I think the new Life of Hastings the worst book that I ever saw. I should be inclined to treat it mercilessly, were it not that the writer, though I never saw him, is, as an Army chaplain, in some sense placed officially under me ; and I think that there would be something like tyranny and insolence in pouring contempt on a person who has a situation from which I could, for aught I know, have him dismissed, and in which I certainly could make him very uneasy. It would be far too Crokerish a proceeding for me to strike a man who would find some difficulty in retaliating. I shall therefore speak of him much less sharply than he deserves ; unless indeed we should be out, which is not improbable. In that case I should, of course, be quite at liberty." Unfortunately for Mr. Gleig, the Whigs were relegated to private life in time to set Macaulay at liberty to make certain strictures ; which, indeed, he was under an absolute obligation quality which lies on the surface of a character, and about which there can be no mistake. Whether a man is cold-hearted, or not, is a much more difficult question. Strong emotions may be hid by a stoical deportment. Kind and caressing manners may conceal an unfeeling disposition. Romilly, whose sensibility was morbidly strong, and who died a martyr to it, was by many thought to be incapable of affection. Rousseau, who was always soaking people's waistcoats with his tears, betrayed and slandered all his benefactors in turn, and sent his children to the Enfans Trouves." Macaulay's sentiments with regard to Voltaire are pretty fully expressed in his essay on Frederic the Great. In 1853 he visited Ferney. "The cabinet where Voltaire used to write looked, not towards Mont Blanc, of which he might have had a noble view, but towards a terrace and a grove of trees. Per- haps he wished to spare his eyes. He used to complain that the snow hurt . them. I was glad to have seen a place about which I had read, and dreamed, so much ; a place which, eighty years ago, was regarded with the deepest in- terest all over Europe, and visited by pilgrims of the highest rank and greatest genius. I suppose that no private house ever received such a number of illustrious guests during the same time as were entertained in Ferney between 1768 and 1778. I thought of Marmontel, and his 'ombre chevalier ;' of La Harpe, and his quarrel with the Patriarch ; of Madame de Genlis, and of all the tattle which fills Grimm's Correspondence. Lord Lansdowne was much pleased. Ellis less so. He is no Voltairian ; nor am I, exactly ; but I take a great interest in the literary history of the last century.' In his diary of the 28th of December, 1850, he writes : " Read the ' Physiology of Monkeys,' and Collins's account of Voltaire ; as mischievous a monkey as any of them." 410 LJfE AND LETTERS OP CM. IX. to make if there was any meaning in the motto of the Edin- burgh Review. 1 The first two paragraphs of the Essay on Warren Hastings originally ran as follows : " This book seems to have been manufactured in pursuance of a contract, by which the representatives of Warren Hastings, on the one part, bound themselves to furnish papers, and Mr. Gleig, on the other part, bound himself to furnish praise. It is but just to say that the covenants on both sides have been most faithfully kept ; and the result is before us in the form of three big bad volumes, full of undigested correspondence and undiscerning pane- gyric. " If it were worth while to examine this performance in detail, we could easily make a long article by merely pointing out inac- curate statements, inelegant expressions, and immoral doctrines. But it would be idle to waste criticism on a book-maker ; and, whatever credit Mr. Gleig may have justly earned by former works, it is as a book-maker, and nothing more, that he now comes before us. More eminent men than Mr. Gleig have written nearly as ill as he, when they have stooped to similar drudgery. It would be unjust to estimate Goldsmith by the Vicar of Wakefield, or Scott by the Life of Napoleon. Mr. Gleig is neither a Goldsmith nor a Scott ; but it would be unjust to deny that he is capable of some- thing better than these Memoirs. It would also, we hope and believe, be unjust to charge any Christian minister with the guilt of deliberately maintaining some of the propositions which we find in this book. It is not too much to say that Mr. Gleig has written several passages which bear the same relation to the ' Prince ' of Machiavelli that the 'Prince' of Machiavelli bears to the 'Whole Duty of Man,' and which would excite admiration in a den of rob- bers, or on board of a schooner of pirates. But we are willing to attribute these offences to haste, to thoughtlessness, and to that disease of the understanding which may be called the Furor Bio- graphicus, and which is to writers of lives what the goitre is to an Alpine shepherd, or dirt-eating to a negro slave." If this passage was _ unduly harsh, the punishment which overtook its author was instant and terrible. It is difficult to conceive any calamity which Macaulay would regard with greater consternation than that, in the opening sentences of an article which was sure to be read by everybody who read anything, he should pose before the world for three mortal months in the character of a critic who thought the Vicar of Wakefield a bad book. Albany, London : October 26, 1841. Dear Napier, I write chiefly to point out, what I dare say you have already observed, the absurd blunder in the first page 1 " Judex damnatur cum nocens absolvitur." 1841-44- LORD MACAULAY. 411 of my article. I have not, I am sorry to say, the consolation of being able to blame either you or the printers : for it must have been a slip of my own pen. I have put the " Vicar of Wakefield " instead of the " History of Greece." Pray be so kind as to correct this in the errata of the next number. I am, indeed, so much vexed by it that I could wish that the correction were made a little more prominent than usual, and introduced with two or three words of preface. But this I leave absolutely to your taste and judgment. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : October 30, 1841. Dear Napier, I have received your letter, and am truly glad to find that you are satisfied with the effect of my article. As to the pecuniary part of the matter, I am satisfied, and more than satisfied. Indeed, as you well know, money has never been my chief object in writing. It was not so even when I was very poor ; and at present I consider myself as one of the richest men of my acquaintance ; for I can well afford to spend a thousand a year, and I can enjoy every com- fort on eight hundred. I own, however, that your supply comes agreeably enough to assist me in furnishing my rooms, which I have made, unless I am mistaken, into a very pleasant student's cell. And now a few words about Leigh Hunt. He wrote to me yesterday in great distress, and enclosed a letter which he had received from you, and which had much agitated him. In truth, he misunderstood you ; and you had used an expression which was open to some little misconstruction. You told him that you should be glad to have a "gentlemanlike" article from him, and Hunt took this for a reflection on his birth. He implored me to tell him candidly whether he had given you any offence, and to advise him as to his course. I replied that he had utterly misunderstood you ; that I was sure you meant merely a literary criticism ; that your taste in composi- tion was more severe than his, more indeed than mine ; that you were less tolerant than myself of little mannerisms spring- ing from peculiarities of temper and training ; that his style seemed to you too colloquial ; that I myself thought that he was in danger of excess in that direction ; and that, when you received a letter from him promising a very "chatty" article, I was not surprised that you should caution him against his besetting sin. I said that I was sure that you wished him well, and would be glad of his assistance ; but that he could not 412 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix. expect a person in your situation to pick his words very nicely ; that you had during many years superintended great literary undertakings ; that you had been under the necessity of col- lecting contributions from great numbers of writers, and that you were responsible to the public for the whole. Your credit was so deeply concerned that you must be allowed to speak plainly. I knew that you had spoken to men of the first con- sideration quite as plainly as to him. I knew that you had refused to insert passages written by so great a man as Lord Brougham. I knew that you had not scrupled to hack and hew articles on foreign politics which had been concocted in the Hotels of Ambassadors, and had received the imprimatur of Secretaries of State. I said that therefore he must, as a man of sense, suffer you to tell him what you might think, whether rightly or wrongly, to be the faults of his style. As to the sense which he had put on one or two of your expressions, I took it on myself, as your friend, to affirm that he had mis- taken their meaning, and that you would never have used those words if you had foreseen that they would have been so under- stood. Between ourselves, the word " gentlemanlike " was used in rather a harsh way. l Now I have told you what has passed between him and me ; and I leave you to act as you think fit. I am sure that you will act properly and humanely. But I must add that I think you are too hard on his article. As to the " Vicar of Wakefield," the correction must be deferred, I think, till the appearance of the next Number. I am utterly unable to conceive how I can have committed such a blunder, and failed to notice it in the proofs. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : November 5, 1841. Dear Napier, Leigh Hunt has sent me a most generous and amiable letter, which he has received from you. He seems much touched by it, and more than satisfied, as he ought to be. I have at last begun my historical labours ; I can hardly say with how much interest and delight. I really do not think- that there is in our literature so great a void as that which I am trying to supply. English history, from 1688 to the French Revolution, is even to educated people almost a terra incognita. I will venture to say that it is quite an even chance whether even such a man as Empson, or Senior, can repeat accurately 1 It is worth notice that "gentlemanlike" is the precise epithet which Ma- caulay applied to his own article on Gladstone's "Church and State." See Page 373- 1841-44- LORD MACAULAY. 413 the names of the Prime Ministers of that time in order. The materials for an amusing narrative are immense. I shall not be satisfied unless I produce something which shall for a few days supersede the last fashionable novel on the tables of young ladies. I should be very much obliged to you to tell me what are the best sources of information about the Scotch Revolution in 1688, the campaign of Dundee, the massacre of Glencoe, and the Darien scheme. I mean to visit the scenes of all the prin- cipal events both in Great Britain and Ireland, and also on the Continent Would it be worth my while to pass a fortnight in one of the Edinburgh Libraries next summer ? Or do you imagine that the necessary information is to be got at the British Museum? By the bye, a lively picture of the state of the Kirk is indis- pensable. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : December i, 1841. Dear Napier, You do not seem to like what I suggested about Henry the Fifth. 1 Nor do I, on full consideration. What do you say to an article on Frederic the Great ? Tom Campbell is bringing out a book about His Majesty. Now that I am seriously engaged in an extensive work, which will probably be the chief employment of the years of health and vigour which remain to me, it is necessary that I should choose my subjects for reviews with some reference to that work. I should not choose to write an article on some point which I should have to treat again as a historian ; for, if I did, I should be in danger of repeating myself. I assure you that I a little grudge you Westminster Hall, in the paper on Hastings. On the other hand there are many characters and events which will occupy little or no space in my History, yet with which, in the course of my historical researches, I shall necessarily be- come familiar. There cannot be a better instance than Frede- ric the Great. His personal character, manners, studies, literary associates ; his quarrel with Voltaire, his friendship for Maupertuis, and his own unhappy metromanie will be very slightly, if at all, alluded to in a History of England. 2 Yet in 1 Macaulay had written on the loth of November : " If Longman will send me Mr. Tyler's book on Henry the Fifth, I will see whether I cannot, with the help of Froissart and Monstrelet, furnish a spirited sketch of that short and most brilliant life." 3 At this period of his career Macaulay still purposed, and hoped, to write 4 I4 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix. order to write the History of England, it will be necessary to turn over all the Memoirs, and all the writings, of Frederic, connected with us, as he was, in a most important war. In this way my reviews would benefit by my historical researches, and yet would not forestall my history, or materially impede its progress. I should not like to engage in any re- searches altogether alien from what is now my main object. Still less should I like to tell the same story over and over again, which I must do if I were to write on such a subject as the Vernon Correspondence, or Trevor's History of William the Third. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. In January 1842, Macaulay writes to Mr. Napier: "As to Frederic, I do not see that I can deal with him well under seventy pages. I shall try to give a life of him after the manner of Plutarch. That, I think, is my forte. The paper on Clive took greatly. That on Hastings, though in my own opinion by no means equal to that on Clive, has been even more success- ful. I ought to produce something much better than either of those articles with so excellent a subject as Frederic. Keep the last place for me, if you can. I greatly regret my never having seen Berlin and Potsdam." Albany, London : April 18, 1842. My dear Napier, I am much obliged to you for your criti- cisms on my article on Frederic. My copy of the Review I have lent, and cannot therefore refer to it. I have, however, thought over what you say, and should be disposed to admit part of it to be just. But I have several distinctions and limi- tations to suggest. The charge to which I am most sensible is that of inter- larding my sentences with French terms. I will not positively affirm that no such expression may have dropped from my pen in writing hurriedly on a subject so very French. It is, how- ever, a practice to which I am extremely averse, and into which I could fall only by inadvertence. I do not really know to what you allude ; for as to the words " Abbe" " and " Parc-aux- Cerfs," which I recollect, those surely are not open to objection. I remember that I carried my love of English in one or two places almost to the length of affectation. For example I called the " Place des Victoires," the " place of Victories "; and the history of England "down to a time which is within the memory of men still living." 1841-44- LORD MACAULAY. 415 the " Fermier General " D'Etioles, a " publican." I will look over the article again, when I get it into my hands, and try to discover to what you allude. The other charge, I confess, does not appear to me to be equally serious. I certainly should not, in regular history, use some of the phrases which you censure. But I do not consider a review of this sort as regular history, and I really think that, from the highest and most unquestionable authority, I could vindicate my practice. Take Addison, the model of pure and graceful writing. In his Spectators I find " wench," " baggage," "queer old put," "prig," "fearing that they should smoke the Knight." All these expressions I met this morning, in turning over two or three of his papers at breakfast. I would no more use the word "bore," or "awkward squad," in a composition meant to be uniformly serious and earnest, than Addison would in a State paper have called Louis an " old put," or have de- scribed Shrewsbury and Argyle as "smoking" the design to bring in the Pretender. But I did not mean my article to be uniformly serious and earnest. If you judge of it as you would judge of a regular history, your censure ought to go very much deeper than it does, and to be directed against the substance as well as against the diction. The tone of many passages, nay of whole pages, would justly be called flippant in a regular history. But I conceive that this sort of composition has its own character, and its own laws. I do not claim the honour of having invented it ; that praise belongs to Southey ; but I may say that I have in some points improved upon his design. The manner of these little historical essays bears, I think, the same analogy to the manner of Tacitus or Gibbon which the manner of Ariosto bears to the manner of Tasso, or the manner of Shakespeare's historical plays to the manner of Sophocles. Ariosto, when he is grave and pathetic, is as grave and pathetic as Tasso ; but he often takes a light fleeting tone which suits him admirably, but which in Tasso would be quite out of place. The despair of Constance in Shakespeare is as lofty as that of CEdipus in Sophocles ; but the levities of the bastard Faulconbridge would be utterly out of place in Sophocles. Yet we feel that they are not out of place in Shakespeare. So with these historical articles. Where the subject re- quires it, they may rise, if the author can manage it, to the highest altitudes of Thucydides. Then, again, they may with- out impropriety sink to the levity and colloquial ease of Horace Walpole's Letters. This is my theory. Whether I have succeeded in the execution is quite another question. You will, however, perceive that I am in no danger of taking 416 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix, similar liberties in my History. I do, indeed, greatly disap- prove of those notions which some writers have of the dignity of history. For fear of alluding to the vulgar concerns of private life, they take no notice of the circumstances which deeply affect the happiness of nations. But I never thought of denying that the language of history ought to preserve a certain dignity. I would, however, no more attempt to pre- serve that dignity in a paper like this on Frederic than I would exclude from such a poem as Don Juan slang terms, because such terms would be out of place in Paradise Lost, or Hudi- brastic rhymes, because such lines would be shocking in Pope's Iliad. As to the particular criticisms which you have made, I willingly submit my judgment to yours, though I think that I could say something on the other side. The first rule of all writing, that rule to which every other is subordinate, is that the words used by the writer shall be such as most fully and precisely convey his meaning to the great body of his readers. All considerations about the purity and dignity of style ought to bend to this consideration. To write what is not understood in its whole force, for fear of using some word which was unknown to Swift or Dryden, would be, I think, as absurd as to build an Observatory like that at Oxford, from which it is impossible to observe, only for the purpose of exactly preserving the proportions of the Temple of the Winds at Athens. That a word which is appropriate to a particular idea, which everybody high and low uses to express that idea, and which expresses that idea with a completeness which is not equalled by any other single word, and scarcely by any circum- locution, should be banished from writing, seems to be a mere throwing away of power. Such a word as " talented " it is proper to avoid ; first, because it is not wanted ; secondly, because you never hear it from those who speak very good English. But the word " shirk " as applied to military duty is a word which everybody uses ; which is the word, and the only word, for the thing ; which in every regiment, and in every ship, belonging to our country, is employed ten times a day ; which the Duke of Wellington, or Admiral Stopford, would use in reprimanding an officer. To interdict it, therefore, in what is meant to be familiar, and almost jocose, narrative seems to me rather rigid. But I will not go on. I will only repeat that I am truly grateful for your advice, and that if you will, on future occa- sions, mark with an asterisk any words in my proof sheets which you think open to objection, I will try to meet your 1841-44- LORD MACAULAY. 417 wishes, though it may sometimes be at the expense of my own. Ever yours most truly T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : April 25, 1842. Dear Napier, Thank you for your letter. We shall have no disputes about diction. The English language is not so poor but that I may very well find in it the means of content- ing both you and myself. I have no objection to try Madame D'Arblay for the Octo- ber number. I have only one scruple, that some months ago Leigh Hunt told me that he thought of proposing that subject to you, and I approved of his doing so. Now, I should have no scruples in taking a subject out of Brougham's hands, be- cause he can take care of himself, if he thinks himself ill-used. But I would not do anything that could hurt the feelings of a man whose spirit seems to be quite broken by adversity, and who lies under some obligations to me. By the way, a word on a subject which I should be much obliged to you to consider, and advise me upon. I find that the American publishers have thought it worth while to put forth two, if not three, editions of my reviews ; and I re- ceive letters from them, saying that the sale is considerable. I have heard that several people here have ordered them from America. Others have cut them out of old numbers of the Edinburgh Review, and have bound them up in volumes. Now, I know that these pieces are full of faults, and that their popu- larity has been very far beyond their merit ; but, if they are to be republished, it would be better that they should be repub- lished under the eye of the author, and with his corrections, than that they should retain all the blemishes inseparable from hasty writing and hasty printing. Longman proposed something of the kind to me three years ago ; but at that time the American publication had not taken place, which makes a great difference. Give me your counsel on the sub- ject. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : June 24, 1842. Dear Napier, I have thought a good deal about republish- ing my articles, and have made up my mind not to do so. It is rather provoking, to be sure, to learn that a third edition is E E 4i3 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. ix. coming out in America, and to meet constantly with smuggled copies. It is still more provoking to see trash, of which I am perfectly guiltless, inserted among my writings. But, on the whole, I think it best that things should remain as they are. The public judges, and ought to judge, indulgently of periodi- cal works. They are not expected to be highly finished. Their natural life is only six weeks. Sometimes their writer is at a distance from the books to which he wants to refer. Some- times he is forced to hurry through his task in order to catch the post. He may blunder ; he may contradict himself ; he may break off in the middle of a story ; he may give an im- moderate extension to one part of his subject, and dismiss an equally important part in a few words. All this is readily for- given if there be a certain spirit and vivacity in his style. But, as soon as he republishes, he challenges a comparison with all the most symmetrical and polished of human compositions. A painter, who has a picture in the Exhibition of the Royal Aca- demy, would act very unwisely if he took it down and carried it over to the National Gallery. Where it now hangs, surrounded by a crowd of daubs which are only once seen, and then for- gotten, it may pass for a fine piece. He is a fool if he places it side by side with the master-pieces of Titian and Claude. My reviews are generally thought to be better written, and they cer- tainly live longer, than the reviews of most other people ; and this ought to content me. The moment I come forward to de- mand a higher rank, I must expect to be judged by a higher standard. Fonblanque may serve for a beacon. His leading articles in the Examiner were extolled to the skies, while they were considered merely as leading articles ; for they were in style, and manner, incomparably superior to anything in the Courier, or Globe, or Standard ; nay, to anything in the Times. People said that it was a pity that such admirable compositions should perish ; so Fonblanque determined to republish them in a book. He never considered that in that form they would be compared, not with the rant and twaddle of the daily and weekly press, but with Burke's pamphlets, with Pascal's letters, with Addison's Spectators and Freeholders. They would not stand this new test a moment. I shall profit by the warning. What the Yankees may do I cannot help ; but I will not found my pretensions to the rank of a classic on my reviews. I will remain, according to the excellent precept in the Gospel, at the lower end of the table, where I am constantly accosted with " Friend, go up higher," and not push my way to the top at the risk of being compelled with shame to take the lowest room. If I live twelve or fifteen years I may perhaps produce 1841 -44- LORD MACAU LAY. 419 something which I may not be afraid to exhibit side by side with the performance of the old masters. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : July 14, 1842. Dear Napier, As to the next Number, I must beg you to excuse me. I am exceedingly desirous to get on with my His- tory, which is really in a fair train. I must go down into Somer- setshire and Devonshire to see the scene of Monmouth's cam- paign, and to follow the line of William's march from Torquay. I have also another plan of no great importance, but one which will occupy me during some days. You are acquainted, no doubt, with Perizonius's theory about the early Roman history; a theory which Niebuhr revived, and which Arnold has adopted as fully established. I have myself not the smallest doubt of its truth. It is, that the stories of the birth of Romulus and Remus, the fight of the Horatii and Curatii, and all the other romantic tales which fill the first three or four books of Livy, came from the lost ballads of the early Romans. I amused myself in India with trying to restore some of these long- perished poems. Arnold saw two of them, 1 and wrote to me in such terms of eulogy that I have been induced to correct and complete them. There are four of them, and I think that, though they are but trifles, they may pass for scholarlike and not inelegant trifles. I must prefix short prefaces to them, and I think of publishing them next November in a small volume. I fear, therefore, that just at present I can be of no use to you. Nor, indeed should I find it easy to select a subject. Romilly's Life is a little stale. Lord Cornwallis is not an attractive sub- ject. Clive and Hastings were great men, and their history is full of great events. Cornwallis was a respectable specimen of mediocrity. His wars were not brilliantly successful ; fiscal re- forms were his principal measures ; and to interest English readers in questions of Indian finance is quite impossible. I am a little startled by the very careless way in which the review on Duelling has been executed. In the historical part there are really as many errors as assertions. Look at page 439. Ossory never called out Clarendon. The Peer 1 Dr. Arnold never saw the Lays in print. Just a month previous to the date of this letter Macaulay wrote to his sister Fanny : ' ' But poor Arnold ! I am deeply grieved for him, and for the public. It is really a great calamity, and will be felt as such by hundreds of families. There was no such school : and from the character of the Trustees, who almost all are strong, and even bitter, Tories, I fear that the place is likely to be filled by somebody of very different spirit." E E 2 420 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix. whom he called out, on the Irish Cattle Bill, was Buckingham. The provocation was Buckingham's remark that whoever op- posed the Bill had an Irish interest, or an Irish understanding. It is Clarendon who tells the whole story. Then, as to the scuffle between Buckingham and a free-trading Lord Dorchester in the lobby, the scuffle was not in the lobby, but at a Conference in the Painted Chamber ; nor had it anything to do with free trade ; for at a Conference all the Lords are on one side. It was the effect of an old quarrel, and of an accidental jostling for seats. Then, a few lines lower, it is said that Lady Shrews- bury dissipated all her son's estate, which is certainly not true ; for, soon after he carne of age, he raised 4o,ooo/. by mortgage, which at the then rate of interest he never could have done unless he had a good estate. Then, in the next page, it is said that Mohun murdered rather than killed the Duke of Hamil- ton, a gross blunder. Those who thought that the Duke was murdered always attributed the murder not to Mohun, but to Mohun's second, Macartney. The fight between the two principals was universally allowed to be perfectly fair. Nor did Steele rebuke Thornhill for killing Dering, but on the contrary did his best to put Thornhill's conduct in the most amiable light, and to throw the whole blame on the bad usages of society. I do not know that there ever was a greater number of mistakes as to matters of fact in so short a space. I have read only those two pages of the article. If it is all of a piece, it is a prodigy indeed. Let me beg that you will not mention the little literary scheme which I have confided to you. I shoulfi be very sorry that it were known till the time of publication arrives. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : July 20, 1842. Dear Napier, I do not like to disappoint you ; and I really would try to send you something, if I could think of a subject that would suit me. My objections to taking Romilly's Life are numerous. One of them is that I was not acquainted with him, and never heard him speak, except for a few minutes when I was a child. A stranger, who writes a description of a person whom hundreds still living knew intimately, is almost certain to make mistakes ; and, even if he makes no absolute mistake, his portrait is not likely to be thought a striking resemblance by those who knew the original. It is like making a bust from a description. The best sculptor must disappoint those who knew the real face. I felt this even about Lord 1 84 1 -44- L ORD MA CA Ut. AY. 421 Holland ; and nothing but Lady Holland's request would have overcome my unwillingness to say anything about his Parlia- mentary speaking, which I had never heard. I had, however, known him familiarly in private ; but Romilly I never saw except in the House of Commons. You do not quite apprehend the nature of my plan about the old Roman ballads ; but the explanation will come fast enough. I wish from my soul that I had written a volume of my History. I have not written half a volume ; nor do I con, sider what I have done as more than rough hewn. I hear with some concern that Dickens is going to publish a most curious book against the Yankees. I am told that all the Fearons, Trollopes, Marryats, and Martineaus together have not given them half so much offence as he will give. This may be a more serious affair than the destruction of the Caroline, or the mutiny in the Creole. l Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. In a subsequent letter Macaulay says : ' I wish Dickens's book to be kept for me. I have never written a word on that subject ; and I have a great deal in my head. Of course I shall be courteous to Dickens, whom I know, and whom I think both a man of genius, and a good-hearted man, in spite of some faults of taste." Mr. Napier was very anxious to turn the enforced leisure of the Whig leaders to some account, by getting an article for his October Number from the Foreign Secretary of the late Adminis- tration. In August 1842 Macaulay writes: "I had a short talk about the Edinburgh Review with Palmerston, just before he left London. I told him what is quite true, that there were some public men of high distinction whom I would never counsel to write, both with a view to the interests of the Review, and to their own ; but that he was in no danger of losing by his writings any part of the credit which he had acquired by speech and action. I was quite sincere in this, for he writes excellently." Lord Palmerston, after thinking the matter over, sent Macaulay a letter promising to think it over a little more ; and stating, in his free pleasant style, the difficulties which made him hesitate 1 The Caroline was an American steamboat which had been employed io convey arms and stores to the Canadian insurgents. A party of loyalists seized the vessel, and sent her down the falls of Niagara. The Creole diffi- culty arose from the mutiny of a ship-load of Virginian slaves, who, in an evil hour for their owner, bethought themselves that they were something better ihan a cargo of cattle. 422 LIFE AND LETJ'ERS OF CH. jx. about acceding to the proposal. " If one has any good hits to make about the present state of foreign affairs, one feels dis- posed to reserve them for the House of Commons ; while, in order to do justice to the British Government, it might now and then be necessary to say things about some foreign Govern- ments which would not come altogether well from anybody who had been, and might be thought likely again at some future time to be, concerned in the management of affairs. Perhaps you will say that the last consideration need not restrain the pen of any of us, according to present appearances. " Albany, London : August 22, 1842. Dear Ellis, For the ballads many thanks. Some of them are capital. I have been wishing for your advice. My little volume is nearly finished, and I must talk the prefaces over with you fully. I have made some alterations which I think improvements, and, in particular, have shortened the Battle of Regillus by nearly thirty lines without, I think, omitting any important circumstance. It is odd that we never, in talking over this subject, remem- bered that, in all probability, the old Roman lays were in the Saturnian metre; and it is still more odd that my ballads should, by mere accident, be very like the Saturnian metre ; quite as like, indeed, as suits the genius of our language. The Saturnian metre is catalectic dimeter Iambic, followed by three trochees. A pure Saturnian line is preserved by some grammarian : " Dabunt malum Metelli Naevio poetee." Now, oddly enough, every tetrastich, and almost every distich, of my ballads opens with a catalectic dimeter Iambic line. " Lars Porsena of Clusium " is precisely the same with " Dabunt malum Metelli." I have not kept the trochees, which really would be very un- pleasing to an English ear. Yet there are some verses which the omission of a single syllable would convert into pure Saturnian metre, as " In Alba's lake no fisher (His) nets to-day is flinging." Is not this an odd coincidence ? 1841-44- LORD MA CAUL AY. 423 The only pure Saturnian line, that I have been able to call to mind, in all English poetry, is in the nursery song, " The Queen was in her parlour Eating bread and honey." Let me know when you come to town. I shall be here. Fix a day for dining with me next week, the sooner after your arrival the better. I must give you one good boring about these verses before I deliver them over to the printer's devils. Have you read Lord Londonderry's Travels ? I hear that they contain the following pious expressions of resignation to the divine will : " Here I learned that Almighty God, for reasons best known to Himself, had been pleased to burn down my house in the county of Durham." Is not the mixture of vexation with respect admirable ? Ever yours T. B. M. In a later letter to Mr. Ellis, Macaulay says : " Your objec- tion to the lines, ' By heaven,' he said, ' yon rebels Stand manfully at bay,' is quite sound. I also think the word ' rebels ' objectionable, as raising certain modern notions about allegiance, divine right, Tower Hill, and the Irish Croppies, which are not at all to the purpose. What do you say to this couplet ? Quoth he, ' The she-wolfs litter Stand savagely at bay.' ' Litter ' is used by our best writers as governing the plural number." Albany : September 29, 1842. Dear Ellis, Many thanks for the sheets. I am much obliged to Adolphus for the trouble which he has taken. Some of his criticisms are quite sound. I admit that the line about bringing Lucrece to shame is very bad, and the worse for coming over so often. 1 I will try to mend it. I admit, also, that the inventory of spoils in the last poem is, as he says, too long. I 1 It is evident from this letter that the line "That brought Lucrece to shame" originally stood wherever the line " That wrought the deed of shame ** stands now. 424 LIFE AND LETTERS OF cM. IX. will see what can be done with it. He is not, I think, in the right about "the true client smile." " The true client smile " is not exactly in the style of our old ballads ; but it would be dangerous to make these old ballads models, in all points, for satirical poems which are supposed to have been produced in a great strife between two parties, crowded together within the walls of a republican city. And yet even in an old English ballad I should not be surprised to find an usurer described as having the "righte Jew grinne." I am more obliged to Adolphus than I can express for his interest in these trifles. As to you, I need say nothing. But pray be easy. I am so, and shall be so. Every book settles its own place. I never did, and never will, directly or indirectly take any step for the purpose of obtaining praise, or deprecating censure. Longman came to ask what I wished him to do before the volume appeared. I told him that I stipulated for nothing but that there should be no puffing of any sort. I have told Napier that I ask it, as a personal favour, that my name and writings may never be mentioned in the Edinburgh Review. I shall certainly leave this volume as the ostrich leaves her eggs in the sand. T. B. MACAULAY. Albany : October 19, 1842. Dear Napier, This morning I received Dickens's book. I have now read it. It is impossible for me to review it ; nor do I think that you would wish me to do so. I cannot praise it, and I will not cut it up. I cannot praise it, though it con- tains a few lively dialogues and descriptions ; for it seems to me to be on the whole a failure. It is written like the worst parts of Humphrey's Clock. What is meant to be easy and sprightly is vulgar and flippant, as in the first two pages. What is meant to be fine is a great deal too fine for me, as the descrip- tion of the Fall of Niagara. A reader who wants an amusing account of the United States had better go to Mrs. Trollope, coarse and malignant as she is. A reader who wants informa- tion about American politics, manners, and literature had better go even to so poor a creature as Buckingham. In short, I pronounce the book, in spite of some gleams of genius, at once frivolous and dull. Therefore I will not praise it. Neither will I attack it ; first, because I have eaten salt with Dickens ; secondly, because he is a good man, and a man of real talent ; thirdly, because he hates slavery as heartily as I do ; and, fourthly, because I 1841-44- LUA'D MACAU LAV. 4^5 wish to see him enrolled in our blue and yellow corps, where he may do excellent service as a skirmisher and sharp-shooter. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. My little volume will be out, I think, in the course of the week. But all that I leave to Longman, except that I have positively stipulated that there shall be no puffing. The sails of the little craft could dispense with an artificial breeze. Launched without any noise of trumpets, it went bravely down the wind of popular favour. Among the first to discern its merits was Macaulay's ancient adversary, Professor \Yilson of Edinburgh, who greeted it in Blackwood's Magazine with a pa?an of heart)', unqualified panegyric ; which was uttered with all the more zest because the veteran gladiator of the press recognised an opportunity for depreciating, by comparison with Macaulay, the reigning verse-writers of the day. " What ! Poetry from Macaulay ? Ay, and why not ? The House hushes itself to hear him, even though Stanley is the cry? If he be not the first of critics, (spare our blushes,) who is ! Name the Young Poet who could have written the Armada. The Young Poets all want fire ; Macaulay is full of fire. The Young Poets are somewhat weakly ; he is strong. The Young Poets are rather ignorant ; his knowledge is great. The Young Poets mumble books ; he devours them. The Young Poets dally with their subject : he strikes its heart. The Young Poets are still their own heroes ; he sees but the chiefs he celebrates. The Young Poets weave dreams with shadows transitory as clouds without substance ; he builds realities lasting as rocks. The Young Poets steal from all and sundry, and deny their thefts ; he robs in the face of day. Whom ? Homer." Again and again in the course of his article Christopher North indulges himself in outbursts of joyous admiration, which he had doubtless repressed, more or less consciously, ever since the time when, " twenty years ago, like a burnished fly in pride of May, Macaulay bounced through the open windows of Knight's Quarterly Magazine." He instructs his readers that a war-song is not to be skimmed through once, and then laid aside like a pamphlet on the Corn Laws. ' Why, Sir Walter kept reciting his favourite ballads almost every day for forty years, and with the same fire about his eyes, till even they grew dim at last. Sir Walter would have rejoiced in Horatius as if he had been a doughty Douglas. 426 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix. ' Now by our sire Quirinus It was a goodly sight To see the thirty standards Swept down the tide of flight.' That is the way of doing business ! A cut and thrust style, with- out any flourish. Scott's style when his blood was up, and the first words came like a vanguard impatient for battle." The description ?of Virginia's death is pronounced by the Reviewer to be " the only passage in which Mr. Macaulay has sought to stir up pathetic emotion. Has he succeeded ? We hesitate not to say that he has, to our heart's desire. This effect has been wrought simply by letting the course of the great natural affections flow on, obedient to the promptings of a sound manly heart." Slight as it is, this bit of criticism shows genuine perspicacity. Frequent allusions in Macaulay's journals leave no doubt that in these lines he intended to embody his feelings towards his little niece Margaret, now Lady Holland, to whom then, as always, he was deeply and tenderly attached. By making such cordial amends to an author whom in old days he had unjustly disparaged, Professor Wilson did credit to his own sincerity ; but the public approbation needed no prompter, either then or thereafter. Eighteen thousand of the Lays of Ancient Rome were sold in ten years ; forty thousand in twenty years ; and, by June 1875, upwards of a hundred thousand copies had passed into the hands of readers. But it is a work of superfluity to measure by statistics the success of poems every line of which is, and long has been, too hackneyed for quotation. Albany, London : November 16, 1842. Dear Napier, On my return from a short tour I found your letter on my table. I am glad that you like my Lays, and the more glad because I know that, from good-will to me, you must have been anxious about their fate. I do not wonder at your misgivings. I should have felt similar misgivings if I had learned that any person, however distinguished by talents and knowledge, whom I knew as a writer only by prose works, was about to publish a volume of poetry. Had I seen advertised a poem by Mackintosh, by Dugald Stewart, or even by Burke, I should have augured nothing but failure ; and I am far from putting myself on a level even with the least of the three. So much the better for me. AVhere people look for no merit, a little merit goes a long way ; and, without the smallest affecta- tion of modesty, I confess that the success of my little book has far exceeded its just claims. I shall be in no hurry to repeat the experiment ; for I am well aware that a second 1841-44- LORD MACAULAY. 427 attempt would be made under much less favourable circum- stances. A far more severe test would now be applied to my verses. I shall, therefore, like a wise gamester, leave off while I am a winner, and not cry Double or Quits. As to poor Leigh Hunt, I wish that I could say, with you, that I heard nothing from him. I have a letter from him on my table asking me to lend him money, and lamenting that my verses want the true poetical aroma which breathes from Spenser's Faery Queen. I am much pleased with him for having the spirit to tell me, in a begging letter, how little he likes my poetry. If he had praised me, knowing his poetical creed as I do, I should have felt certain that his praises were insincere. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : December 3, 1842. Dear Napier, Longman has earnestly pressed me to con- sent to the republication of some of my reviews. The plan is one of which, as you know, I had thought ; and which, on full consideration, I had rejected. But there are new circumstances in the case. The American edition is coming over by whole- sale. l To keep out the American copies by legal measures, and yet to refuse to publish an edition here, would be an odious course, and in the very spirit of the dog in the manger. I am, therefore, strongly inclined to accede to Longman's proposition. And if the thing is to be done, the sooner the better. I am about to put forth a second edition of my Roman Lays. They have had great success. By the bye, Wilson, whom I never saw but at your table, has behaved very hand- somely about them. I am not in the habit of returning thanks for favourable criticism ; for, as Johnson says in his Life of Lyttelton, such thanks must be paid either for flattery or for justice. But, when a strong political opponent bestows fervent praise on a work which he might easily depreciate by means of sly sneer and cold commendations, and which he might, if he chose, pass by in utter silence, he ought, I think, to be told that his courtesy and good feeling are justly appreciated. I should be really obliged to you, if, when you have an opportunity, you 1 In a subsequent letter Macaulay writes : ' ' The question is now merely this, whether Longman and I, or Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, shall have the supplying of the English market with these papers. The American copies are coming over by scores, and measures are being taken for bringing them over by hundreds. 1 428 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix. will let Professor Wilson know that his conduct has affected me as generous conduct affects men not ungenerous. Ever yours T. B. MACAU LAY. Macaulay spent the first weeks of 1 843 in preparing for the republication of his Essays. " I find from many quarters," he writes to Mr. Longman on the 25th of January, " that it is thought that the article on Southey's edition of Bunyan ought to be in the collection. It is a favourite with the Dissenters." And again : " Pray omit all mention of my Prefatory Notice. It will be very short and simple, and ought by no means to be announced beforehand as if it were anything elaborate and im- portant." The world was not slow to welcome, and, having welcomed, was not in a hurry to shelve, a book so unwillingly and unostentatiously presented to its notice. Upwards of a hundred and twenty thousand copies have been sold in the United Kingdom alone by a single publisher. Considerably over a hundred and thirty thousand copies of separate essays have been printed in the series known by the name of the Travellers' Library. And it is no passing, or even waning, popularity which these figures represent. Between the years 1843 and 1853, the yearly sales by Messrs. Longman of the collected editions averaged 1,230 copies ; between 1853 and 1864, they rose to an average of 4,700 ; and, since 1864, more than six thousand copies have, one year with another, been disposed of annually. The publishers of the United States are still pouring forth reprints by many thousands at a time ; and in British India, and on the Continent of Europe, these produc- tions, which their author classed as ephemeral, are so greedily read and so constantly reproduced, that, taking the world as a whole, there is probably never a moment when they are out of the hands of the compositor. The market for them in their native country is so steady, and apparently so inexhaustible, that it perceptibly falls and rises with the general prosperity of the nation ; and it is hardiy too much to assert that the de- mand for Macaulay varies with the demand for coal. The astonishing success of this celebrated book must be regarded as something of far higher consequence than a mere literary or commercial triumph. It is no insignificant feat to have awakened in hundreds of thousands of minds the taste for letters, and the yearning for knowledge ; and to have shown by example that, in the interests of its own fame, genius can never be so well employed as on the careful and earnest treatment of serious themes. 1 84 1 44- LORD MACAULAY. 429 Albany, London : January 18, 1843. Dear Napier, Another paper from me is at present out of the question. One in half a year is the very utmost of which I can hold out any hopes. I ought to give my whole leisure to my History ; and I fear that, if I suffer myself to be diverted from that design as I have done, I shall, like poor Mackintosh, leave behind me the character of a man who would have done something, if he had concentrated his powers, instead of fritter- ing them away. I do assure you that, if it were not on your ac- count, I should have already given up writing for the Review at all. There are people who can carry on twenty works at a time. Southey would write the History of Brazil before breakfast, an ode after breakfast, then the History of the Peninsular War till dinner, and an article for the Quarterly Review in the evening. But I am of a different temper. I never write to please myself until my subject has for the time driven every other out of my head. When I turn from one work to another, a great deal of time is lost in the mere transition. I must not go on dawdling, and re- proaching myself, all my life. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : April 19, 1843. Dear Napier, You may count on an article from me on Miss Aikin's Life of Addison. Longman sent me the sheets as they were printed. I own that I am greatly disappointed. There are, to be sure, some charming letters by Addison which have never yet been published ; but Miss Aikin's nar- rative is dull, shallow, and inaccurate. Either she has fallen off greatly since she wrote her former works, or I have become much more acute since I read them. By the bye, I have an odd story to tell you. I was vexed at observing in a very hasty perusal of the sheets, a great number of blunders, any of which singly was discreditable, and all of which united were certain to be fatal to the book. To give a few specimens, the lady called Evelyn " Sir John Evelyn ;" transferred Christ Church from Oxford to Cambridge ; confounded Robert Earl of Sunderland, James the Second's Minister, with his son Charles Earl of Sunderland, George the First's Minister ; con- founded Charles Montague, Earl of Halifax, with George Savile, Marquis of Halifax ; called the Marquis of Hertford "Earl of Hertford," and so forth. I pointed the grossest blunders out to Longman, and advised him to point them out to her without mentioning me. He did so. The poor woman could not deny that my remarks were just ; but she railed most 430 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IX. bitterly, both at the publishers, and at the Mr. Nobody, who had had the insolence to find any blemish in her writings. At first she suspected Sedgwick. She now knows that she was wrong in that conjecture, but I .do not think that she has de- tected me. This, you will say, is but a bad return to me for going out of my way to save her book from utter ruin. I am glad to learn that, with all her anger, she has had the sense to cancel some sheets in consequence of Mr. Nobody's criti- cisms. My collected reviews have succeeded well. Longman tells me that he must set about a second edition. In spite, however, of the applause and of the profit, neither of which I despise, I am sorry that it had become necessary to republish these papers. There are few of them which I read with satis- faction. Those few, however, are generally the latest, and this is a consolatory circumstance. The most hostile critic must admit, I think, that I have improved greatly as a writer. The third volume seems to me worth two of the second, and the second worth ten of the first. Jeffrey is at work on his collection. It will be delightful, no doubt ; but to me it will not have the charm of novelty ; for I have read, and re-read, his old articles till I know them by heart. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Albany : June 15, 1843. Dear Napier, I mistrust my own judgment of what I write so much, that I shall not be at all surprised if both you and the public think my paper on Addison a failure ; but I own that I am partial to it. It is now more than half finished. I have some researches to make before I proceed ; but I have all the rest in my head, and shall write very rapidly. I fear that I cannot contract my matter into less than seventy pages. You will not, I think, be inclined to stint me. I am truly vexed to find Miss Aikin's book so very bad, that it is impossible for us, with due regard to our own charac- ter, to praise it. All that I can do is to speak civilly of her writings generally, and to express regret that she should have been nodding. I have found, I will venture to say, not less than forty gross blunders as to matters of fact in the first volume. Of these I may, perhaps, point out eight or ten as courteously as the case will bear. Yet it goes much against my feelings to censure any woman, even with the greatest lenity. My taste and Croker's are by no means the same. I shall not 1841-44- LORD MACAU LAY. 431 again undertake to review any lady's book till I know how it is executed. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : July 22, 1843. Dear Napier, I hear generally favourable opinions about my article. I am much pleased with one thing. You may remember how confidently I asserted that " little Dicky " in the Old Whig was the nickname of some comic actor. 1 Several people thought that I risked too much in assum- ing this so strongly on mere internal evidence. I have now, by an odd accident, found out who the actor was. An old prompter of Drury Lane Theatre, named Chetwood, pub- lished in 1 749 a small volume, containing an account of all the famous performers whom he remembered, arranged in alpha- betical order. This little volume I picked up yesterday, for sixpence, at a book-stall in Holborn ; and the first name on which I opened was that of Henry Norris, a favourite comedian, who was nicknamed Dicky, because he first obtained celebrity by acting the part of Dicky in the Trip to the Jubilee. It is 1 "One calumny, which has been often repeated, and never yet contradicted, it is our duty to expose. It is asserted, in the Biographia Britannica, that Addison designated Steele as 'little Dicky.' This assertion was repeated by Johnson, who had never seen the Old Whig, and was therefore excusable. It has also been repeated by Miss Aikin, who has seen the Old Whig, and for whom therefore there is less excuse. Now, it is true that the words ' little Dicky ' occur in the Old Whig, and that Steele's name was Richard. It is equally true that the words 'little Isaac' occur in the Duenna, and that New- ton's name was Isaac. But we confidently affirm that Addison's little Dicky had no more to do with Steele, than Sheridan's little Isaac with Newton. If we apply the words ' little Dicky ' to Steele, we deprive a very lively and in- genious passage, not only of all its wit, but of all its meaning. Little Dicky was evidently the nickname of some comic actor who played the usurer Gomez, then a most popular part, in Dryden's Spanish Friar." This passage occurs in Macaulay's Article on Miss Aikin's Life and Writings of Addison, as it originally appeared in July 1843. There is a marked diffe- rence of form between this, and all his previous contributions to the Edinburgh Review. The text of the article on Addison is, with few and slight variations, the text of the Collected Edition ; while a'l that relates to Miss Aikin is rele- gated to the foot-notes. Thus in the note on page 239 we read : ' ' Miss Aikin says that the Guardian was launched in November 1713. It was launched in March 1713, and was given over in the following September." And in the note on page 247 : "Miss Aikin has been most unfortunate in her account of this Rebellion. We will notice only two errors, which occur in one page. She says that the rebellion was undertaken in favour of James the Second, who had been fourteen years dead, and that it was headed by Charles Edward, who was not born." Macaulay was now no longer able to conceal from himself the fact, that, whether he liked it or not, his Essays would live ; and he accordingly took pains to separate the part of his work, which was of permanent literary value, from those passing strictures upon his author which as a Reviewer he was bound to make, in order to save himself the trouble of subsequent revision and expurgation. 432 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix. added that his figure was very diminutive. He was, it seems, in the height of his popularity at the very time when the Old Whig was written. You will, I think, agree with me that this is decisive. I am a little vairr of my sagacity, which I really think would have dubbed me a " vir clarissimus " if it had been shown on a point of Greek or Latin learning ; but I am still more pleased that the vindication of Addison from an unjust charge, which has been universally believed since the publica- tion of the Lives of the Poets, should thus be complete. Should you have any objection to inserting a short note at the end of the next Number? Ten lines would suffice ; and the matter is really interesting to all lovers of literary history. As to politics, the Ministers are in a most unenviable situation ; and, as far as I can see, all the chances are against them. The immense name of the Duke, though now only a " magni nominis umbra," is of great service to them. His assertion, unsupported by reasons, saved Lord Ellenborough. His declaration that sufficient precautions had been taken against an outbreak in Ireland has done wonders to calm the pub- lic mind. Nobody can safely venture to speak in Parliament with bitterness, or contempt, of any measure which he chooses to cover with his authority. But he is seventy-four, and, in consti- tution, more than seventy-four. His death will be a terrible blow to these people. I see no reason to believe that the Irish agitation will subside of itself, or that the death of O'Connell would quiet it. On the contrary, I much fear that his death would be the signal for an explosion. The aspect of foreign politics is gloomy. The finances are in disorder. Trade is in distress. Legislation stands still. The Tories are broken up into three or more factions, which hate each other more than they hate the Whigs, the faction which stands by Peel, the fac- tion which is represented by Vyvyan and the Morning Post, and the faction of Smythe and Cochrane. I should not be sur- prised if, before the end of the next session, the Ministry were to fall from mere rottenness. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Macaulay was right in thinking that the Government was rotten, and Lord Palmerston l in believing that it was safe. Sir Robert Peel was not the first Minister, and perhaps he is not destined to be the last, who has been chained down to office by the passive weight of an immense but discontented majority. Unable to retire in favour of his opponents and 1 See page 422. 1841-44- LORD MACAU LAY. 433 compelled to disgust his supporters at every turn, he had still before him three more years of public usefulness and personal mortification. One, at any rate, among his former antagonists did much to further his measures, and little or nothing to aggravate his difficulties. The course which Macaulay pursued between the years 1841 and 1846 deserves to be studied as a model of the conduct which becomes a statesman in opposition. In following that course he had a rare advantage. The con- tinuous and absorbing labours of his History filled his mind and occupied his leisure, and relieved him from the craving for occupation and excitement that lies at the root of half the errors to which politicians out of office are prone ; errors which the popular judgment most unfairly attributes to lack of patriotism, or excess of gall. In the set party fights, that from time to time took place, he spoke seldom, and did not speak his best ; but, when subjects came to the front on which his knowledge was great, and his opinion strongly marked, he interfered with decisive and notable effect. It has been said of Macaulay, with reference to this period of his political career, that no member ever produced so much effect upon the proceedings of Parliament who spent so many hours in the Library, and so few in the House. Never has any public man, unendowed with the authority of a Minister, so easily moulded so important a piece of legislation into a shape which so accurately accorded with his own views, as did Macaulay the Copyright Act of 1842. In 1814 the term, during which the right of printing a book was to continue private pro- perty, had been fixed at twenty-eight years from the date of publi- cation. The shortness of this term had always been regarded as a grievance by authors and by publishers, and was beginning to be so regarded by the world at large. " The family of Sir Walter Scott," says Miss Martineau in her History of England, " stripped by his great losses, might be supposed to have an honourable provision in his splendid array of works, which the world was still buying as eagerly as ever : but the copyright of Waverley was about to expire ; and there was no one who could not see the injustice of transferring to the public a pro- perty so evidently sacred as theirs." An arrangement which bore hardly upon the children of the great Scotchman, whose writings had been popular and profitable from the first, was nothing less than cruel in the case of authors who, after fighting a lifelong battle against the in- sensibility of their countrymen, had ended by creating a taste for their own works. Wordsworth's poetry was at length being freely bought by a generation which he himself had educated F F 434 MFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix. to enjoy it ; but as things then stood, his death would at once rob his representatives of all share in the produce of the Sonnets and the Ode on Immortality, and would leave them to console themselves as they best might with the copyright of the Prelude. Southey, (firmly' possessed, as he was, with the notion that posterity would set the highest value upon those among his productions which living men were the least dis- posed to purchase,) had given it to be understood that, in the existing state of the law, he should undertake no more works of research like the History of Brazil, and no more epic poems on the scale of Madoc and Roderick. But there was nothing which so effectually stirred the sympathies of men in power, and persuaded their reason, as a petition presented to the House of Commons by " Thomas Carlyle, a writer of books ; " which began by humbly showing "That your petitioner has written certain books, being incited thereto by certain innocent and laudable considerations ; " which proceeded to urge " that this his labour has found hitherto, in money or money's worth, small recompense or none : that he is by no means sure of its ever finding recompense : but thinks that, if so, it will be at a distant time, when he, the labourer, will probably no longer be in need of money, and those dear to him will still be in need of it; " and which ended by a prayer to the House to forbid " ex- traneous persons, entirely unconcerned in this adventure of his, to steal from him his small winnings, for a space of sixty years at the shortest. After sixty years, unless your Honourable House provide otherwise, they may begin to steal." In the session of 1841 Serjeant Talfourd brought in a measure, devised with the object of extending the term of copyright in a book to sixty years, reckoned from the death of the author. Macaulay, speaking with wonderful force of argu- ment and brilliancy of illustration, induced a thin House to reject the bill by a few votes. Talfourd, in the bitterness of his soul, exclaimed that Literature's own familiar friend, in whom she trusted, and who had eaten of her bread, had lifted up his heel against her. A writer of eminence has since echoed the complaint ; but none can refuse a tribute of respect to a man who, on high grounds of public expediency, thought him- self bound to employ all that he possessed of energy and ability on the task of preventing himself from being placed in a posi- tion to found a fortune, which, by the year 1919, might well have ranked among the largest funded estates in the country. Admonished, but not deterred, by Serjeant Talfourd's reverse, Lord Mahon next year took up the cause of his brother authors, and introduced a bill in which he proposed to carry 1841-44- LORD MACAULAY. 435 out the objectionable principle, but to carry it less far than his predecessor. Lord Mahon was for giving protection for five- and-twenty years, reckoned from the date of death ; and his scheme was regarded with favour, until Macaulay came for- ward with a counter-scheme, giving protection for forty-two years, reckoned from the date of publication. He unfolded his plan in a speech, terse, elegant, and vigorous ; as amusing as an essay of Elia, and as convincing as a proof of Euclid. ' 1 " But this is not all. My noble friend's plan is not merely to institute a lottery in which some writers will draw prizes and some will draw blanks. His lottery is so contrived that, in the vast majority of cases, the blanks will fall to the best books, and the prizes to books of inferior merit. "Take Shakespeare. My noble friend gives a longer protection than I should give to Love's Labour Lost, and Pericles, Prince of Tyre ; but he gives a shorter protection than 1 should give to Othello and Macbeth. "Take Milton. Milton died in 1674. The copyrights of Milton's great works would, according to my noble friend's plan, expire in 1699. Comus ap- peared in 1634, the Paradise Lost in 1668. To Comus, then, my noble friend would give sixty-five years of copyright, and to Paradise Lost only thirty-one years. Is that reasonable ? Comus is a noble poem ; but who would rank it with the Paradise Lost? My plan would give forty-two years both to the Para- dise Lost, and to Comus. " Let us pass on from Milton to Dry den. My noble friend would give more than sixty years of copyright to Dryden's worst works ; to the encomiastic verses on Oliver Cromwell, to the Wild Gallant, to the Rival Ladies, to other wretched pieces as bad as anything written by Flecknoe or Settle : but for Theodore and Honoria, forTancred andSigismunda, for Cimonand Iphigenia, for Palamon and Arcite, for Alexander's Feast, my noble friend thinks a copy- right of twenty-eight years sufficient. Of all Pope's works, that to which my noble friend would give the largest measure of protection is the volume of Pas- torals, remarkable only as the production of a boy. Johnson's first work was a Translation of a Book of Travels in Abyssinia, published in 1735. It was so poorly executed that in his later years he did not like to hear it mentioned. Boswell once picked up a copy of it, and told his friend that he had done so. ' Do not talk about it,' said Johnson : ' it is a thing to be forgotten.' To this performance my noble friend would give protection during the enormous term of seventy-five years. To the Lives of the Poets he would give protection during about thirty years. * "I have, I think, shown from literary history that the effect of my noble friend's plan would be to give to crude and imperfect works a great advantage over the highest productions of genius. What I recommend is that the certain term, reckoned from the date of publication, shall be forty-two years instead of twenty-eight years. In this arrangement there is no uncertainty, no inequality. The advantage which I propose to give will be the same to every book. No work v\ill have so long a copyright as my noble friend gives to some books, or so short a copyright as he gives to others. No copyright will last ninety years. No copyright will end in twenty-eight years. To every book published in the last seventeen years of a writer's life I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend gives ; and I am confident that no person versed in literary history will deny this, that in general the most valuable works of an author are pub- lished in the last seventeen years of his life. To Lear, to Macbeth, to Othello, to the Faery Queen, to the Paradise Lost, to Bacon's Novum Organum and De Augmentis, to Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, to Clarendon's History, to Hume's History, to Gibbon's History, to Smith's Wealth of Na- tions, to Addison's Spectators, to almost all the great works of Burke, to Cla- rissa and Sir Charles Grandison, to Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, F F 2 43 6 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. ix. When he resumed his seat, Sir Robert Peel walked across the floor, and assured him that the last twenty minutes had radi- cally altered his own views on the law of copyright. One member after another confessed to an entire change of mind ; and, on a question which had 'nothing to do with party, each change of mind brought a vote with it. The bill was remodelled on the principle of calculating the duration of copyright from the date of publication, and the term of forty-two years was adopted by a large majority. Some slight modifications were made in Macaulay's proposal ; but he enjoyed the satisfaction of having framed according to his mind a Statute which may fairly be described as the charter of his craft, and of having added to Hansard what are by common consent allowed to be among its most readable pages. There was another matter, of more striking dimensions in the eyes of his contemporaries, on which, by taking an inde- pendent course and persevering in it manfully, Macaulay brought round to his own opinion first his party, and ultimately the country. The Afghan war had come to a close in the autumn of 1842. The Tories claimed for Lord Ellenborough the glory of having saved India ; while the Opposition held that he had with difficulty been induced to refrain from throw- ing obstacles in the way of its being saved by others. Most Whigs believed, and one Whig was ready on all fit occasions to maintain, that his Lordship had done nothing to deserve national admiration in the past, and a great deal to arouse the gravest apprehensions for the future. Macaulay had persuaded himself, and was now bent on persuading others, that, as long as Lord Ellenborough continued Governor-General, the peace of our Eastern Empire was not worth six months' purchase. Albany : February, 1843. Dear Ellis, I never thought that I should live to sympa- thise with Brougham's abuse of the Whigs ; but I must own that we deserve it all. I suppose that you have heard of the stupid and disgraceful course which our leaders have resolved to take. I really cannot speak or write of it with patience. They are going to vote thanks to Ellenborough, in direct oppo- sition to their opinion, and with an unanswerable case against him in their hands, only that they may save Auckland from and, with the single exception of Waverley, to all the novels of Sir Walter Scott, I give a longer term of copyright than my noble friend gives. Can he match that list? Does not that list contain what England has produced greatest in many various ways, poetry, philosophy, history, eloquence, wit. skilful portraiture of life and manners ? I confidently therefore call on the Com- mittee to take my plan in preference to the plan of my noble friend." 1841-44- LOR& MACAULAY, 437 recrimination. They will not save him, however. Cowardice is a mighty poor defence against malice. And to sacrifice the whole weight and respectability of our party to the feelings of one man is but the thing is too bad to talk about. I cannot avert the disgrace of our party ; but I do not choose to share it. I shall therefore go to Clapham quietly, and leave those, who have cooked this dirt-pie for us, to eat it. I did not think that any political matter would have excited me so much as this has done. I fought a very hard battle, but had nobody except Lord Minto and Lord Clanricarde to stand by me. I could easily get up a mutiny among our rank and file, if I chose ; but an internal dissension is the single calamity from which the Whigs are at present exempt. I will not add it to all their other plagues. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. On the 2oth of February the House of Commons was called upon to express its gratitude to the Governor-General. The speeches from the front Opposition bench were as good as could be made by statesmen who had assumed an attitude such that they could not very well avoid being either insincere, or ungracious. The Vote of Thanks was unanimqusly passed ; and within three weeks' time the Whigs were, almost to a man, engaged in hot support of a motion of Mr. Vernon Smith involving a direct and crushing censure on Lord Ellenborough. Lord Stanley, (making, as he was well able, the most of the opportunity,) took very good care that there should be no mis- take about the consistency of men who, between the opening of the Session and the Easter holidays, had thanked a public officer for his " ability and judgment," and had done their best to stigmatise him as guilty of conduct " unwise, indecorous, and reprehensible." Happily Macaulay's conscience was clear; and his speech, in so far as the reader's pleasure is a test of excellence, will bear comparison with anything that still remains of those orations against Warren Hastings in which the great men of a former generation contested with each other the crown of eloquence. The division went as divisions go, in the most good- natured of all national assemblies, when the whole strength of a powerful Government is exerted to protect a reputation. On the 1 4th of March the Duke of Wellington wrote to Lord Ellenborough : " Nothing could have been more satisfactory than the debate in the House of Lords, and I am told it was equally so in the Commons." The Duke's informant could not 438 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IX. have seen far below the surface. Macaulay's measured and sustained denunciation of Lord Ellenborough's perilous levity had not fallen on inattentive ears. He had made, or at any rate had implied, a prophecy. " Who can say what new freak we may hear of by the next mail ? I am quite confident that neither the Court of Directors, nor Her Majesty's Ministers, can look forward to the arrival of that mail without uneasiness." He had given a piece of advice. " I cannot sit down without addressing myself to those Directors of the East Indian Com- pany who are present. I exhort them to consider the heavy responsibility which rests on them. They have the power to recall Lord Ellenborough ; and I trust that they will not hesi- tate to exercise that power." The prophecy came true, and the advice was adopted to the letter. Before another twelvemonth had elapsed. Lord Ellenborough was in a worse scrape than ever. This time, Macaulay resolved to take the matter in hand him- self. He had a notice of motion on the books of the House, and his speech was already in his head, when on the 26th of April, 1844, Sir Robert Peel announced that Her Majesty's Government had received a communication from the Court of Directors "stating that they had exercised the power which the law gives them to recall at their will and pleasure the Governor-General of India." Macaulay's reputation and authority in Parliament owed nothing to the outward graces of the orator. On this head, the recollections of the Reporters' Gallery, (which have been as gratefully accepted as they were kindly offered,) are unanimous and precise. Mr. Clifford, of the Times, says : " His action, the little that he used was rather ungainly. His voice was full and loud ; but it had not the light and shade, or the modu- lation, found in practised speakers. His speeches were most carefully prepared, and were repeated without the loss, or omission, of a single word." This last observation deserves a few sentences of comment. Macaulay spoke freely enough on the spur of the moment ; and some excellent judges were of opinion that, on these occasions, his style gained more in animation than it lost in ornament. Even when he rose in his place to take part in a discussion which had been long foreseen, he had no notes in his hand, and no manuscript in his pocket. If a debate was in prospect, he would turn the subject over while he paced his chamber, or tramped along the streets. Each thought, as it rose in his mind, embodied itself in phrases, and clothed itself in an ap- propriate drapery of images, instances, and quotations ; and when, in the course of his speech, the thought recurred, all the 1841-44- LORD MACAtJLA\> 439 words which gave it point and beauty spontaneously recurred with it. "He used scarcely any action," says a gentleman on the staff of the Standard. " He would turn round on his heel, and lean slightly on the table ; but there was nothing like demon- strative or dramatic action. He spoke with great rapidity ; and there was very little inflection in the voice, which, however, in itself, was not unmusical. It was somewhat monotonous, and seldom rose or fell. The cadences were of small range. He spoke with very great fluency, and very little emphasis. It was the matter and the language, rather than the manner, that took the audience captive." l Mr. Downing of the Daily News writes : "It was quite evi- dent that Macaulay had not learned the art of speaking from the platform, the pulpit, the forum, or any of the usual modes of obtaining a fluent diction. He was at once too robust, and too recondite, for these methods of introduction to the oratori- cal art. In all probability it was that fulness of mind, which broke out in many departments, that constituted him a born 1 Lord Lytton, in his poem on "St. Stephen's," amply confirms this view of Macaulay : " Perhaps so great an orator was ne'er So little of an actor ; half the care Giv'n to the speaking which he gave the speech Had raised his height beyond all living reach. Ev'n as it was, a master's power he proved In the three tests : he taught, he charmed, he moved. Few compass one ; whate'er their faults may be Great orators alone achieve the three." This generous testimony of a political opponent is repeated in prose, at greater length, but hardly with more precision, than in the verse : " However carefully prepared, Lord Macaulay's parliamentary speeches were composed as orations, not as essays. Indeed, many years ago, before he went to India, he observed to the author of the lines which render so inade- quate a tribute to his honoured name, that he himself never committed to writing words intended to be spoken, upon the principle that, in the process of writing, the turn of diction, and even the mode of argument, might lose the vivacity essential to effective oration, and, in fact, fall into essay. His wonderful powers of memory enabled him to compose, correct, and retain, word by word, the whole of a speech, however long, without the aid of the pen. * '* * " It was certainly, however, the brilliant art with which his speeches were composed upon oratorical principles, both as to arrangement of argument and liveliness of phraseology, that gave them that prodigious effect which they, (at least the earlier ones,) produced upon a mixed audience, and entitles this eminent personage to the fame of a very considerable orator. I may be par- doned for insisting upon this, since in the various obituary notices of Lord Macaulay there has apeared to me a disposition to depreciate his success as an orator, while doing the amplest justice to his merits as a writer. He was cer- tainly not a debater, nor did he ever attempt to be so ; but in the higher art of sustained, elaborate oration, no man in our age has made a more vivid effect upon an audience " 440 LIFE AND LETTERS OF cH< Jx. orator. Vehemence of thought, vehemence of language, vehemence of manner, were his chief characteristics. The listener might almost fancy he heard ideas and words gurg- ling in the speaker's throat for priority of utterance. There was nothing graduated, or undulating, about him. He plunged at once into the heart of the matter, and continued his loud resounding pace from beginning to end, without halt or pause. This vehemence and volume made Macaulay the terror of the reporters ; and, when he engaged in a subject outside their ordinary experience, they were fairly nonplussed by the display of names, and dates, and titles. He was not a long-winded speaker. In fact, his earnestness was so great that it would have failed under a very long effort. He had the faculty, pos- sessed by every great orator, of compressing a great deal in a short space." A fourth witness, after confirming the testimony of his col- leagues, concludes with the remark : " Macaulay was wonder- fully telling in the House of Commons. Every sentence was perfectly devoured by the listeners." As soon as the session of 1843 ended, Macaulay started for a trip up and down the Loire. Steaming from Orleans to Nantes, and back again from Nantes to Angers, he indulged to the full his liking for river travel and river scenery, and his passion for old cities which had been the theatre of memorable events. His letters to his sisters abundantly prove that he could have spoken off a very passable historical handbook for Central France, without having trained himself for the feat by a course of special reading. His catalogue of the successive occupants of Chambord is marvellously accurate and complete, from Francis the First and his Italian architects, to the time when '' the royalists got up a subscription to purchase it for the Duke of Berri's posthumous son, whom they still call Henry the Fifth. The project was not popular ; but, by dint of bully- ing, and telling all who objected that they would be marked men as long as they lived, a sufficient sum was extorted." There are touches that mark the historian in his description of the Castle of Blois, when he speaks of " the chimney at which Henry Duke of Guise sate down for the last time to warm himself," and " the observatory of Catherine de' Medici, designed rather for astrological than for astronomical obser- vations ; " but, taken as a whole, the letters have too much of the tourist's journal about them to bear printing in their integrity. 1841-44- LORD MACAULAY. 441 Paris : August 21, 1843. " Dearest Hannah, What people travel for is a mystery. I have never during the last forty-eight hours had any wish so strong as to be at home again. To be sure, those forty-eight hours have hardry been a fair specimen of a traveller's life. They have been rilled with little miseries, such as made Mr. Testy roar, and Mr. Sensitive sigh. I could very well add a chapter to the ' Miseries of Human Life.' For example : " Groan i. The Brighton railway ; in a slow train ; a carriage crowded as full as it would hold ; a sick lady smelling of aether ; a healthy gentleman smelling of brandy ; the thermometer at 102 in the shade, and I not in the shade, but exposed to the full glare of the sun from noon till half after two, the effect of which is that my white trowsers have been scorched into a pair of very service- able nankeens. " Groan 2 ; and for this Fanny is answerable, who made me believe that the New Steyne Hotel at Brighton was a good one. A coffee-room ingeniously contrived on the principle of an oven, the windows not made to open ; a dinner on yesterday's pease- soup, and the day before yesterday's cutlets ; not an ounce of ice ; and all beverages, wine, water, and beer, in exactly the state of the Church of Laodicea. " Groan 3. My passage to Dieppe. We had not got out oi sight of the Beachy Head lights, when it began to rain hard. I was therefore driven into the cabin, and compelled to endure the spectacle, and to hear the unutterable groans and gasps, of fifty sea-sick people. I went out when the rain ceased ; but everything on deck was soaked. It was impossible to sit ; so that I walked up and down the vessel all night. The wind was in our faces, and the clear grey dawn was visible before we entered the harbour of Dieppe. Our baggage was to be examined at seven ; so that it was too late to go to bed, and yet too early to find any shop open, or anything stirring. All our bags and boxes were in the custody of the authorities, and I had to pace sulkily about the pier for a long time, without even the solace of a book. "Groan 4. The custom-house. I never had a dispute with custom-house officers before, having found that honesty answered in England, France, and Belgium, and corruption in Italy. But the officer at Dieppe, finding among my baggage some cotton stockings which had not been yet worn, threatened to confiscate them, and exacted more than they were worth between thirteen and fourteen francs by way of duty. I had just bought these unlucky stockings to do honour to our country in the eyes of foreigners ; being unwilling that the washerwomen of Paris and Orleans should see an English Member of Parliament's stockings either in holes or darned. See what the fruits of patriotism are ! " Groan 5. Mine inn at Dieppe. I need not describe it, for it was the very same at which we stopped for a night in 1840, and at which you ate of a gigot as memorable as Sam Johnson's shoulder of mutton. 1 I did not discover where I was till too late. I had a 1 In the review on Croker, Macaulay calls it a leg of mutton. As a matter 442 LIFE AND LETTERS OP CH. ix. cup of coffee worse than I thought any French cook could make for a wager. In the bedroom, where I dressed, there was a sort of soap which I had half a mind to bring away, that men of science might analyse it. It would be, I should think, an excellent substitute for Spanish flies in a blister. I shaved with it, and the consequence is that I look as if I had that complaint which our mother held in such horror. If I used such cosmetics often, I should be forced to beg Queen Victoria to touch me. " The cathedral, which was my chief object at Chartres, rather disappointed me ; not that it is not a fine church ; but I had heard it described as one of the most magnificent in Europe. Now, I have seen finer Gothic churches in England, France, and Belgium. It wants vastness ; and its admirers make the matter worse by proving to you that it is a great deal larger than it looks, and by assuring you that the proportions are so exquisite as to produce the effect of littleness. I have heard the same cant canted about a much finer building,- St. Peter's. But, surely, it is impossible to say a more severe thing of an architect than that he has a knack of building edifices five hundred feet long which look as if they were only three hundred feet long. If size be an element of the sublime in architecture, and this, I imagine, everybody's feelings will prove, then a great architect ought to aim, not at making buildings look smaller than they are, but at making them look larger than they are. If there be any proportions which have the effect of making St. Paul's look larger than St. Peter's, those are good proportions. To say that an artist is so skilful that he makes buildings, which are really large, look small, is as absurd as it would be to say that a novelist has such skill in narration as to make amusing stories dull, or to say that a controversialist has such skill in argument that strong reasons, when he states them, seem to be weak ones." "September i, 1843. " I performed my journey to Bourges, comfortably enough, in the coupe'e of the diligence. There was a prodigious noise all night of people talking in English on the roof. At Vierzon I found that this noise proceeded from seven English labourers, good-look- ing fellows enough, who were engaged to work on a line of rail- road, and were just going to quit the coach. I asked them about their state and prospects, told them that I hoped they would let a countryman treat them to breakfast, and gave them a Napoleon for that purpose. They were really so pleased and grateful for being noticed in that way that I was almost too strongly moved by their thanks. Just before we started, one of them, a very intelli- gent man and a sort of spokesman, came to the window, and asked me with great earnestness to tell them my name, which I did. ' Ah, sir, we have all heard of you. You have always been a good of fact, Boswell does not specify whether it was a leg or a shoulder. Whatever the joint may have been, Dr. Johnson immortalised it in these words : " It is as bad as bad can be it is ill-fed, ill-killed, ill-kept, and ill-dressed." 1841-44- LORD ArACAULAY. 443 friend to the country at home, and it will be a great satisfaction to us all to know this.' He told me to my comfort, that they did very well, being, as he said, sober men ; that the wages were good ; and that they were well treated, and had no quarrels with their French fellow-labourers. " I could not, after this, conceal my name from a very civil, good-natured, Frenchman, who travelled in the coupee with me, and with whom I had already had some conversation. He insisted on doing the honours of Bourges to me, and has really been officiously kind and obliging. Indeed, in this city I have found nothing but courtesy worthy of Louis the Fourteenth's time. Queer old-fashioned country gentlemen of long descent, who recovered part of their estates on their return from emigration, abound in the neighbourhood. They have hotels in Bourges, where they often pass the winter, instead of going up to Paris. The manners of the place are most ceremonious. Hats come off at every word. If you ask your way, a gentleman insists on escorting you. Did you ever read Georges Dandin ? If not, read it before you sleep. There you will see how Moliere has portrayed the old-fashioned provincial gentry. I could fancy that many Messieurs and Mes- dames de Sotenville were to be found at Bourges." ' ' September 6. " I know nothing about politics except what I glean from French newspapers in the coffee-houses. The people here seem to be in very ill-humour about the Queen's visit ; and I think it, I must own, an ill-judged step. Propriety requires that a guest, a sove- reign, and a woman, should be received by Louis Philippe with something of chivalrous homage, and with an air of deference. To stand punctiliously on his quality in intercourse with a young lady would be uncourteous, and almost insulting. But the French have taken it strongly into their heads that their Government is acting a servile part towards England, and they are therefore dis- posed to consider every act of hospitality and gallantry on the part of the King as a national humiliation. I see that the journals are crying out that France is for ever degraded because the band of a French regiment played ' God Save the Queen ' when Her Majesty landed. I fear that Louis Philippe cannot possibly behave on this occasion so as at once to gratify his guest and his subjects. They are the most unreasonable people which exists ; that is the truth ; and they will never be wiser until they have had another lesson like that of 1815." "September 9, 1843. " It was just four in the morning when I reached Angers ; but I found a cafe" open, made a tolerable breakfast, and before five was on board a steamer for Tours. It was a lovely day. The banks were seen to every advantage, and, without possessing beauty of the highest class, presented an endless succession of pretty and cheerful landscapes. With the scenery, and a book, I was in no want of company. A Frenchman, however, began to 444 LIFE AND LETTERS OF crt. tx. talk to me, and proved a sensible and well-bred man. He had been in England, and, when ill, had been kindly treated by the people among whom he found himself. He always therefore, he said, made a point of paying attention to Englishmen. I could not help telling him that he miglit easily get himself into a scrape with some swindler, or worse, if he carried his kindness to our nation too far. ' Sans doute,' said he, ' il faut distinguer ; ' and then he paid me the highest compliment that ever was paid me in my life ; for he said that nobody who knew the world could fail to per- ceive that I was what the English call a gentleman, ' homme comme il faut.' That you may fully appreciate the value of this compli- ment I must tell you that, having travelled all the preceding night, I had a beard of two days' growth, that my hair was unbrushed, my linen of yesterday, my coat like a miller's, and my waistcoat, which had been white when I left Nantes, in a state which filled me with self-abhorrence. Nor had he the least notion who I was ; for I gave no hint, and my name was not on my baggage. I shall, therefore, henceforward consider myself as a person of singularly noble look and demeanour. " Will you let me recommend you a novel ? Try Sceur Anne, by Paul de Kock. It is not improper, and the comic parts are really delightful. I have laughed over them till I cried. There are tragic parts which I skipped for fear of crying in another sense." Albany, London : November 25, 1843. Dear Napier, Many thanks for your excellent letter. I have considered it fully, and 1 am convinced that by visiting Edinburgh at present I should do unmixed harm. The question respecting the Catholic clergy is precisely in that state in which a discussion at a public meeting can do no good, and may do great mischief. It is in a state requiring the most painful attention of the ablest heads ; nor is it by any means certain that any attention, or any ability, will produce a satisfactory solution of the problem. My own view is this. I do not on principle object to the paying of the Irish Catholic priests. I regret that such a step was not taken in 1829. I would, even now, gladly support any well digested plan which might be likely to succeed. But I fear that the difficulties are insurmountable. Against such a measure there are all the zealots of the High Church, and all the zealots of the Low Church ; the Bishop of Exeter, and Hugh Macneile ; Oxford, and Exeter Hall ; all the champions of the voluntary system ; all the English Dissenters ; all Scot- land ; all Ireland, both Orangemen and Papists. If you add together the mass which opposed the late Government on the Education question, the mass which opposed Sir James Gra- 1841-44- LORD MACAU LAY. 445 ham's Education clauses last year, 1 and the mass which is crying out for repeal in Ireland, you get something like a notion of the force which will be arrayed against a Bill for paying the Irish Catholic clergy. What have you on the other side ? You have the states- men, both Tory and Whig ; but no combination of statesmen is a match for a general combination of fools. And, even among the statesmen, there is by no means perfect concord. The Tory statesmen are for paying the Catholic priests, but not for touching one farthing of the revenue of the Protestant Church. The Liberal statesmen, (I for one, if I may lay claim to the name,) would transfer a large part of the Irish Church revenues from the Protestants to the Catholics. For such a measure I should think it my duty to vote, though I were certain my vote would cost me my seat in Parliament. Whether I would vote for a measure which, leaving the Protestant Church of Ireland untouched, should add more than half a million to our public burdens for the maintenance of the Popish priesthood, is another question. I am not ashamed to say that I have not quite made up my mind, and that I should be glad, before I made it up, to hear the opinions of others. As things stand, I do not believe that Sir Robert or Lord John, or even Sir Robert and Lord John united, could induce one third part of the members of the House of Commons to vote for any plan whatever of which the object should be the direct payment of the Irish Catholic priests. Thinking thus, I have turned my mind to the best indirect ways of effecting this object, and I have some notions which may possibly bear fruit. I shall probably take an opportunity of submitting them to the House of Commons. Now I can conceive nothing more inexpedient than that, with these views, I should at the present moment go down to Edinburgh. If I did, I should certainly take the bull by the horns. I should positively refuse to give any promise. I should declare that I was not, on principle, op- posed to the payment of Catholic priests ; and I should re- serve my judgment as to any particular mode of payment till the details were before me. The effect would be a violent explosion of public feeling. Other towns would follow the example of Edinburgh. Petitions would pour in by thousands as soon as Parliament had assembled, and the difficulties with which we have to deal, and which are great enough as it is, would be doubled. 1 In 1843, Sir James Graham, speaking for the Government, proposed a scheme for educating the population of our great towns which was defeated by the opposition of the Nonconformists. 446 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. IX. I do not, however, think that the Edinburgh Review ought to be under the same restraints under which a Whig Cabinet is necessarily placed. The Review has not to take the Queen's pleasure, to count votes in the Houses, or to keep powerful supporters in good humour. It should expound and defend the Whig theory of government ; a theory from which we are forced sometimes to depart in practice. There can be no ob- jection to Senior's arguing in the strongest manner for the pay- ing of the Catholic priests. I should think it very injudicious to lay down the rule that the Whig Review should never plead for any reforms except such as a Whig Ministry could pru- dently propose to the Legislature. I have a plan in my head which I hope you will not dislike. I think of reviewing the Memoirs of Barere. I really am per- suaded that I could make something of that subject. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : December 13, 1843. Dear Napier, You shall have my paper on Barere before Parliament meets. I never took to writing anything with more hearty goodwill. If I can, I will make the old villain shake even in his grave. Some of the lies in which I have detected him are such as you, with all your experience in literary matters, will find it difficult to believe without actual inspection of the authorities. ' What do you hear of Jeffrey's book ? 2 My own general impression is that the selection is ill made, and that a certain want of finish, which in a periodical work is readily excused, and has sometimes even the effect of a grace, is rather too perceptible in many passages. On the other hand, the variety and versatility of Jeffrey's mind seems to me more extraordi- nary than ever. I think that there are few things in the four volumes which one or two other men could not have done as well ; but I do not think that any one man except Jeffrey, nay that any three men, could have produced such diversified excellence. When I compare him with Sydney and myself, I feel, with humility perfectly sincere, that his range is immeasur- ably wider than ours. And this is only as a writer ; but he is 1 "As soon as he ceases to write trifles, he begins to write lies ; and such lies ! A man who has never been within the tropics does not know what a thunderstorm means ; a man who has never looked on Niagara has but a faint idea of a cataract ; and he who has not read Barere's Memoirs may b<- said not to know what it is to lie." Macaulay's Article on Barere. 3 Lord Jeffrey's Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. 1841-44- LORD MACAU LAY. 447 not only a writer ; he has been a great advocate, and he is a great Judge. Take him all in all, I think him more nearly an universal genius than any man of our time ; certainly far more nearly than Brougham, much as Brougham affects the character. Brougham does one thing well, two or three things indifferently,, and a hundred things detestably. His Parliamentary speaking is admirable ; his forensic speaking poor ; his writings, at the very best, second-rate. As to his hydrostatics, his political philosophy, his equity judgments, his translations from the Greek, they are really below contempt. Jeffrey, on the other hand, has tried nothing in which he has not succeeded, except Parliamentary speaking ; and there he obtained what to any other man would have been great success, and disappointed his hearers only because their expectations were extravagant. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. Albany, London : April 10, 1844. Dear Napier, I am glad that you like my article. It does not please me now, by any means, as much as it did while I was writing it. It is shade, unrelieved by a gleam of light. 1 This is the fault of the subject rather than of the painter ; but it takes away from the effect of the portrait. And thus, to the many reasons which all honest men have for hating Barere I may add a reason personal to myself, that the excess of his rascality has spoiled my paper on him. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. 1 ' ' Whatsoever things are false, whatsoever things are dishonest, whatsoever things are unjust, whatsoever things are impure, whatsoever things are hateful, whatsoever things are of evil report, if there be any vice, and it there be any infamy, all these things were blended in Harare. " 448 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x CHAPTER X. 1844-1847. Letters to Mr. Napier Macaulay remodels his design for an article on Burke and his Times into a sketch of Lord Chatham's later years- Tour in Holland Scene off Dordrecht Macaulay on the Irish Church Maynooth The Ministerial crisis of December 1845 : letters to Mrs. Trevelyan Letter to Mr. Macfarlan Fall of Sir Robert Peel Macaulay becomes Paymaster-General His re-election at Edin- burgh -His position in the House of Commons- General election of 1847 Macaulay's defeat at Edinburgh. Albany, London : August 14, 1844. DEAR NAPIER, I have been working hard for you during the last week, and have covered many sheets of foolscap ; and now I find that I have taken a subject altogether unmanageable. 1 There is no want of materials. On the contrary, facts and thoughts, both interesting and new, are abundant. But this very abundance bewilders me. The stage is too small for the actors. The canvas is too narrow for the multitude of figures. It is absolutely necessary that I should change my whole plan. I will try to write for you, not a History of England during the earlier part of George the Third's reign, but an account of the last years of Lord Chatham's life. I promised or half promised this ten years ago, at the end of my review of Thackeray's book. Most of what I have written will come in very well. The fourth volume of the Chatham Correspondence has not, I think, been reviewed. It will furnish a heading for the article. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAUI.AV. 1 The unmanageable subject was a review of Burke's Life and Writings. " I should wish," Macaulay writes, "to say a good deal about the Ministerial revolutions of the early part of George the Third's reign ; about the characters of Bute, Mansfield, Chatham, Townsend, George Grenville, and many others ; about Wilkes's and Churchill's lampoons, and so forth. I should wish also to go into a critical examination of the Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful, and to throw out some hints on the subject which have long been rolling up and down in my mind. But this would be enough for a long article ; and, when this is done, we have only brought Burke to the threshold of the House of Commons. The American War, the Coalition, the Impeachment of Hastings, the French Revolution, still remain." 1844-47- LORD MACAU I. AY. 449 A week later Macaulay writes : "The article on Chatham goes on swimmingly. A great part of the information which I have is still in manuscript ; Horace Walpole's Memoirs of George the Third's reign, which were transcribed for Mackin- tosh ; and the first Lord Holland's Diary, which Lady Holland permitted me to read. I mean to be with you on Saturday the 3 1 st. I would gladly stay with you till the Tuesday; but I shall not be quite my own master. It is certainly more agree- able to represent such a place as Paisley, or Wolverhampton, than such a place as Edinburgh. Hallam or Everett can enjoy the society and curiosities of your fine city ; but I am the one person to whom all those things are interdicted." Shortly before Macaulay's arrival in India, a Civil Servant of the Company, employed as Resident at a native court, came under the suspicion of having made use of his position to enrich himself by illicit means. Bills came to hand through Persia, drawn in his favour for great sums of money on the Company itself. The Court of Directors naturally took the alarm, and sent a hint to the Governor-General, who wrote to the officer in question inviting him to clear his character before a Com- mission of Inquiry. But the bird had already flown. The late Resident was well on his way to Europe ; and his answer to Lord William Bentinck, in which the offer of an investigation was civilly but most positively declined, was actually addressed from the Sandheads at the mouth of the Hooghly. The fol- lowing letters will sufficiently indicate the aspect under which the transaction presented itself to Macaulay. His behaviour on this occasion may seem unnecessarily harsh to that section of society which, in its dealings with gilded rogues, takes very good care not to err on the side of intolerance; but most readers will think the better of him because, when he found himself in questionable company, he obeyed the instinct which prompted him to stand on his dignity as an honest man. Rotterdam : October 9, 1844. Dear Hannah, After a very pleasant day at Antwerp, 1 started at seven yesterday morning by the steamer for Rotter- dam. I had an odd conversation on board, and one which, I think, will amuse both you and Trevelyan. As we passed Dordrecht, one of the passengers, an Englishman, said that he had never seen anything like it. Parts of it reminded me of some parts of Cape Town ; and I said so. An elderly gentle- man immediately laid hold of me. " You have been at the Cape, Sir?" "Yes, Sir." "Perhaps you have been in India?" "Yes, Sir." "My dear, here is a gentleman who has been in G G 450 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. India." So I became an object of attention to an ill-looking vulgar woman, who appeared to be the wife of my questioner ; and to his daughter, a pretty girl enough, but by no means ladylike. " And how did you like India ? Is it not the most delightful place in the world?" "It is well enough," I said, "for a place of exile." "Exile!" says the lady. "I think people are exiled when they come away from India." " I have never," said the old gentleman, " had a day's good health since I left India." A little chat followed about mangoes and mango- fish, punkahs and palanquins, white ants and cockroaches. I maintained, as I generally do on such occasions, that all the fruits of the tropics are not worth a pottle of Covent Garden strawberries, and that a lodging up three pair of stairs in London is better than a palace in a compound at Chowringhee. My gentleman was vehement in asserting that India was the only country to live in. "I went there," he said, "at sixteen, in 1800, and stayed till 1830, when I was superannuated. If the Company had not chosen to superannuate me, I should have been there still. I should like to end my days there." I could not conceive what he meant by being superannuated at a time when he could have been only forty-six years old, and conse- quently younger than most of the field-officers in the Indian army, and than half the Senior Merchants in the Civil Service ; but I was too polite to interrogate him. That was a politeness, however, of which he had no notion. " How long," he asked, " were you in India ?" " Between four and five years." " A clergyman, I suppose ?" Whether he drew this inference from the sanctity of my looks, or from my olive- coloured coat and shawl waistcoat, I do not pretend to guess ; but I answered that I had not the honour to belong to so sacred a profession. "A mercantile gentleman, no doubt?" "No." Then his curiosity got the better of all the laws of good breed- ing, and he went straight to the point. " May I ask, Sir, to whom I have the honour of talking?" I told him. "Oh, Sir," said he, u you must often have heard of me. I am Mr. . I was long at Lucknow." " Heard of you ! " thought I. " Yes ; and a pretty account I have heard of you ! " I should have at once turned on my heel, and walked away, if his daughter had not been close to us; and, scoundrel as he is, I could not affront him in her presence. I merely said, with the coldest tone and look: "Certainly I have heard of Mr. ." He went on : " You are related, I think, to a civil servant who made a stir about - ." It was just on my lips to say: "Yes. It was by my brother-in-law's means that - - was superan- nuated;" but I commanded myself, and merely said that I was 1844-47- LORD MACAULAY. 451 nearly related to Mr. Trevelyan ; and I then called to the steward, and pretended to be very anxious to settle with him about some coffee that I had taken. While he was changing me a gold William I got away from the old villain ; went to the other end of the poop ; took out my book ; and avoided looking towards him during the rest of the passage. And yet I could not help thinking a little better of him for what had happened, for it reminded me of what poor Macnaghten once said to me at Ootacamund. " - has certain excuses which and others have not had ; for he is really so great a fool that he can hardly be called a responsible agent." I certainly never knew such an instance of folly as that to which I had just been witness. Had he been a man of common sense he would have avoided all allusion to India, or, at any rate, would have talked about India only to people who were likely to be unacquainted with his history. He must have known that I was Secretary to the Board of Control when that Board expressed its entire con- currence in the measures taken by the Company against him. Ever yours T. B. M. Four days later Macaulay writes from Amsterdam : " I have been pestered by those s all the way from Rotterdam hither, and shall probably be pestered by them the whole way back. We are always in the same inns; we always go to Museums at the same hour, and we have been as near as pos- sible to travelling in the same diligence. I resolutely turn away from the old rogue, and pretend not to see him. He perfectly comprehends my meaning, and looks as if he were in the pillory. But it is not pleasant to have such scenes daily in the presence of his wife and daughter." During 1844 an d 1845 Macaulay pretty frequently addressed the House of Commons. He earned the gratitude of the Uni- tarians by his successful vindication of their disputed title to their own chapels and cemeteries. By his condemnation of theological tests at Scotch Universities, and his adventurous assault upon the Church of Ireland, he appealed to the con- fidence of those Edinburgh dissenters whose favour he for some time past had been most undeservedly losing. It is hard to conceive now United Presbyterians, and Free Churchmen fresh from the Disruption, could have found it in their hearts to quarrel with a representative who was able to compose, and willing to utter, such a declaration as this: " I am not speaking in anger, or with any wish to excite anger in others; I am not speaking with rhetorical exaggeration; I am calmly and delibe- 452 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. rately expressing, in the most appropriate terms, an opinion which I formed many years ago, which all my observations and reflections have confirmed, and which I am prepared to support by reasons, when I say that, of all the institutions of the civilised world, the Established Church of Ireland seems to me the most absurd. " When Sir James Graham was called to account for opening Mazzini's envelopes, Macaulay attacked that unlucky statesman in a speech, which, in writing to a correspondent, he mentions as having fallen " like a shell in a powder magazine." He like- wise was active and prominent in the controversy that raged over the measure by which the question of Maynooth College was sent to an uneasy sleep of five-and-twenty years. The passage in which he drew a contrast, glowing with life and colour, between the squalor of the Irish Seminary and the wealth of the Colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, will rank higher than any other sample of his oratory in the estimation of schoolboys; and especially of such schoolboys as are looking forward long- ingly to the material comforts of an university career. ' But men, who are acquainted with those temptations and anxieties which underlie the glitter of Parliamentary success, will give their preference to the closing sentences ; sentences more honourable to him who spoke them than the most finished and famous among all his perorations. " Yes, Sir, to this bill, and to every bill which shall seem to me likely to promote the real Union of Great Britain and Ireland, I will give my support, regardless of obloquy, regardless of the risk which I may run of losing my seat in Parliament. For such obloquy I have learned to consider as true glory; and as to my seat, I am de- termined that it never shall be held by an ignominious tenure; and I am sure that it can never be lost in a more honourable cause." These words were not the idle flourish of an adroit speaker, certain of impunity, and eager only for the cheer which 1 ' ' When I think of the spacious and stately mansions of the heads of houses, of the commodious chambers of the fellows and scholars, of the refectories, the combination rooms, the bowling greens, the stabling, of the state and luxury of the great feast days, of the piles of old plate on the tables, of the savoury steam of the kitchens, of the multitude of geese and capons which turn at once on the spits, of the oceans of excellent ale in the butteries ; and when I remember from whom all this splendour and plenty is derived ; when I remember what was the faith of Edward the Third and of Henry the Sixth, of Margaret of Anjou and Margaret of Richmond, of William of Wyke- ham and William of Waynefleet, of Archbishop Chicheleyand Cardinal Wolsey; when I remember what we have taken from the Roman Catholics, King's College, New College, Christ Church, my own Trinity; and when I look at the miserable Dotheboys Hall which we have given them in exchange, I feel, I must own, less proud than I could wish of being a Protestant and a Cambridge man." Page 175 of Macaulay's Speeches (People's Edition). 1844-47- LORD MACAULAY. 453 is the unfailing reward of a cheap affectation of courage and disinterestedness. They were given forth in grave earnest, and dictated by an expectation of impending trouble which the event was not slow to justify. In September 1853, when Macaulay, much against his will, was preparing his speeches for publication, he notes in his diary: "After breakfast I wrote out the closing passages of Maynooth. How white poor Peel looked while I was speaking! I remember the effect of the words, ' There you sit .' I have a letter from my Dutch translator. He is startled by the severity of some of my speeches, and no wonder. He knows nothing of the conflict of parties." Peel might well look white beneath the flood of unanswer- able taunts which was poured forth by his terrible ally. Even in his utmost need, it was a heavy price to pay for the support of Macaulay and his party. " There is too much ground for the reproaches of those who, having, in spite of a bitter experi- ence, a second time trusted the Right Honourable Baronet, now find themselves a second time deluded. It has been too much his practice, when in Opposition, to make use of passions with which he has not the slightest sympathy, and of prejudices which he regards with a profound contempt. As soon as he is in power a change takes place. The instruments which have done his work are flung aside. The ladder by which he has climbed is kicked down. . . . Can we wonder that the eager, honest, hot-headed Protestants, who raised you to power in the confident hope that you would curtail the privileges of the Roman Catholics, should stare and grumble when you propose to give public money to the Roman Catholics ? Car we wonder that, from one end of the country to the other, everything should be ferment and uproar ; that petitions should, night after night, whiten all our benches like a snow-storm? Can we wonder that the people out of doors should be exasperated by seeing the very men who, when we were in office, voted against the old grant to Maynooth, now pushed and pulled into the House by your whippers-in to vote for an increased grant ? The natural consequences follow. All those fierce spirits, whom you hallooed on to harass us, now turn round and begin to worry you. The Orangeman raises his war-whoop ; Exeter Hall sets up its bray; Mr. Macneile shudders to see more costly cheer than ever pro- vided for the priests of Baal at the table of the Queen; and the Protestant operatives of Dublin call for impeachments in ex- ceedingly bad English. But what did you expect ? Did you think, when, to serve your turn, you called the devil up, that it was as easy to lay him as to raise him ? Did you think, when 454 HFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. you went on, session after session, thwarting and reviling those whom you knew to be in the right, and flattering all the worst passions of those whom you knew to be in the wrong, that the day of reckoning would never come? It has come. There you sit, doing penance for the disingenuousness of years ." Between the House of Commons and his History, Macaulay had no time to spare for writing articles. Early in 1845 a rumour had found its way into the newspapers, to the effect that he had discontinued his connection with the Edinburgh Review. He at once assured Mr. Napier that the rumour in question had not been set on foot by himself; but, in the same letter, he announced his resolution to employ himself exclusively upon his History, until the first portion of it was completed " If I had not taken that resolution, my History would have perished in embryo, like poor Mackintosh's. As soon as I have finished my first two volumes, I shall be happy to assist you again. But when that will be it is difficult to say. 1 Parliamentary business, at present, prevents me from writing a line. I am preparing for Lord John's debate on Sugar, and for Joseph Hume's debate on India ; and it is one of my infirmities an infirmity, I grieve to say, quite incurable that I cannot correctly and heartily apply my mind to several subjects to- gether. When an approaching debate is in my head, it is to no purpose that I sit down at my desk to write history, and I soon get up again in disgust." London : December n, 1845. Dear Hannah, I am detained for a few minutes at Ellis's chambers with nothing to do. I will therefore employ my leisure in writing to you on a sheet of paper meant for some plea or replication. Yesterday morning I learned that the Ministers had gone down to the Isle of Wight for the purpose of resigning, and that Lord John had been sent for. This morning, all the world knows it. There are many reports ; but my belief is that the Duke of Wellington, after having con- sented to support Peel, was alarmed by the symptoms of oppo- sition among the Lords of the Tory party, and retracted. How this is we shall probably soon learn. In the meantime, London is in confusion. The politicians run from club to club picking up and circulating rumours, and nobody knows exactly what to expect. All discerning men, among whom I rank myself, are anxious and melancholy. What is to befall the country ? Will Lord John attempt to form a Government? Can such a Government abolish the Corn duties? Can it stand three 1 Macaulay never again wrote for the Edinburgh Review. 1844-47- LORD MACAULAY. 455 months with the present House of Commons ? Would even a dissolution give the "U'higs a working majority in the Commons ? And, even if we had such a majority in the Commons, what could we do with the Lords ? Are we to swamp them, as Lord Grey's Ministry proposed to do ? Have we sufficient support in the country to try so extreme a measure ? Are we to go on, as Lord Melbourne's Ministry did unable to carry our own bills, and content with holding the executive functions, and distributing the loaves and fishes ? Or are we, after an unsuccessful attempt to settle the Corn question, to go out? If so, do we not leave the question in a worse position than at present? Or are Peel and Lord John to unite in one Govern- ment? How are personal pretensions to be adjusted in such an arrangement? How are questions of Foreign policy, and of Irish policy, to be settled ? How can Aberdeen and Palmer- ston pull together? How can Lord John himself bear to sit in the same Cabinet with Graham ? And, supposing all these difficulties got over, is it clear that a coalition between Peel and the Whigs could carry the repeal of the Corn Law through the Lords ? What then remains, except an Ultra-Tory Administra- tion composed of such men as the Dukes of Buckingham and Richmond ? Yet how can such an Administration look in the face an Opposition, which will contain every statesman and orator in the House of Commons? What, too, will be the effect produced out of doors by such an Administration? What is there that may not be apprehended if we should have a year of severe distress, and if the manufacturers should impute all their sufferings to the selfish tyranny and rapacity of the Ministers of the Crown ? It is difficult, I think, to conceive a darker prospect than that which lies before us. Yet I have a great confidence in the sense, virtue, and self-command of the nation ; and I therefore hope that we shall get out of this miserable situation, as we have got out of other situations not less miserable. I have spent some hours in carefully considering my own position, and determining on my own course. I have at last made up my mind ; and I send you the result of my deliberations. If, which is not absolutely impossible, though improbable, Peel should still try to patch up a Conservative Administration, and should, as the head of that Administration, propose the repeal of the Corn Laws, my course is clear. I must support him with all the energy that I have, till the question is carried. Then I am free to oppose him. If an Ultra-Tory Ministry should be framed, my course is equally clear. I must oppose them with every faculty that God has given me. 456 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. X. If Lord John should undertake to form a Whig Ministry, and should ask for my assistance, I cannot in honour refuse it But I shall distinctly tell him, and tell my colleagues and con- stituents, that I will not again go through what I went through in Lord Melbourne's Administration. I am determined never again to be one of a Government which cannot carry the measures which it thinks essential. I am satisfied that the great error of Lord Melbourne's Government was, that they did not resign as soon as they found that they could not pass the Appropriation Clause. They would have gone out with flying colours, had they gone out then. This was while I was in India When I came back, I found the Liberal Ministry in a thoroughly false position ; but I did not think it right to separate myself from them. Now the case is different. Our hands are free. Our path is still clear before us ; and I never will be a party to any step which may bring us into that false position again. I will therefore, supposing that Lord John applies to me, accept office on this express condition, that, if we find that we cannot carry the total repeal of the Corn Laws, we will forthwith resign ; or, at all events, that I shall be at liberty forthwith to resign. I am quite sure that this is the right course ; and I am equally sure that, if I take it, I shall be out of office at Easter. There remains another possible case. What if Lord John and Peel should coalesce, and should offer me a place in their Cabinet ? I have fully made up my mind to refuse it. I should not at all blame them for coalescing. I am willing, as an independent Member, to support them as far as I can ; and, as respects the question of the Corn Laws, to support them with all my heart and soul. But, after the language which I have held respecting Peel, and which I am less than ever disposed to retract, I feel that I cannot, without a loss of personal dignity, and without exposing myself to suspicions and insinua- tions which would be insupportable to me, hold any situation under him. The circumstance that my fortune, though amply sufficient for my wants, is small when compared with the fortunes of all the other Cabinet Ministers of our time, makes it fit that I should avoid with punctilious care everything which the multitude may attribute to sordid motives. There are other reasons which do not apply to Lord John, to Lord Lansdowne, to Palmerston, to Baring, to Labouchere, and to Grey ; but which would prevent me from holding office in such an arrangement My opinions about the Irish Church are stronger than those of my friends, and have recently been ex- pressed in a manner which has excited attention. The question 1844-47- LORD MACAULAY. 457 of the ballot would also be an insuperable obstacle. I have spoken and voted for it ; I will not vote against it for a place ; and I am certain that Peel will never consent to let it be an open question. This is an objection which does not apply to Lord John, and to others whom I have named ; for they always opposed the ballot. My full resolution therefore is, if a Coali- tion Ministry should be formed, to support it, but not to be a member of it. I hope that you will not be dissatisfied with this long expo- sition of my views and intentions. I must now make haste home, to dress for dinner at Milman's, and for the Westminster Play. Ever yours T. B. M. Albany : December 13, 1845. Dear Hannah, I am glad that you sympathise with me, and approve of my intentions. I should have written yester- day ; but I was detained till after post-time at a consultation of Whigs, which Lord John had summoned. We were only five, Lord John, Lord Cottenham, Clarendon, Palmerston, and myself. This morning we met again at eleven, and were joined by Baring, by Lord Lansdowne, and by the Duke of Bedford. The posture of affairs is this. Lord John has not consented to form a Ministry. He has only told the Queen that he would consult his friends, and see what could be done. We are all most unwilling to take office, and so is he. I have never seen his natural audacity of spirit so much tempered by discretion, and by a sense of responsibility, as on this occasion. The question of the Com Laws throws all other questions into the shade. Yet, even if that question were out of the way, there would be matters enough to perplex us. Ireland, we fear, is on the brink of something like a servile war, the effect, not of Repeal agitation, but of the severe distress endured by the peasantry. Foreign politics look dark. An augmentation of the army will be necessary. Pretty legacies to leave to a Ministry which will be in a minority in both Houses ! I have no doubt that there is not a single man among us who would not at once refuse to enlist, if he could do so with a clear conscience. Nevertheless, our opinion is that, if we have a reasonable hope of being able to settle the all-important question of the Corn Laws in a satisfactory way, we ought, at whatever sacrifice of quiet and comfort, to take office, though only for a few weeks. But can we entertain such a hope ? That is the point ; 458 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH x. and, till we are satisfied about it, we cannot positively accept or refuse. A few days must pass before we are able to decide. It is clear that we cannot win the battle with our own un- assisted strength. If we win it at all, it must be by the help of Peel, Graham, and their friends.* Peel has not seen Lord John ; but he left with the Queen a memorandum, containing a promise to support a Corn Bill founded on the principles of Lord John's famous letter to the electors of London. Graham has had both a correspondence, and a personal conference, with Lord John and with Lord Lansdowne, and has given similar assurances. But we all feel that this is too vague, and that we may still be left in the lurch. Lord John has asked for a sketch of Peel's own plan. This we cannot get. In fact, strange as it seems, the plan was never drawn up in a distinct form, or submitted to the late Cabinet in detail. As soon as the general nature of it was stated, the opposition became so strong that nothing was said as to minor points. We have therefore de- termined on the following course. All our friends who are likely to be Cabinet Ministers are summoned to London, and will, with scarcely an exception, be here in a day or two. We shall then resolve on the heads of a Corn Law, such as we think that we can with honour introduce. When this is done, we shall send it to Peel and Graham, and demand categorically whether they will cordially support such a Bill, aye or no. \( they refuse, or use vague language, we shall at once decline to form a Government. If they pledge themselves to stand by us, we must undertake the task. This is a very strange, indeed an unprecedented, course. But the situation is unprecedented. We are not coming into office as conquerors, leading a majority in Parliament, and driving out our predecessors. Our predecessors, at a most critical moment, throw up the reins in confusion and despair, while they have a strong majority in both Houses, and implore us, who are a minority, to extricate the country from its troubles. We are therefore entitled, if we consent, to demand their honest support as a right, not to supplicate it as a favour. My hope is that Peel will not accede to our terms, and that we shall be set at liberty. He will then be forced to go on with a Ministry patched up as well as he can patch it up. In the meantime, nothing can be more public-spirited or disinterested than the feelings of all our friends who have yet been con- sulted. This is a good sign. 1 "The imposition of any duty at present, wiihout a provision for its ex- tinction within a short period, would but prolong a contest already sufficiently fruitful of animosity and d sconlent." Such was the cardinal sentence of Lord John Russell's celebrated letter. 1844-47- LORD MA CAUL AY 459 If I do come in, I shall take a carriage by the month from Newman, and remain at the Albany for some weeks. I have no doubt that we shall all be out by Easter in any event. If we should remain longer, I must, of course, take a house ; but nobody can expect that I should be provided with a house at a day's notice. Ever yours T. B. M Albany : December 19, 1845. Dear Hannah, It is an odd thing to see a Ministry making. I never witnessed the process before. Lord John has been all day in his inner library. His ante-chamber has been filled with comers and goers, some talking in knots, some writing notes at tables. Every five minutes somebody is called into the inner room. As the people who have been closeted come out, the cry of the whole body of expectants is " What are you ? " I was summoned almost as soon as I arrived, and found Lord Auckland and Lord Clarendon sitting with Lord John. After some talk about other matters, Lord John told me that he had been trying to ascertain my wishes, and that he found that I wanted leisure and quiet more than salary and business. La- bouchere had told him this. He therefore offered me the Pay Office, one of the three places which, as I have often told you, I should prefer. I at once accepted it. The tenure by which I shall hold it is so precarious that it matters little what its ad- vantages may be ; but I shall have two thousand a year for the trouble of signing my name. I must indeed attend Parliament more closely than I have of late done ; but my mornings will be as much my own as if I were out of office. If I give to my History the time which I used to pass in transacting business when I was Secretary at War, I shall get on nearly as fast as when I was in Opposition. Some other arrangements promise to be less satisfactory. Palmerston will hear of nothing but the Foreign Office, and Lord Grey therefore declines taking any place. I hope that Lord John will give one of the Secre- taryships of State to George Grey. It would be a great eleva- tion ; but I am sure that it is the right thing to do. I have told Grey that I look to him as our future leader in the Commons, and that no pretensions of mine shall ever interfere with this. Labouchere feels exactly as I do. Labouchere and Baring are at least as good men of business as Grey ; and I may say without vanity that I have made speeches which were out of the reach of any of the three. But, taking the talent for business and the talent for speaking together, Grey is un- 460 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. doubtedly the best qualified among us for the lead ; and we are perfectly sensible of this. Indeed, I may say that I do not believe that there was ever a set of public men who had less jealousy of each other, or who formed a more correct estimate of themselves, than the younger members of this Cabinet. Ever yours T. B. M. Albany, London : December 20, 1845. Dear Hannah, All is over. Late at night, just as I was undressing, a knock was given at the door of my chambers. A messenger had come from Lord John with a short note. The quarrel between Lord Grey and Lord Palmerston had made it impossible to form a Ministry. I went to bed, and slept sound. In the morning I went to the corner of Belgrave Square, which is now the great place for political news, and found that Lord John had gone to Windsor to resign his trust into the Queen's hands. I have no disposition to complain of the loss of office. On the contrary, my escape from the slavery of a placeman is my only consolation. l But I feel that we are in an ignominious position as a party. After agreeing on the principles of our measure, after agreeing that our public duty required us to take office, we have now thrown the game up, not on account of any new matter affecting the national interests, but solely because we are, as the French say, mauvais coucheurs, and cannot adjust ourselves to accommodate each other. I do not blame Lord John ; but Lord Grey and Lord Palmerston are both at fault. I think Lord Grey, highly as I esteem his integrity and ability, chiefly responsible for the unfortunate situation in which we are now placed ; but I suspect that Palmerston will be made the scapegoat. He is no favourite with the public. A large por- tion of our own friends think him a dangerous Minister. By the whole continental and American press he has been represented as the very Genius of War and Discord. People will now say that, when every other place was within his reach ; when he might have had the Home Office, the Colonies, the Admiralty, a peerage, in short, his own terms, he declared that, unless he was allowed to be where he was generally considered as a 1 "On the whole," Macaulay wrote to Mr. Ellis, "I am inclined to think that what has happened will do more good than harm. Perhaps the pleasure with which I have this morning looked round my chambers, and resumed my History, has something to do in making me thus cheerful. Let me advise you to put forth a little tract, after the fashion of the seventeenth century, entitled ' A Secret History of some Late Passages, as they were communicated by a Person of Honour to T. F. E., a Gentleman of the Inner Temple.' " 1844-47- LORD MAC A UL AY. 461 firebrand, he would blow up his party, at a crisis when the fate of his party involved the fate of his country. I suspect that a great storm of public indignation will burst upon him, and that he will sink under it. In the meantime what is to happen ? I have had an anxious time since you were away ; but I can truly say that I have done nothing through all these troubles which I should be ashamed to hear proclaimed at Charing Cross, or which I would not do again. Ever yours T. B. M. Macaulay's readiness to brave publicity was soon put to a most unpleasant test. Mr. Macfarlan, a constituent who was much in his confidence, had transmitted to him for presenta- tion a memorial to the Queen praying for the removal of all restriction on the importation of corn. Macaulay replied by a letter which commenced as follows : " You will have heard the termination of our attempt to form a Government. All our plans were frustrated by Lord Grey. I hope that the public interests will not suffer. Sir Robert Peel must now undertake the settlement of the question. It is certain that he can settle it. It is by no means certain that we could have done so : for we shall to a man support him ; and a large proportion of those who are now in office would have refused to support us. On my own share in these transactions I reflect with unmixed satisfaction. From the first, I told Lord John that I stipulated for one thing only, total and immediate repeal of the Corn Laws ; that my objections to gradual abolition were insur- mountable ; but that, if he declared for total and immediate repeal, I would be, as to all other matters, absolutely in his hands; that I would take any office or no office, just as it suited him best ; and that he should never be disturbed by any personal pretensions or jealousies on my part. If everybody else had acted thus, there would now have been a Liberal Ministry. However, as I said, perhaps it is best as it is." It unfortunately happened that Mr. Macfarlan, forgetting both prudence and propriety in his eagerness to seize so good an opportunity of establishing his Member's character as an uncompromising free-trader, thought the letter much too good to be kept to himself. It accordingly appeared in the columns of the Scotsman, and was copied into all the newspapers of the country, to the heartfelt, and, as his diaries prove, the lifelong, regret of Macaulay. He was deeply pained at being paraded before the world as the critic of an old friend and colleague. l ; 1 "May 17, 1850. Macfarlan called; a man who did me a great injury 462 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. Bowood : January 4, 1846. My dear Napier, I am, as ever, grateful for your kindness. Of course you were perfectly right in supposing that I was altogether taken by surprise when I saw my letter to Macfarlan in print. I do not think that I was ever more astonished or vexed. However, it is very little my way to brood over what is done and cannot be helped. I am not surprised that many should blame me ; and yet I cannot admit that I was much to blame. I was writing to an active friendly constituent who had during some years been in almost constant communication with me. We had corresponded about Edinburgh intrigues, about the Free Church, about May- nooth ; and I had always written with openness, and had never found any reason to complain of indiscretion. After all, I wrote only what everybody at Brooks's, and at the Reform Club, was saying from morning till night. I will venture to affirm, that, if the post-bags of the last fortnight were rum- maged, it would appear that Lord John, Lord Morpeth, Lord Grey himself, in fact, everybody concerned in the late nego- tiations, has written letters quite as unfit for the public eye as mine. However, I well know that the world always judges by the event ; and I must be content to be well abused till some new occurrence puts Macfarlan's prank out of people's heads. I should be much obliged to you, whenever an opportunity offers, to say from me that I am surprised and indignant at the unauthorised publication of a private letter unguardedly written ; but that, whatever I have written, guardedly or unguardedly, is the truth by which I am prepared to stand. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. Albany. London : January 10, 1846. Dear Napier, Thanks for all your kindness. I am sorry to be the cause of so much trouble to my friends. I have received a penitent letter from Macfarlan, offering to do any- thing in his power. The business is very disagreeable, but might have been but he meant no harm, and I have long forgiven him ; though to the end of my life I shall occasionally feel twinges of a very painful sort at the recollection." And again : "July 4, 1851. I stayed at home all the morning, and wrote not amiss. Macfarlan called. What harm that man did me ! What misery for a time he caused me ! In my happy life that was one of the calamities which cut deep. There is still a scar." So keenly did Macaulay feel the only circumstance which ever threw a momentary doubt upon the loyalty of his friendship. 1 844 47. LORD MA CAUL AY 463 worse. To say of a man that he has talents and virtue, but wants judgment and temper, is no very deadly outrage. I declare that I should not have scrupled to put this unlucky sentence, 1 with a little softening, into the Edinburgh Review. For example : " We cannot but regret that a nobleman, whose talents and virtue we fully ackowledge, should have formed so high an estimate of his own pretensions, and should be so unwilling to make any concession to the opinions of others, that it is not easy to act in concert with him." There is nothing here which I would not say in the House of Commons. I do not know whether it is worth while to mention the following circumstance. Macfarlan, soon after he got this unlucky letter, wrote to tell me that he thought the publication of it would be of use to me. I instantly wrote to beg that he would not think of such a thing, and gave as my reason the great esteem and admiration which, in spite of recent events, I felt for Lord Grey. Whether any good use can be made of this fact I do not know. I am very unwilling to be on bad terms with a man whom I greatly respect and value. I rely implicitly on your discretion. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY At this period of his life Macaulay was still a hard hitter ; but he timed his blows with due regard for the public interests. In January 1845 he writes to Mr. Napier: "Many thanks for your kind expressions about the last session. I have certainly been heard with great favour by the House whenever I have spoken. As to the course which I have taken, I feel no mis- givings. Many honest men think that there ought to be no retrospect in politics. I am firmly convinced that they are in error, and that much better measures than any which we owe to Peel would be very dearly purchased by the utter ruin of all public virtue which must be the consequence of such immoral lenity." So much for Maynooth, and for the past. With regard to the future, and the Corn Laws, he says : " As to any remarks which I may make on Peel's gross inconsistency, they must wait till his Bill is out of all danger. On the Maynooth question he ran no risk of a defeat ; and therefore I had no scruple about attacking him. But to hit him hard while he is fighting the land- owners would be a very different thing. It will be all that he can do to win the battle with the best help that we can give 1 The sentence which referred to "personal pretensions" and "jealousies." 464 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. him. A time will come for looking back. At present our business is to get the country safe through a very serious and doubtful emergency." But no aid from his opponents, however loyally rendered, could keep Sir Robert Peel in o'ffice when once that emergency was at an end On the 26th of June, 1846, the Corn Law Bill passed the Peers ; and, before the night was over, the Govern- ment had received its coup-de-grace in the Commons. Lord John Russell was again commanded to form an Administration. Macaulay obtained the post which he preferred, as the least likely to interfere with his historical labours ; and, as Paymaster- General of the Army, he went down to Scotland to ask for re-election. On the pth of July he wrote to Mrs. Trevelyan from the Royal Hotel : " I reached Edinburgh last night, and found the city in a storm. The dissenters and Free Churchmen have got up an opposition on the old ground of Maynooth, and have sent for Sir Culling Eardley Smith. He is to be here this evening. Comically enough, we shall be at the same inn ; but the landlord, waiters, chambermaid, and boots are all with me. I have no doubt about the result We had to-day a- great meeting of electors. The Lord Provost presided Near three thousand well-dressed people, chiefly voters, were present I spoke for an hour, as w r ell, they tell me, as I ever spoke in my life, and certainly with considerable effect There was immense cheering, mingled with a little hissing. A show of hands was called for. I had a perfect forest, and the other side not fifty. I am exceedingly well and in high spirits. I had become somewhat effeminate in literary repose and leisure. You would not know me again now that my blood is up. I am such as when, twelve years ago, I fought the battle with Sadler at Leeds." This ardour for the fray augured badly for Sir Culling Eardley. He proved no match for Macaulay, who out-talked him on the hustings ; beat him by two to one at the poll ; and returned to the Albany in triumph, none the worse for his exhilarating, though rather expensive, contest We are told by Gibbon, in the most delightful of auto- biographies, that he never found his mind more vigorous, nor his composition more happy, than in "the winter hurry of society and Parliament" The historian of the Roman Empire found a gentle stimulus and a salutary distraction in the dis- charge of his functions as Commissioner of Trade and Planta- tions, and in the debates on Burke's measures of Economical Reform. In like manner the routine of the Pay Orifice, and the obligations of the Treasury bench in the House of Com- mons, were of benefit to Macaulay while he was engaged upon j 844-47. LORD MA CAUL AY. 465 Monmouth's invasion, and the Revolution of 1688. The new Paymaster-General discovered his duties to be even less burden- some than he had been given to suppose. An occasional Board day at Chelsea, passed in checking off lists of names and signing grants of pension, made very moderate demands upon his time and energy ; and in Parliament his brother Members treated him with a respectful indulgence on which he very seldom trespassed. Lord Lytton must have been thinking of this period in his career, when he ascribed to him " A royal Eloquence, that paid, in state, A ceremonious visit to Debate." Macaulay spoke only five times in all during the sessions of 1846 and 1847 ; but whenever, and on whatever subject, he opened his lips, the columns of Hansard are thickly studded with compliments paid to him either in retrospect or by anti- cipation. His intention to take part in a discussion was, as it were, advertised beforehand by the misgivings of the speakers who differed from him. When the Ten Hours' Bill was under consideration, one of its most resolute opponents, fearing the effect which would be produced upon the House by a disserta- tion from Macaulay in favour of the principle of the Factory Acts, humorously deprecated the wrath of " his Right Honour- able friend, under whose withering eloquence he would, there was little doubt, be very speedily extinguished." ' On another 1 On the 8th of October 1853, Macaulay says, with the frankness of a man who is speaking about his own performances without the fear of being over- heard : " I worked at the Factory speech, but did little. I like the speech amazingly. I rather think that it is my very best." At all events, it has proved a mine of wealth to those who, since Macaulay's day, have argued for extending the Factory Acts. He made an effective use of the analogy of the Sunday in order to defend the principle of regulating the hours of labour by law. "Man, man is the great instrument that produces wealth. The natural difference between Campania and Spitzbergen is trifling when compared with the difference between a country inhabited by men full of bodily and mental vigour, and a country inhabited by men sunk in bodily and mental decrepitude. Therefore it is that we are not poorer but richer, because we have, through many ages, rested from our labour one day in seven. That day is not lost. While industry is suspended, while the plough lies in the furrow, while the Exchange is silent, while no smoke ascends from the factory, a process is going on quite as important to the wealth of nations as any process which is performed on more busy days. Man, the machine of machines, the machine compared with which all the contrivances of the Watts and the Arkwrights are worthless, is repairing and winding up, so that he returns to his labours on the Monday with clearer intellect, with livelier spirits, with renewed corporal vigour. Never will I believe that what makes a population stronger, and healthier, and wiser, and better, can ultimately make it poorer. You try to frighten us by telling us that, in some German factories, the young work seventeen hours in the twenty-four ; that they work so hard that among thousands there is not one who grows to such a stature that he can be admitted into the army ; and you ask whether, if we pass this bill, we can possibly hold our own against such competition as this. Sir, I laugh at the thought of such competition. If ever H II. 466 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. occasion he was unexpectedly called upon his feet to account for a letter, in which he had expressed an opinion about the propriety of granting a pardon to the leaders of the Welsh Chartists. When the House had heard his explanation, (into which he contrived to bring an allusion to Judge Jeffreys and the Bloody Assize, a reminiscence, in all probability, of his morning's study,) Mr. Disraeli gracefully enough expressed the general sentiment of the audience. " It is always, to me at least, and I believe to the House, so agreeable to listen to the Right Honourable gentleman under any circumstances, that we must have been all gratified to-night that he has found it necessary to vindicate his celebrated epistle." In October 1846, Macaulay writes to one of his sisters : " I have received the most disgusting letter, by many degrees, that I ever read in my life from old Mrs. . I can convey to you no idea of it but by transcribing it, and it is too long to transcribe. However, I will give you the opening. ' My dear friend, Many years have passed away, since my revered hus- band, and your excellent father, walked together as Christian friends, and since I derived the sweetest comfort and pleasure from a close friendship with both your blessed parents.' After a great deal more about various revered and blessed people, she comes to the real object of her epistle, which is to ask for three livings and a bishopric. I have been accustomed to unreasonable and importunate suitors ; but I protest that this old hag's impudence fairly took away my breath. She is so moderate as to say that for her son she will accept, nay, very thankfully accept, even a living of five hundred a year. Another proof of her moderation is that, before she asks for a bishopric, she has the grace to say, ' I am now going to be very bold.' Really the comedy of actual life is beyond all comedy." The repugnance which this deluge of unctuous importunity aroused in Macaulay's breast was not aggravated by any pre- possession in favour of doctrines the opposite of Evangelical. This is clearly proved, if proof be wanting, by the last sentence of a letter bearing upon what was perhaps the most important piece of business which it fell to him to transact as Paymaster- General of the Army. Dear Ellis, I have at this moment the disposal of a toler- able piece of patronage, the Chaplainship of Chelsea Hospital ; light duty, a nice house, coal, candles, and three hundred pounds we are forced to yield the foremost place among commercial nations, we shall yield it, not to a race of degenerate dwarfs, but to some people pre-eminently rigorous in body and in mind." 1844-47- LORD MA CAUL AY. 467 a year. It would be an exceedingly pleasant situation for a literary man. But he must also be a man of piety and feeling ; for, the Hospital being full of old battered soldiers, the duty, though by no means onerous, consists chiefly in attending sick beds, and I would not for any consideration assign such a duty to a person who would hurry through it in a perfunctory manner. Is there any among the junior Fellows of Trinity who would suit ? I do not want a politician ; and nothing shall induce me to take a Puseyite. Yours very truly T. B. M. In Parliament, in society, and in literary and political circles throughout the country, Macaulay already enjoyed that general respect and goodwill which attach themselves to a man who has done great things, and from whom something still greater is expected. But there was one city in the kingdom where he had ceased to be popular, and unfortunately that city was Edinburgh. The causes of his unpopularity were in part external and temporary, and in part can be detected only after an attentive review of his personal character. In the year 1847 the disruption of the Scotch Church was already an accomplished and accepted fact ; but that momentous crisis had left bitter feelings behind it. Our leading public men had displayed an indifference to the tendencies of religious opinion in Scotland, and a scandalous ignorance of her re- ligious affairs, which had alienated from Whigs and Englishmen the confidence and attachment of the population north of Tweed. Macaulay, the most eminent Whig, and far the most eminent Englishman, who then sat for a Scotch constituency, was made the scapegoat for the sins of all his colleagues. He might have averted his fate by subservience, or mitigated it by prudence ; but the necessity of taking a side about Maynooth obliged him to announce his views on the question of religious endowments, and his nature did not allow him to soften down those views by the use of dainty and ambiguous phraseology. He wished all the world to know that, however much the people whom he represented might regard ecclesiastical matters from the standpoint of the Church, he regarded them, and would always continue to regard them, exclusively from the standpoint of the State. Radicalism, again, then as always, was stronger in Scotland that in any other portion of the United Kingdom, and stronger in Edinburgh than in any other town of Scotland ; for in Edin- burgh the internal differences of the Liberal party were intensified 468 LIFE AND LETTERS Of en. x. by local circumstances. " Twenty years ago," writes a former supporter of Macaulay, " there was among us a great deal of wnat in Oxford is called Town and Gown. The Parliament House, Literature, and the University made the Gown. The tradesmen, as a class, maintained that the high Whigs, though tailing themselves the friends of the people, were exclusive and overbearing ; and there was some truth in this. The Whigs were always under terror of being coupled with Cobbett, Hunt, and their kind.' Macaulay had his full share of this feeling. In May 1842, when the People's Charter was presented to Parliament, he spoke, with an emphasis which nothing but sincere conviction could supply, against Mr. Thomas Dun- combe's motion that the petitioners should be heard at the Bar of the House. " Sir," he said, " I cannot conscientiously assent to the motion. And yet I must admit that the Honourable Member for Finsbury has framed k with considerable skill. He has done his best to obtain the support of all those timid and interested politicians who think much more about the security of their seats than about the security of their country. It would be very convenient to me to give a silent vote with him. I should then have it in my power to say to the Chartists of Edinburgh, ' When your petition was before the House I was on your side : I was for giving you a full hearing.' I should at the same time be able to assure my Conservative constituents that I never had supported and never would support the Charter. But, Sir, though this course would be very convenient, it is one which my sense of duty will not suffer me to take." In a letter to Mr. Napier, dated the loth of August 1844, he writes : " I must put off my journey northward for a week. One of my reasons for this postponement, (but let it rest between ourselves,) is that, on Wednesday the 2ist, Hume is to lay the first stone of a monument to the Republicans who were trans- ported by Pitt and Dundas. Now, though I by no means approve of the severity with which those people were treated, I do not admire their proceedings, nor should I choose to attend the ceremony. But, if I arrived just before it, I should certainly be expected by a portion of my constituents either to attend or explain the reasons of my absence, and thus we should have another disagreeable controversy." But Macaulay might have been as much of a Whig and an Erastian as he chose if he had had in his composition more of the man of the world and less of the man of the study. There was a perceptible want of lightness of touch in his method of doing the ordinary business which falls to the lot of a Member of Parliament " The truth is," wrote Lord Cockburn in July I844-47. LORD MAC A UL AY. 4&9 1846, "that Macaulay, with all his admitted knowledge, talent, eloquence, and worth, is not popular. He cares more for his History than for the jobs of his constituents, and answers letters irregularly, and with a brevity deemed contemptuous ; and, above all other defects, he suffers severely from the vice of over-talking, and consequently of under-listening. A deputa- tion goes to London to enlighten their representative. They are full of their own matter, and their chairman has a statement bottled and ripe, which he is anxious to draw and decant ; but, instead of being listened to, they no sooner enter the audience chamber than they find themselves all superseded by the restless ability of their eloquent Member, who, besides mistaking speak- ing for hearing, has the indelicate candour not even to profess being struck by the importance of the affair." Macaulay had exalted, and, as some would hold, over- strained ideas of the attitude which a representative should adopt in his pecuniary relations with the electors who have sent him to Parliament. Although one of the most generous of men, who knew no delight like giving, and who indulged himself in that respect with an indiscriminate and incautious facility which was at times little short of blameworthy, he was willing, when Edinburgh was in question, to be called stingy if he could only make it clear to his own conscience that he was not tampering with corruption. London : July 14, 1841. My dear Mr. Black, I am much gratified by what you say about the race-cup. I had already written to Craig to say that I should not subscribe, and I am glad that my determination meets your approbation. In the first place, I am not clear that the object is a good one. In the next place, I am clear that by giving money for such an object in obedience to such a summons, I should completely change the whole character of my connection with Edinburgh. It has been usual enough for rich families to keep a hold on corrupt boroughs by defraying the expense of public amusements. Sometimes it is a ball ; sometimes a regatta. The Derby family used to support the Preston races. The Members for Beverley, I believe, find a bull for their constituents to bait. But these were not the con- ditions on which I undertook to represent Edinburgh. In return for your generous confidence, I offer Parliamentary service, and nothing else. I am indeed most willing to con- tribute the little that I can spare to your most useful public charities. But even this I do not consider as matter of contract. Nor should I think it proper that the Town Council should call 470 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. on me to contribute even to an hospital or a school. But the call that is now made is one so objectionable that, I must plainly say, I would rather take the Chiltern Hundreds than comply with it. I should feel this if I were a rich man. But I am not rich. I have the means of living very comfortably according to my notions, and I shall still be able to spare something for the common objects of our party, and something for the distressed. But I have nothing to waste on gaieties which can at best only be considered harmless. If our friends want a Member who will find them in public diversions, they can be at no loss. I know twenty people who, if you will elect them to Parliament, will gladly treat you to a race and a race-ball once a month. But I shall not be very easily induced to believe that Edin- burgh is disposed to select her representatives on such a principle. Ever yours truly T. B. MACAULAY. Macaulay was so free from some faults to which literary men are proverbially inclined, that many of those who had claims upon his time and services were too apt to forget that, after all, he possessed the literary temperament. In the heyday of youth he relished the bustle of crowds, and could find amusement in the company of strangers ; but as years went forward, as his spirits lost their edge and his health its spring, he was ever more and more disposed to recoil from publicity. Insatiable of labour, he regarded the near approach, and still more the distant prospect, of worry with an exaggerated dis- quietude which in his case was a premonitory symptom of the disease that was to kill him. Perpetually overworked by his History, (and there is no overwork like that of a task which has grown to be dearer to a man than life itself,) he no longer had the nerve required to face the social efforts, and to undergo the minute and unceasing observation, to which he was, or fancied himself to be, exposed when on a visit to the city which he represented. " If the people of Edinburgh," he wrote to Mr. Napier, " were not my constituents, there is no place in the island where I should like so much to pass a few weeks : but our relation imposes both such constant exertion and such constant reserve that a trip thither is neither pleasant nor prudent." And again : " I hope to be at Edinburgh on August the 1 9th or 2oth. At so dead a time of the year I should think thai! it might be possible for me to escape speeches and meet- ings, particularly as I mean to go quietly, and without sending 1844-47- LORD MACAULAY. 471 notice to any of our political managers. It is really very hard that I cannot visit your city as any other gentleman and man of letters can do. My intention is to stay about a fortnight and I should like to go out to you from Edinburgh on Saturday the 2oth, and to return on the Monday. I wish to avoid passing a Sunday in the good town, for to whatever church I go, I shall give offence to somebody." Whatever may have been the origin and the extent of Macaulay's shortcomings as representative of Edinburgh, there were men at hand who were anxious, and very well able, to turn them to their own account. But the injuries which he forgave I am forbidden to resent. No drop of ink from this pen shall resuscitate the memory of the intrigues that preceded and brought about the catastrophe of 1847 '> a catastrophe which was the outcome of jealousies which have long been dead, and the stepping-stone of ambitions which have ere this . been gratified. But justice demands that on one point a pro- test should be made. There are some still alive who have persuaded themselves into the belief that they opposed Mac- aulay because he was not sound on the Corn Laws ; and this in the teeth of the facts that from the year 1843 onward he was a consistent and hearty supporter of the uncompromising Resolution annually brought forward by Mr. Charles Villiers ; and that, (as his letter to Mr. Macfarlan made only too notori- ous,) at the crowning moment of the Free Trade controversy he statedly and resolutely refused to lend his assistance in forming any Ministry which did not pledge itself to the total and immediate removal of the duty upon corn. 1 If such an early and signal repentance as this, (and I will not enter into the question whether or not his previous conduct had been such as called for repentance,) was ineffectual to clear him in the eyes of his constituents, then indeed the authority of an elector over his representative would be a tyranny which no man of right feeling would desire to exercise, and no man of honour could be expected to endure. When Parliament was dissolved in the summer of 1847, all the various elements of discontent, political, ecclesiastical, and personal alike, mustered round the standard that was raised by Sir Culling Eardley's former committee, "which," says Lord Cockburn, "contained Established Churchmen and wild Volun- taries, intense Tories and declamatory Radicals, who agreed in nothing except in holding their peculiar religion as the scriptural, and therefore the only safe, criterion of fitness for public duty. 1 See pages 454 and 461. 472 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. These men would have preferred Blackadder to Marlborough for the command of an army." "The struggle," wrote Hugh Miller, " is exciting the deepest interest, and, as the beginning of a decided movement on the part of Christians of various denominations to send men of avowed Christian principle to Parliament, may lead to great results." The common sense of the Scotch people brought this movement, such as it was, to a speedy close ; and it led to no greater result than that of inflicting a transient scandal upon the sacred name of religion, and giving Macaulay the leisure which he required in order to put the finishing touch to the first two volumes of his History. The leaders of the agitation judged it necessary to select a stronger candidate than Sir Culling Eardley ; and their choice fell upon Mr. Charles Cowan, a son of one of the most respected citizens of Edinburgh, and himself a man of high private cha- racter, though not very conversant with public affairs. The gentleman who introduced Mr. Cowan to the electors at his first public meeting recommended him on the express ground that " Christian men ought to send Christian men to represent them." But, when people inspired by these exemplary motives had once begun to move, others whose views were of a more temporal and mundane complexion were not behindhand in following their example. A deputation of spirit-dealers waited upon Macaulay to urge the propriety of altering the method of levying the excise duties. They failed to convince him ; and he told them plainly that he would do nothing for them, and most probably should do something against them. The im- mediate consequence of this unsatisfactory interview was the appearance of a fourth candidate in the person of Mr. Black- burn, who was described by his own proposer as one who " came forward for the excise trader, which showed that his heart was with the people," or at any rate with that section of the people whose politics consisted in dislike to the whisky- duty. The contest was short, but sharp. For ten days the city was white with broadsides, and the narrow courts off the High Street rang with the dismal strains of innumerable ballad- singers. The opposition was nominally directed against both the sitting Members ; but from the first it was evident that all the scurrility was meant exclusively for Macaulay. He came scatheless even out of that ordeal. The vague charge of being too much of an essayist and too little of a politician was the worst that either saint or sinner could find to say of him. The burden of half the election-songs was to the effect that he had written poetry, and that one who knew so much about Ancient 1844-47- LORD AIACAULAY. 473 Rome could not possibly be the man for Modern Athens. The day of nomination was the 2gth of July. The space in front of the hustings had been packed by the advocates of cheap whisky. Professor Aytoun, who seconded Mr. Blackburn, was applauded to his heart's content, while Macaulay was treated with a brutality the details of which are painful to read, and would be worse than useless to record. The polling took place on the morrow. A considerable number of the Tories, instead of plumping for Blackburn, or dividing their favours with the sitting Members, (who were both of them moderate Whigs and supporters of the Establishment,) thought fit to give their second votes to Mr. Cowan, an avowed Voluntaryist in Church matters, and the accepted champion of the Radical party. " I waited with Mr. Macaulay," says Mr. Adam Black, " in a room of the Merchants' Hall, to receive at every hour the numbers who had polled in all the districts. At ten o'clock we were con- founded to find that he was 150 below Cowan, but still had faint hopes that the next hour might turn the scale. The next hour came, and a darker prospect. At twelve o'clock he was 340 below Cowan. It was obvious now that the field was lost; but we were left from hour to hour under the torture of a sink- ing poll, till at four o'clock it stood thus : Cowan, 2,063 '> Craig, 1,854 ; Macaulay, 1,477 ; Blackburn, 980." Edinburgh : July 30, 1847. Dearest Hannah, I hope that you will not be much vexed; for I am not vexed, but as cheerful as ever I was in my life. I have been completely beaten. The poll has not closed ; but there is no chance that I shall retrieve the lost ground. Radi- cals, Tories, Dissenters, Voluntaries, Free Churchmen, spirit drinkers who are angry because I will not pledge myself to repeal all taxes on whisky, and great numbers of persons who are jealous of my chief supporters here, and think that the patronage of Edinburgh has been too exclusively distributed among a clique, have united to bear me down. I will make no hasty resolutions ; but everything seems to indicate that I ought to take this opportunity of retiring from public life. Ever yours T. B. M. Edinburgh : July 30, 1847. Dear Ellis, I am beaten, but not at all the less happy for being so. I think that having once been manumitted, after the 474 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. x. old fashion, by a slap in the face, I shall not take to bondage again. But there is time to consider that matter. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAY. That same night, while the town was still alive with jubila- tion over a triumph that soon lost its gloss even in the eyes of those who won it, Macaulay, in the grateful silence of his chamber, was weaving his perturbed thoughts into those exquisite lines which tell within the compass of a score of stanzas the essential secret of the life whose outward aspect these volumes have endeavoured to portray. The day of tumult, strife, defeat, was o'er. Worn out with toil, and noise, and scorn, and spleen, I slumbered, and in slumber saw once more A room in an old mansion, long unseen. That room, methought, was curtained from the light ; Yet through the curtains shone the moon's cold ray Full on a cradle, where, in linen white, Sleeping life's first soft sleep, an infant lay. * * * And lo ! the fairy queens who rule our birth Drew nigh to speak the new-born baby's doom : With noiseless step, which left no trace on earth, From gloom they came, and vanished into gloom. Not deigning on the boy a glance to cast Swept careless by the gorgeous Queen of Gain. More scornful still, the Queen of Fashion passed, With mincing gait and sneer of cold disdain. The Queen of Power tossed high her jewelled head, And o'er her shoulder threw a wrathful frown. The Queen of Pleasure on the pillow shed Scarce one stray rose-leaf from her fragrant crown. Still fay in long procession followed fay ; And still the little couch remained unblest : But, when those wayward sprites had passed away, Came One, the last, the mightiest, and the best. Oh ! glorious lady, with the eyes of light, And laurels clustering round thy lofty brow, Who by the cradle's side didst watch that night, Warbling a sweet strange music, who wast thou ? " Yes, darling ; let them go," so ran the strain : " Yes ; let them go, gain, fashion, pleasure, power, And all the busy elves to whose domain Belongs the nether sphere, the fleeting hour. 1844-47- LORD MACAULAY. 475 " Without one envious sigh, one anxious scheme, To nether sphere, the fleeting hour resign. Mine is the world of thought, the world of dream, Mine all the past, and all the future mine. * * * * " Of the fair brotherhood who share my grace, I, from thy natal day, pronounce thee free ; And, if for some I keep a nobler place, I keep for none a happier than for thee. '' There are who, while to vulgar eyes they seem Of all my bounties largely to partake, Of me as of some rival's handmaid deem And court me but for gain's, power's, fashion's sake. " To such, though deep their lore, though wide their fame, Shall my great mysteries be all unknown : But thou, through good and evil, praise and blame, Wilt not thou love me for myself alone ? " Yes ; thou wilt love me with exceeding love ; And I will tenfold all that love repay : Still smiling, though the tender may reprove ; Still faithful, though the trusted may betray. " In the dark hour of shame, I deigned to stand Before the frowning peers at Bacon's side ; On a far shore I smoothed with tender hand, Through months of pain, the sleepless bed of Hyde. " I brought the wise and brave of ancient days To cheer the cell where Raleigh pined alone. I lighted Milton's darkness with the blaze Of the bright ranks that guard the eternal throne. " And even so, my child, it is my pleasure That thou not then alone shouldst feel me nigh, When in domestic bliss and studious leisure, Thy weeks uncounted come, uncounted fly. * # * * " No ; when on restless night dawns cheerless morrow, When weary soul and wasting body pine, Thine am I still, in danger, sickness, sorrow, In conflict, obloquy, want, exile, thine ; " Thine where on mountain waves the snowbirds scream, Where more than Thule's winter barbs the breeze, Where scarce, through lowering clouds, one sickly gleam Lights the drear May-day of Antarctic seas 476 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. X. " Thine, when around thy litters track all day White sandhills shall reflect the blinding glare ; Thine, when, through forests breathing death, thy way All night shall wind by many a tiger's lair ; " Thine most, when friends turn pale, when traitors fly When, hard beset, thy spirit, justly proud, For truth, peace, freedom, mercy, dares defy A sullen priesthood and a raving crowd. 1 " Amidst the din of all things fell and vile, Hate's yell, and envy's hiss, and folly's bray, Remember me ; and with an unforced smile See riches, baubles, flatterers, pass away. " Yes ; they will pass away ; nor deem it strange ; They come and go, as comes and goes the sea : And let them come and go ; thou, through all change, Fix thy firm gaze on virtue and on me." 1 "I cannot," said Macaulay on the hustings, "ask pardon for my con- duct I cannot ask pardon for being in the right. I come here to state what I have done clearly, and to defend it." The address to his late constituents, which he put forth after his defeat, contained the following sentence. " I shall always be proud to think that I once enjoyed your favour ; but permit me to say that I shall remember not less proudly how I risked, and how I lost it." 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 477 CHAPTER XL 1847-1849. Macaulay retires into private life Extracts from Lord Carlisle's journal Macaulay's conversation His memory His distaste for general society His ways with children Letters to his niece Margaret The judicious poet Valentines Sight-seeing Eastern tours Macaulay's method of work His diligence in collecting his materials Glencoe Londonderry Macaulay's accuracy : opinions of Mr. Bagehot and Mr. Buckle Macaulay's industry at the desk His love for his task Extracts from his diary His attention to the details of the press The History appears Congratulations Lord Halifax ; Lord Jeffrey; Lord Auckland ; Miss Edgeworth The popularity of the work Extract from "Punch" Macaulay's attitude in relation to his critics The Quarterly Review The sacrifices which Macaulay made to literature. AFTER a few nights of sound sleep, and a few days of quiet among his books, Macaulay had recovered both from the fatigues of the contest and the vexation of the defeat. On the 6th of August 1847, he writes to his sister Fanny : " I am here in solitude, reading and working with great satisfaction to my- self. My table is covered with letters of condolence, and with invitations from half the places which have not yet chosen members. I have been asked to stand for Ayr, for Wigton, and for Oxfordshire. At Wigton, and in Oxfordshire, I was actually put in nomination without my permission, and my sup- porters were with difficulty prevented from going to the poll. From the Sheffield Iris, which was sent me to-day, I see that a party wishes to put me up for the West Riding. Craig tells me that there is a violent reaction at Edinburgh, and that those who voted against me are very generally ashamed of them- selves, and wish to have rne back again. I did not know how great a politician I was till my Edinburgh friends chose to dismiss me from politics. I never can leave public life with more dignity and grace than at present." Such consolations as private life had to offer, Macaulay possessed in abundance. He enjoyed the pleasures of society in their most delightful shape , for he was one of a circle of emi- 4?S LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. nent and gifted men who were the warm friends of himself and of each other. How brilliantly these men talked is already a matter of tradition. No report of their conversation has been published, and in all probability none exists. Scattered and meagre notices in the leaves of private- diaries form the sole surviving record of many an Attic night, and still more agreeable morn- ing. Happily Lord Carlisle's journal has preserved for us, (as may be seen in the extracts which follow,) at least the names of those with whom Macaulay lived, the houses which he fre- quented, and some few of the topics which he discussed That journal proves, by many an affectionate and admiring expres- sion, how highly my uncle was esteemed by one whose appro- bation and regard were never lightly given. 1 "June 27, 1843. I breakfasted with Hallam, John Russell, Macaulay, Everett, Van de Weyer, Mr. Hamilton, U S., and Mahon. Never were such torrents of good talk as burst and sput- tered over from Macaulay and Hallam. A great deal about Latin and Greek inscriptions. They think the first unrivalled for that purpose : so free from articles and particles. Hallam read some wondrous extracts from the Lives of the Saints now being edited by Newman. 2 Macaulay repeated, after the Yankees were gone, an egregious extract from a Natchez repudiation Paper, making out our Saviour to be the first great repudiator, when he overthrew the seats of the money-changers." "March 4, 1848. Macaulay says that they" (the Parisian republicans) " are refuting the doctrines of political economy in the way a man would refute the doctrine of gravitation by jumping off the Monument." 1 Macaulay's acquaintance with the Howard family was of old standing, as may be gathered from a passage in a letter of the year 1833. This exceed- ingly droll production is too thickly strewn with personal allusions to admit of its being published except in a fragmentary condition which would be unjust to the writer, and not very interesting to the reader. " I dined at Holland House yesterday. DRAMATIS PERSONS. Lord Holland A fine old gentleman, very gouty and good- natured. Earl Grey Prime Minister ; a proud and majestic, yet polite and affable person. The Rev. Sydney Smith ... A holy and venerable ecclesiastic, director of the consciences of the above-named lords. ***** Lady Dover A charming woman, like all the Howards of Carlisle." 2 About this period Macaulay writes to Mr. Napier : ' ' Newman announces an English Hagiology in numbers, which is to contain the lives of such blessed saints as Thomas a Becket and Dunstan. I should not dislike to be the Avvo- cato del Diavolo on such an occasion." And again : "I hear much of the miracles of the third and fourth centuries by Newman. I think that I could treat that subject without giving scandal to any rational person, and I should like it much. The times require a Middleton." 1847-49- LORD MA CAUL AY. 479 " January 6, 1849. Finished Macaulay's two volumes. How admirable they are, full of generous impulse, judicial impartiality, wide research, deep thought, picturesque description, and sustained eloquence ! Was history ever better written ? Guizot 1 praises Macaulay. He says that he has truly hit the ruling passion of William the Third : his hatred for Louis the Fourteenth." "February 12. Breakfasted with Macaulay. There were Van de Weyer, Hallam, Charles Austin, Panizzi, Colonel Mure, and Dicky Milnes, but he went to Yorkshire after the first cup. The conversation ranged the world ; art, ancient and modern ; the Greek tragedians ; characters of the orators, how Philip and Alexander probably felt towards them as we do towards a scurri- lous newspaper editor. It is a refreshing break in common-place life. I stayed till past twelve. His rooms at the top of the Albany are very liveable and studious-looking." " May 25. Breakfasted with Rogers. It was a beautiful morn- ing, and his house, view, and garden looked lovely. It was extremely pleasant. Mahon tried to defend Clarendon, but was put down by Hallam and Macaulay. Macaulay was very severe on Cranmer. Then we all quoted a good deal ; Macaulay, (as I had heard him before,) four very fine lines from the Tristia, as being so contrary to their usual whining tone, and of even a Miltonic loftiness of sentiment. ' En ego, quum patria caream, vobisque, clomoque ; Raptaque sint, adimi qtue potuere, tnihi ; Ingenio tamen ipse meo comitorque, fruorque. Caesar in hoc potuit juris habere nihil.' I think we must have rather shot beyond Rogers sometimes." " October 1 1. (Dinner at Lord Carlisle's.) The evening went off very cosily and pleasantly, as must almost always happen with Mac- aulay. He was rather paradoxical, as is apt to be his manner, and almost his only social fault. The greatest marvel about him is the quantity of trash he remembers. He went off at score with Lord Thurlow's poetry." ''March 5, 1850. Dined at the Club. Dr. Holland in the chair. Lord Lansdowne, Bishop of London, Lord Mahon, Mac- aulay, Milman, Van de Weyer, I, David Dundas, Lord Harry Vane, Stafford O'Brien. The Bishop talked of the wit of Rowland Hill. One day his chapel, with a thinner attendance than usual, suddenly filled during a shower of rain. He said : ' I have often heard of religion being used as a cloak, but never before as an um- 1 Guizot was then a refugee in England. Shortly before this date Macaulay writes to his sister Selina : " I left a card with Guizot, but did not ask to see him. I purposely avoided meeting him on Friday at Lord Holland's. The truth is that I like and esteem the man : but I think the policy of the Minister both at home and abroad detestable. At home it was all corruption, and abroad all treachery. I could not hold to him the language of entire respect and complacency without a violation of truth ; and, in his present circum- stances, I could not bear to show the least disapprobation." 480 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. XT. brella.' In his later life he used to come to his chapel in a carriage. He got an anonymous letter rebuking him for this, because it was not the way his heavenly Master travelled. He read the letter from the pulpit, said it was quite true, and that if the writer would come to the vestry afterwards with a saddle and bridle he would ride him home. They talked a good deal of French authors. The Tartuffe was thought Moliere's best play ; then the Misanthrope. Macaulay prefers L'Avare. We recited Johnson's beautiful epitaphs on Philips and Levett. Macaulay's flow never ceased once during the four hours, but it is never overbearing." "March 23. Breakfast with Macaulay. On being challenged, he repeated the names of the owners of the several carriages that went to Clarissa's funeral. We chiefly talked of Junius, and the irresistible proofs for Sir Philip Francis." l " May 9. Breakfast with Macaulay. We talked of Thiers and Lamartine as historians ; Thiers not having any moral principle ; Lamartine a great artist, but without the least care for truth. They were just passing to the Jesuits and Pascal when I thought it right (and I must claim some merit in this) to go to the Ascension morning service at St. James's. After I went, the conversation got upon moral obligations, and was so eagerly carried on by Hal- lam, Whewell, and Macaulay, though without the slightest loss of temper, that not one sentence could any of them finish." "November n. Breakfasted with Macaulay, Charles Greville, Hobhouse, Sir R. Murchison, and Charles (Howard). The talk was even more than usually agreeable and interesting, and it got on very high themes. Macaulay argued very forcibly against Hobhouse and Charles Greville for the difference between the evidence of Christ's miracles and of the truth of transubstantiation. To put them on a level, Lazarus ought to have remained inanimate, colourless, and decomposing in the grave, while we should be called upon to believe that he had at the word of Christ become alive. He does not consider the doctrine of the Trinity opposed to reason. He was rather less opposed to the No Popery cry, so rife at present, than I might have expected. He thinks the nonsense of people may be advantageously made use of to set them against the real mischief of Popish interference." 2 1 Two days previously Macaulay and Carlyle had met at Lord Ashburton's house. It was perhaps on this occasion that Carlyle was wofully bored by the irresistible proofs for Sir Philip Francis. ' ' As if it could matter the value of a brass farthing to any living human being who was the author of Junius ! " 2 Four days after this breakfast Macaulay wrote to his sister Fanny : " If I told you all that I think about these disputes I should write a volume. The Pope hates the English nation and government. He meant, I am convinced, to insult and annoy the Queen and her Ministers. His whole conduct in Ireland has evidently been directed to that end. Nevertheless the reasons popularly urged against this Bull seem to me absurd. We always knew that the Pope claimed spiritual jurisdiction, and I do not see that he now claims temporal jurisdiction. I could wish that Lord John had written more guard- edly ; and that, I plainly see, is the wish of some of his colleagues, and pro- 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 48! "May 13. Dined at the Club. Bishop of Oxford, Dean of St. Paul's, Whewell, Macaulay, Lord Overstone, Dr. Holland, Sir G. Staunton, George Lewis. A good company, and it was most agreeable. They were very droll about Sir John Sinclair; his writing to Pitt that it was very desirable that the President of the Scotch Agricultural Society " (which office he then held) " should be a Peer. Pitt answered that he quite agreed with him ; accepted his resignation, and appointed Lord Somerville. The Bishop said he remembered his complaining of it at his father's, at Kensington Gore ; it had been ' such a wilful misunderstanding.' Macaulay said that there are in his works two distinctions, the one the most complete, the other the most incomplete, that he remembers. The first is : ' There are two kinds of sleep : one with your nightcap, and the other without it.' The second : ' There are three kinds of bread : white bread, brown bread, and rolls.' At the end the Bishop and I fought a mesmeric and electro-biological battle against the scornful opposition of all the rest." 1 "May 15. Breakfasted with the Bishop of Oxford. It was re- markably pleasant ; a little on derivations.* As an instance of un- lucky quotation I gave Lord Fitzwilliam's, when calling on the Dissenters to join the Established Clergy in subscribing for the rebuilding of York Minster, ' Flectere si nequeo superos Acheronta movebo.' Van de Weyer remarked on the English horror of false quantities, which Macaulay defended justly on the plea that no one is bound bably by this time is also his own. He has got much applause in England : but, when he was writing, he should have remembered that he had to govern several millions of Roman Catholics in Ireland ; that to govern them at all is no easy task ; and that anything which looks like an affront to their religion is certain to call forth very dangerous passions. In the meantime these things keep London all alive. Yesterday the ballad-singers were entertaining a great crowd under my windows with bawling : Now all the old women are crying for fear, ' The Pope is a-coming : oh dear ! oh dear ! The wall of Burlington Gardens is covered with ' No Popery, ' ' No Wafer Gods.' I cannot help enjoying the rage and terror of the Puseyites, who are utterly prostrated by this outbreak of popular feeling." And again, some days later, he says: "A deputation of my parish, St. James's, came to me yesterday to ask me to move a Resolution at a public meeting. I refused, took their Resolutions in my hand, and criticised them in such a way as, for the time at least, converted the delegates. They told me, at parting, that the whole should be recast ; that intolerant sentiments should be expunged ; and that, instead of calling for laws to punish avowed Roman Catholics, the parish would express its dislike of the concealed Roman Catho- lics who hold benefices in the Established Church." 1 Macaulay's account of the evening is : " Pleasant party at the Club : but we got a little too disputatious at last about Mesmerism and Clairvoyance. It is difficult to discuss such matters without using language which seems to reflect on the understanding of those who believe what you think absurd. However, we kept within tolerable bounds." - Lord Carlisle elsewhere says : "The conversation rather etymological, as perhaps it is too apt to be in this society." 1 I 482 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. to quote. No one resents the Duke of Wellington, in the theatre at Oxford, having called it Carolus, after being corrected for saying Jacobus. It was the Duke's advice to Sir George Murray, when he said he never should be able to get on with speaking in the Commons, ' Say what you have to say, don't quote Latin, and sit down.' " " May 27. Dined at the Club. The talk ran for some time on whether the north or south of different countries had contributed most to their literature. I remained on with Macaulay and Mihnan. The first gave a list of six poets, whom he places above all others, in the order of his preference : Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, ./Eschylus, Milton, Sophocles. Milman, on the whole, acquiesced. I fought some battle for Virgil coming before Sophocles : but ' What,' said Macaulay, ' did Virgil ever write like the Philoctetes ?' He would place Lucretius and Ariosto before him. He thinks the first part of Henry the Fourth Shakespeare's best comic play ; then the second part ; then Twelfth Night : but Shakespeare's plays are not to be classed into Tragedy and Comedy. It was the object of the Elizabethan drama, the highest form of composition he can conceive, to represent life as it is." "February 14, 1852. Dined at Mrs. Drummond's. Trevelyans, Strutts, Fords, Merivales, Macaulay. It was very pleasant. Mac- aulay and Mrs. Strutt both own to the feeling Doctor Johnson had, of thinking oneself bound sometimes to touch a particular rail or post, and to tread always in the middle of the paving-stone. I certainly have had this very strongly. Macaulay wished that he could spend a day of every century in London since the Romans ; though of the two he would rather spend a day in it 1800 years hence, than 1800 years ago, as he can less easily conceive it. We agreed there can never have been thirty years in which all mechanical improvements have made so much progress as in the last thirty, but he looks on printing as a greater discovery than steam, but not near so rapid in its obvious results. He told us of two letters he had received from America ; one from a Mr. Crump, offering him 500 dollars if he could introduce the name of Crump into his History; another from a Young Men's Philosophical Society in New York, beginning, ' Possibly our fame has not pinioned the Atlantic.' " " May 4. Dined with the Club. Very pleasant, though select. Something led to my reminding Lord Aberdeen that we both put Macbeth the first of Shakespeare's great plays. Lord Lansdowne quite concurred. Macaulay thinks it may be a little owing to our recollections of Mrs. Siddons. He is much inclined to rank them thus : Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet." l 1 In the course of the next month there was a breakfast at the Bishop of Oxford's. "Extremely agreeable," writes Lord Carlisle, "and would have been still more so, but there was a tendency to talk veiy loud, and all at once." On this occasion Macaulay told a story about one of the French prophets of the seventeenth century, who came into the Court of King's Bench, and an- 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 483 " November 29. Breakfasted with Macaulay. He thinks that, though the last eight books of Paradise Lost contain incomparable beauties, Milton's fame would have stood higher if only the first four had been preserved. He would then have been placed above Homer." There is nothing very attractive in a memorandum which barely chronicles the fact that on a certain day, five-and-twenty years ago, Hallam, and Milman, and Macaulay undertook to classify in order of excellence the Greek Tragedians or the Elizabethan Dramatists. But it must be remembered that every one of these entries represents an hour of glowing decla- mation and sparkling repartee, interspersed with choice passages from the writer whose merits w r ere in question, recited as poetry is recited by men who learn without effort and admire without affectation. "When I praise an author," Macaulay used to say, " I love to give a sample of his wares." That sample was sometimes only too favourable. He had so quick an eye for literary effect, so grateful was he to any -book which had pleased him even for a moment, that he would pick out from such a book, and retain for ever in his memory, what was perhaps the single telling anecdote or well-turned couplet which could be discovered in its pages. A pointed story, extracted from some trumpery memoir of the last century, and retold in his own words, a purple patch from some third-rate sermon or political treatise, woven into the glittering fabric of his talk with that art which in his case was a second nature, have often and often tempted his younger hearers into toiling through volume after volume of prosy or flippant trash in which a good paragraph was as rare as a silver spoon in a dust-heap. 1 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 nounced that the Holy Ghost had sent him to command Lord Holt to enter a nolle prosequi. "If," said Lord Holt, "the Holy Ghost had wanted a nolle prosequi he would have bade you apply to the Attorney-General. The Holy Ghost knows that I cannot enter a nolle prosequi. But there is one thing which I can do. I can lay a lying knave by the heels ; " and thereupon he committed him to prison. 1 " My father," says Sara Coleridge, "had a way of seizing upon the one bright thing out of long tracts of dull and tedious mutter. I remember a great campanula which grew in a wood at Keswick. Two or three such I found in my native vale during the course of my flower-seeking days. As well might we present one of these as a sample of the blue-bells of bonny Cumberland, or the one or two oxlips which may be found among a multitude of cowslips in a Somersetshire meadow, as specimens of the flowerhood of the field, as give these extracts for proof of what the writer was generally wont to produce." I I 2 484 LIFE AXD LETTERS OF CH. xi. 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 intel- ligible 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 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 Caffre 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. On a Sunday afternoon, when the family were engaged in discussing a new curate, one of the children, with true Clapham instinct, asked whether the reverend gentleman had ever received a testimonial. " I am glad, my boy," said Macaulay, " that you would not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn." Sometimes he would re-cast his thoughts, and give them over again in the shape of an epigram. "You call me a Liberal," he said ; " but I don't know that in these days I deserve the name. I am opposed to the abolition of standing armies. I am opposed to the abrogation of capital punishment. I am opposed to the destruction of the National Church. In short, I am in favour of war, hanging, and Church Establishments/' 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 Arch- bishops of Canterbury backwards ; " and he went off at score, i8 4 7 49- LORD MACAULAY. 485 drawing breath only once in order to remark on the oddity of there having been both an Archbishop Sancroft and an Arch- bishop Bancroft, until Sir David stopped him at Cranmer. 1 Macaulay could seldom be tempted to step outside his own immediate circle of friends and relations. His distaste for the chance society of a London drawing-room increased as years went on. Like Casaubon of old, he was well aware that a man cannot live with the idlers, and with the Muses too. " He was peculiarly susceptible," says Lady Trevelyan, " of the feeling of ennui when in company. He really hated staying out even in the best and most agreeable houses. It was with an effort that he even dined out, and few of those who met him, and enjoyed his animated conversation, could guess how much rather he would have remained at home, and how much difficulty I had to force him to accept invitations and prevent his growing a recluse. But, though he was very easily bored in general society, I think he never felt ennui when he was alone, or when he was with those he loved. Many people are very fond of children, but he was the only person I ever knew who never tired of being with them. Often has he come to our house, at Clapham or in Westbourne Terrace, directly after breakfast, and, finding me out, has dawdled away the whole morning with the children ; and then, after sitting with me at lunch, has taken Margaret a long walk through the City which lasted the whole afternoon. Such days are ahvays noted in his journals as especially happy." It is impossible to exaggerate the pleasure which Macaulay took in children, or the delight which he gave them. He was beyond all comparison the best of playfellows ; unrivalled in the invention of games, and never wearied of repeating them. He had an inexhaustible repertory of small dramas for the benefit of his nieces, in which he sustained an endless variety of parts with a skill that at any rate was sufficient for his audience. An old friend of the family writes to my sister, Lady Holland : " I well remember that there was one never- failing game of building up a den with newspapers behind the sofa, and of enacting robbers and tigers ; you shrieking with terror, but always fascinated and begging him to begin again : and there was a daily -recurring observation from him that, after all, children were the only true poets." Whenever he was at a distance from his little companions 1 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. ' 4S6 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. he consoled himself and them by the exchange of long and frequent letters. The earliest in date of those which he wrote in prose begins as follows : September 15, 1842. My dear Baba, 1 Thank you for your very pretty letter. I am always glad to make my little girl happy, and nothing pleases me so much as to see that she likes books. For when she 13 as old as I am she will find that they are better than all the tarts, and cakes, and toys, and plays, and sights in the world. If anybody would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces, and gardens, and fine dinners, and wine, and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I would not read books, I would not be a king. I would rather be a poor man in a garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading." Five years later on he writes: "I must begin sooner or later to call you ' Margaret ; ' and I am always making good resolutions to do so, and then breaking them. But I will pro- crastinate no longer. Procrastination is the thief of time, says Dr. Young. He also says, Be wise to-day. 'Tis madness to defer, and, Next day the fatal precedent will plead. That is to say, if I do not take care, I shall go on calling my darling ' Baba ' till she is as old as her mamma, and has a dozen Babas of her own. Therefore I will be wise to-day, and call her ' Margaret.' I should very much like to see you and Aunt Fanny at Broadstairs : but I fear, I fear, that it cannot be. Your Aunt asks me to shirk the Chelsea Board. I am staying in England chiefly in order to attend it. When Parliament is not sitting, my duty there is all that I do for two thousand four hundred pounds a year. We must have some conscience. " Michaelmas will, I hope, find us all at Clapham over a noble goose. Do you remember the beautiful Puseyite hymn on Michaelmas day ? It is a great favourite with all the Trac- tarians. You and Alice should learn it. It begins : Though Quakers scowl, though Baptists howl, Though Plymouth Brethren rage, We Churchmen gay will wallow to-day In apple sauce, onions, and sage. 1 Baba %vas a pet name for his niece Margaret, derived from the Indian nursery. 1847-49 LORD MACAULAY. 487 Ply knife and fork, and draw the cork, And have the bottle handy : For each slice of goose will introduce A thimbleful of brandy. Is it not good? I wonder who the author can be. Not Newman, I think. It is above him. Perhaps it is Bishop Wilberforce." The following letter is in a graver tone, as befits the cor- respondent of a young lady who has only two years of the schoolroom still before her. October 14, 1851. Dear Margaret, Tell me how you like Schiller's Mary Stuart. It is not one of my favourite pieces. I should put it fourth among his plays. I arrange them thus : Wallenstein, William Tell, Don Carlos, Mary Stuart, the Maid of Orleans. At a great interval comes the Bride of Messina ; and then, at another great interval, Fieschi. "Cabal and Love" I never could get through. " The Robbers " is a mere schoolboy rant below serious criticism, but not without indications of mental vigour which required to be disciplined by much thought and study. But, though I do not put Mary Stuart very high among Schiller's works, I think the Fotheringay scenes in the fifth act equal to anything that he ever wrote, indeed equal to anything dramatic that has been produced in Europe since Shakespeare. I hope that you will feel the wonderful truth and beauty of that part of the play. I cannot agree with you in admiring Sintram. There is an age at which we are disposed to think that whatever is odd and extravagant is great. At that age we are liable to be taken in by such orators as Irving, such painters as Fuseli, such plays as the Robbers, such romances as Sintram. A better time comes, when we would give all Fuseli's hobgoblins for one of Rey- nolds's little children, and all Sintram's dialogues with Death and the Devil for one speech of Mrs. Norris or Miss Bates. Tell me however, as of course you will, quite truly what you think of Sintram. I saw a description of myself yesterday in a New York paper. The writer says that I am a stout man with hazel eyes ; that I always walk with an umbrella ; that I sometimes bang the umbrella against the ground ; that I often dine in the Coffee-room of the Trafalgar on fish ; that, once he saw me break a decanter there, but that I did not appear to be at all ashamed of my awkwardness, but called for my bill as coolly 488 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. as if nothing had happened. I have no recollection of such an occurrence ; but, if it did take place, I do not think that it would have deprived me of my self-possession. This is fame. This is the advantage of making a figure in the world. This has been the last week of the Great Exhibition. It makes me quite sad to think of our many, many happy walks there. To-morrow I shall go to the final ceremony, and try to hear the Bishop of London's thanksgiving, in which I shall very cordially join. This will long be remembered as a singu- larly happy year, of peace, plenty, good feeling, innocent pleasure, national glory of the best and purest sort. I have bespoken a Schiller for you. It is in the binder's hands, and will be ready, I hope, before your return. Ever yours T. B. MACAU LAY. His poetical, no less than his epistolary, style was carefully adapted to the age and understanding of those whom he was addressing. Some of his pieces of verse are almost perfect specimens of the nursery lyric. From five to ten stanzas in length, and with each word carefully formed in capitals, most comforting to the eyes of a student who is not very sure of his small letters, they are real children's poems, and they profess to be nothing more. They contain none of those strokes of satire, and allusions to the topics and personages of the day, by which the authors of what is now called Juvenile Literature so often attempt to prove that they are fit for something better than the task on which they are engaged. But this very absence of pretension, which is the special merit of these trifles, renders them unworthy of a place in a book intended for grown-up readers. There are, however, few little people between three and five years old who would not care to hear how There once was a nice little girl, With a nice little rosy face. She always said " Our Father," And she always said her grace : and how as the reward of her good behaviour They brought the browned potatoes, And minced veal, nice and hot, And such a good bread-pudding All smoking from the pot ! And there are still fewer who would be indifferent to the fate which befell the two boys who talked in church, when 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 489 The Beadle got a good big stick, Thicker than uncle's thumb. Oh, what a fright those boys were in To see the Beadle come ! And they were turned out of the church And they were soundly beat : And both those wicked, naughty boys Went bawling down the street. All his rhymes, whether written or improvised, he put dov, r n to the credit of the Judicious Poet. The gravity with which he maintained the innocent delusion was too much for children, who more than half believed in the existence of a writer for whose collected works they searched the library in vain ; though their faith was from time to time shaken by the almost miracu- lous applicability of a quotation to the most unexpected cir- cumstances of the moment. St. Valentine's Day brought Macaulay's nieces a yearly offering of rhyme, until he thought them too old to care for verses which he himself pronounced to be on a level with the bellman's, but which are certainly as good, and probably as sincere, as nine-tenths of the pastoral poetry that has been written during the last two centuries. In 1847 the annual effusion ran as follows : And canst thou spurn a kneeling bard, Mine own, mine only Valentine? The heart of beauty still is hard ; But ne'er was heart so hard as thine. Each year a shepherd sings thy praise, And sings it in no vulgar strain. Each year a shepherd ends his days, A victim to thy cold disdain. In forty-five, relentless maid, For thee melodious Strephon died. For thee was gentle Thyrsis laid, In forty-six, by Strephon's side. The swain who to thy footstool bears Next spring the tribute of his verses Will tell thee that poor Damon shares The grave of Strephon and of Thyrsis. Then will the whole Arcadian quire Their sweetest songster's fate bemoan, Hang o'er his tomb his crook and lyre, And carve this ditty on the stone : 490 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. " Stop, passenger. Here Damon lies, Beloved of all the tuneful nine ; The third who perished by the eyes Of one too charming Valentine." THE BROKEN-HEARTED DAMON. The longest and the most elaborate of these little composi- tions was addressed to the daughter of Earl Stanhope, now the Countess Beauchamp. The allusion to the statue of Mr. Fitt in Hanover Square is one of the happiest touches that can be found in Macaulay's writings. Good morrow, gentle Child, and then Again good morrow, and again ; Good morrow following still good morrow, Without one cloud of strife or sorrow. And when the god to whom we pay In jest our homages to-day Shall come to claim, no more in jest, His rightful empire o'er thy breast, Benignant may his aspect be, His yoke the truest liberty : And if a tear his power confess, Be it a tear of happiness ! It shall be so. The Muse displays The future to her votary's gaze. Prophetic rage my bosom swells. I taste the cake ! I hear the bells ! From Conduit Street the close array Of chariots barricades the way To where I see, with outstretched hand, Majestic, thy great kinsman stand, And half. unbend his brow of pride, As welcoming so fair a bride. The feelings with which Macaulay regarded children were near akin to those of the great writer to whom we owe the death of little Paul, and the meeting between the schoolboy and his mother in the eighth chapter of David Copperfield. " Have you seen the first number of Dombey ? " he writes. " There is not much in it ; but there is one passage which made me cry as if my heart would break. It is the description of a little girl who has lost an affectionate mother, and is unkindly treated by everybody. Images of that sort always overpower me, even when the artist is less skilful than Dickens." In truth, Macaulay's extreme sensibility to all which appealed 184;-;'). LORD MAC A UL AY. 491 to the sentiment of pity, whether in art or in nature, was nothing short of a positive inconvenience to him. 1 He was so moved by the visible representation of distressing scenes that he went most unwillingly to the theatre, for which during his Cambridge days he had entertained a passionate, though passing, fondness. 2 I remember well how, during the performance of Masks and Faces, the sorrows of the broken-down author and his starving family in their Grub Street garret entirely destroyed the pleasure which he otherwise would have taken in Mrs. Stirling's admirable acting And he was hardly less easily affected to tears by that which was sublime and stirring in literature, than by that which was melancholy and pathetic. In August 1851, he writes from Malvern to his niece Margaret : " I finished the Iliad to-day. I had not read it through since the end of 1837, when I was at Calcutta, and when you often called me away from my studies to show you pictures and to feed the crows. I never admired the old fellow so much, or was so strongly moved by him. What a privilege genius like his enjoys ! I could not tear myself away. I read the last five books at a stretch during my walk to-day, and was at last forced to turn into a by-path, lest the parties of walkers should see me blubbering for imaginary beings, the creations of a ballad-maker who has been dead tAvo thousand seven hundred years. What is the power and glory of Cresar and Alexander to that? Think what it would be to be assured that the inhabitants of Monomotapa would weep over one's writings Anno Domini 4551 ! " Macaulay was so devoid of egotism, and exacted so little deference and attention from those with whom he lived, that the young people around him were under an illusion which to this day it is pleasant to recall. It was long, very long, before we guessed that the world thought much of one who appeared to think so little of himself. I remember telling my school- fellows that I had an uncle who was about to publish a History of England in two volumes, each containing 650 pages ; but it never crossed my mind that the work in question would have anything to distinguish it except its length. As years went on, it seemed strange and unnatural to hear him more and more frequently talked of as a great man ; and we slowly, and almost 1 "April 17, 1858. In the Times of this morning there was an account of a suicide of a poor girl which quite broke my heart. I cannot get it out of my thoughts, or help crying when I think of it." * I recollect hearing Macaulay describe the wonder and delight with which, during a long vacation spent at the University, he saw his first play acted by a strolling company in the Barnwell Theatre. " Did you, then, never go to the play as a boy?" asked some one who was present. "No," said he ; "after the straitest sect of our religion I was bred a 1'haribir." 492 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. reluctantly, awoke to the conviction that " Uncle Tom " was cleverer, as well as more good-natured, than his neighbours. Among other tastes which he had in common with children was an avidity for sight-seeing. " What say you," he asks Mr. Ellis, " to a visit to the Chinese Museum ? It is the most interesting and curious sight that I know. If you like the plan, I will call on you at four. Or will you call on me ? For I am halfway between the Temple and the wonders of the Celestial Empire." And again : " We treated the Clifton Zoo much too contemptuously. I lounged thither, and found more than six- pennyworth of amusement " " After breakfast I went to the Tower," he writes in his journal of 1839. " I found great changes. The wild beasts were all gone. The Zoological Gardens have driven paved courts and dark narrow cages quite out of fashion. I was glad for the sake of the tigers and leopards. " He was never so happy as when he could spend an after- noon in taking his nieces and nephews a round of London sights, until, to use his favourite expression, they " could not drag one leg after the other." If he had been able to have his own way, the treat would have recurred at least twice a week. On these occasions we drove into London in time for a sump- tuous midday meal, at which everything that we liked best was accompanied by oysters, caviare, and olives, some of which delicacies he invariably provided with the sole object of seeing us reject them with contemptuous disgust. Then off we set under his escort, in summer to the bears and lions ; in winter to the Panorama of Waterloo, to the Colosseum in Regent's Park, or to the enjoyment of the delicious terror inspired by Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. When the more attractive exhibitions had been exhausted by too frequent visits, he would enliven with his irrepressible fun the dreary propriety of the Polytechnic, or would lead us through the lofty corridors of the British Museum, making the statues live and the busts speak by the spirit and colour of his innumerable anecdotes paraphrased offhand from the pages of Plutarch and Suetonius. One of these expeditions is described in a letter to my mother in January 1845. " Fanny brought George and Margaret, with Charley Cropper, to the Albany at one yesterday. I gave them some dinner ; fowl, ham, marrow-bones, tart, ice, olives, and champagne. I found it difficult to think of any sight for the children : however, I took them to the National Gallery, and was excessively amused with the airs of connoisseurship which Charley and Margaret gave themselves, and with Georgy's honestly avowed weariness. ' Let us go. There is nothing 1347-49- LORD MA CAUL AY. 493 here that I care for at all.' When I put him into the carriage, he said, half sulkily : ' I do not call this seeing sights. I have seen no sight to-day.' Many a man who has laid out thirty thousand pounds on paintings would, if he spoke the truth, own that he cared as little for the art as poor Georgy." Regularly every Easter, when the closing of the public offices drove my father from the Treasury for a brief holiday, Macaulay took our family on a tour among Cathedral-towns, varied by an occasional visit to the Universities. We started on the Thursday ; spent Good Friday in one city and Easter Sunday in another, and went back to town on the Monday. This year it was Worcester and Gloucester ; the next, York and Lincoln ; then Lichfield and Chester, Norwich and Peter- borough, Ely and Cambridge, Salisbury and Winchester. Now and then the routine was interrupted by a trip to Paris, or to the great churches on the Loire ; but in the course of twenty years we had inspected at least once all the Cathedrals of England, or indeed of England and Wales, for we carried our researches after ecclesiastical architecture as far down in the list as Bangor. " Our party just filled a railway carriage," says Lady Trevelyan, "and the journey found his flow of spirits unfailing. It was a return to old times ; a running fire of jokes, rhymes, puns, never ceasing. It was a peculiarity of his that he never got tired on a journey. As the day wore on he did not feel the desire to lie back and be quiet, and he liked to find his companions ready to be entertained to the last." Any one who reads the account of Norwich and Bristol in the third chapter, or the account of Magdalen College in the eighth chapter, of the History, may form an idea of Macaulay's merits as a Cicerone in an old English provincial capital. To walk with him round the walls of York, or through the Rows of Chester ; to look up at the towers of Lichfield from the spot where Lord Brook received his death-wound, or down upon Durham from the brow of the hill behind Neville's Cross ; to hear him discourse on Monmouth and Bishop Ken beneath the roof of Longleat Hall, or give the rein to all the fancies and reminiscences, political, personal, and historical, which were conjured up by a drive past Old Sarum to Stonehenge, were privileges which a child could appreciate, but which the most learned of scholars might have envied. When we returned to our inn in the evening, it was only an exchange of pleasures. Sometimes he would translate to us choice morsels from Greek, Latin, Italian, or Spanish writers, with a vigour of language and vivacity of manner which com- municated to his impromptu version not a little of the air and 494 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. xi. the charm of the original. Sometimes lie would read from the works of Sterne, or Smollett, or Fielding those scenes to which ladies might listen, but which they could not well venture to pick out for themselves. And when we had heard enough oi the siege of Carthagena in "Roderick Random," or of Lieu- tenant Le Fever's death in " Tristram Shandy," we would fall to capping verses, or stringing rhymes, or amusing ourselves with some game devised for the occasion which often made a considerable demand upon the memory or invention of the players. Of these games only a single trace remains. One of his nieces, unable to forecast the future of her sex, had ex- pressed a regret that she could never hope to go in for a college examination. Macaulay thereupon produced what he was pleased to call a paper of questions in Divinity, the contents of which afford a curious proof how constantly the lighter aspects of English sectarianism were present to his thoughts. The first three questions ran as follows : i. "And this is law, I will maintain Until my dying day, Sir, That whatsoever king shall reign, I'll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir." " Then read Paul's epistles, You rotten Arminian. You won't find a passage To support your opinion." "When the lads of the village so merrily, ah ! Sound their tabors, I'll hand thee along. And verily, verily, verily, ah ! Thou and I will be first in the throng." To what sects did the three persons belong who express their sentiments in the three passages cited above? Is there anything in the third passage at variance with the usages of the sect to which it relates ? Which of those three sects do you prefer ? Which of the three bears the closest resemblance to Popery? Where is Bray ? Through what reigns did the political life of the Vicar of Bray extend ? 2. Define "Jumper," "Shaker," "Ranter," "Dunker." 3. Translate the following passage into the Ouakeric dialect : " You and Sir Edward Ryan breakfasted with me on Friday the eleventh of December." Like -all other men who play with a will, and who work to a purpose, Macaulay was very well aware of the distinction between work and play. He did not carry on the business of 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 495 his life by desultory efforts, or in the happy moments of an elegant inspiration. Men have disputed, and will long continue to dispute, whether or not his fame was deserved ; but no one who himself has written books will doubt that at any rate it was hardly earned. " Take at hazard," says Thackeray, "any three pages of the Essays or History : and, glimmering below the stream of the narrative, you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half-score of allusions to other historic facts, characters, literature, poetry, with which you are acquainted. Your neigh- bour, who has his reading and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind, shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating, not only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this great scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence ; he travels a hundred miles to make a line of description." That this praise, though high, was not excessive, is amply proved by that portion of Macaulay's papers which extends over the period when his History was in course of preparation. Justice demands that, even at the risk of being tedious, a spe- cimen should be given of the scrupulous care and the unflagging energy with which he conducted his investigations. July 17, 1848. Dear Ellis, Many thanks for your kindness. Pray let Dr. Hook know, whenever you have an opportunity, how much I am obliged to him. 1 The information which he has procured for me, I am sorry to say, is not such as I can use. But you need not tell him so. 1 feel convinced that he has made some mistake : for he sends me only a part of the Leeds burials in 1685 ; and yet the number is double that of the Manchester burials in the same year. If the ordinary rules of calculation are applied to these data, it will be found that Leeds must in 1685 have contained 16,000 souls or thereabouts. Now at the beginning of the American war Leeds contained only 16,000 souls, as appears from Dr. Hook's own letter. Nobody can suppose that there had been no increase between 1685 and 1775. Besides, neither York nor Exeter contained 16,000 in- habitants in 1685, and nobody who knows the state of things at that time can believe that Leeds was then a greater town than York or Exeter. Either some error has been committed, or else there was an extraordinary mortality at Leeds in 1685. In either case the numbers are useless for my purpose. Ever yours T. B. M 1 Mr. Ellis was Recorder of Leeds, and Dr. Hook its vicar. 496 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. July 27, 1848. Dear Ellis, Many thanks. Wardell l is the man. He gives a much better thing than a list of burials ; a list of the houses returned by the hearthmoney collectors. It appears that Leeds contained, in 1663, just 1,400 houses. And observe ; all the town- ships are included. The average number of people to a house in a country town was, according to the best statistical writers of the seventeenth century, 4-3. If that estimate be just, Leeds must, in 1663, have contained about 6,000 souls. As it increased in trade and wealth during the reign of Charles II., we may well suppose that in 1685 the population was near 8,000; that is to say, about as much as the population of Manchester. I had expected this result from observing that by the writers of that time Manchester and Leeds are always mentioned as of about the same size. But this evidence proves to demonstration either that there was some mistake about the number of burials, or that the year 1685 was a singularly unhealthy year from which no inference can be drawn. One person must have died in every third house within twelve months ; a rate of mortality quite frightful. Ever yours T. B. MACAULAV. It must be remembered that these letters represent only a part of the trouble which Macaulay underwent in order to ensure the correctness of five and a half lines of print. He had a right to the feeling of self-satisfaction which, a month later on, allowed him to say: " I am working intensely, and, I hope, not unsuccessfully. My third chapter, which is the most diffi- cult part of my task, is done, and, I think, not ill done." Any one who will turn to the description of the town of Leeds, and will read the six paragraphs that precede it, and the three that follow it, may form a conception of the pains which those clear and flowing periods must have cost an author who expended on the pointing of a phrase as much conscientious research as would have provided some writers, who speak of Macaulay as showy and shallow, with at least half a dozen pages of ostenta- tious statistics. On the 8th of February 1849, after the publication of his first two volumes, he writes in his journal : " I have now made up my mind to change my plan about my History. I will first set myself to know the whole subject : to get, by reading and travelling, a full acquaintance with William's reign. I reckon that it will take me eighteen months to do this. I must visit Holland, Belgium, Scotland, Ireland, France. The Dutch archives and French archives must be ransacked. 1 will see whether anything is to be got from other diplomatic collections. 1 The author of the Municipal History of the Borough of Leeds, 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 497 I must see Londonderry, the Boyne, Aghrim, Limerick, Kinsale, Namur again, Landen, Steinkirk. I must turn over hundreds, thousands, of pamphlets. Lambeth, the Bodleian and the other Oxford Libraries, 1 the Devonshire Papers, the British Museum, must be explored, and notes made : and then I shall go to work. When the materials are ready, and the History mapped out in my mind, I ought easily to write on an average two of my pages daily. In two years from the time I begin writing I shall have more than finished my second part. Then I reckon a year for polishing, retouching, and printing. This brings me to the autumn of 1853. I like this scheme much. I began to-day with Avaux's despatches from Ireland, abstracted almost a whole thick volume, and compared his narrative with James's. There is much to be said as to these events." This programme was faithfully carried out. He saw Glencoe in rain and in sunshine : " Yet even with sunshine what a place it is ! The very valley of the shadow of death." He paid a second visit to Killiecrankie for the special purpose of walking up the old road which skirts the Garry, in order to verify the received accounts of the time spent by the English army in mounting the pass which they were to descend at a quicker rate. The notes made during his fortnight's tour through the scenes of the Irish war are equal in bulk to a first-class article in the Edinburgh or Quarterly Reviews. He gives four closely- written folio pages to the Boyne, and six to Londonderry. It is interesting to compare the shape which each idea took, as it arose in his mind, with the shape in which he eventually gave it to the world. As he drove up the river from Drogheda 1 "October 2, 1854. I called on the Warden of All Souls', who was the only soul in residence. He was most kind ; got me the manuscript of Nar- cissus Luttrell's Diary, seven thick volumes in cramped writing, put me into a comfortable room ; and then left me to myself. I worked till past five ; then walked for an hour or so, and dined at my inn, reading Cooper's ' Pathfinder.' " October 3. I went to All Souls' at ten, and worked till five. Narcissus is dreadfully illegible in 1696 ; but that matters the less, as by that time the news- papers had come in. I found some curious things. The Jacobites had a way of drinking treasonable healths by limping about the room with glasses at their lips. To limp meant L. Lewis XIV. I. James. M. Mary of Modena. P. Prince of Wales. " October 4. I have done with All Souls'. At ten I went to the Bodleian. I got out the Tanner MSS., and worked on them two or three hours. Then the Wharton MSS. Then the far more remarkable Nairne MSS. At three they rang me out. I do think that from ten to three is a very short time to keep so noble a library open. " October 5. Pamphlets in abundance ; but pamphlets I can get elsewhere ; so I fell on the Nairne MSS. again. I could amuse myself here ten years without a moment of ennui." K K 498 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. XL he notices that " the country looked like a flourishing part of England. Cornfields, gardens, woods, succeeded each other just as in Kent and Warwickshire." And again : " Handsome seats, fields of wheat and clover, noble trees : it would be called a fine country even in Somersetshire." In the sixteenth chapter of the History these 'hasty jottings have been trans- muted into the sentences : " Beneath lay a valley now so rich and so cheerful that an Englishman who gazes on it may imagine himself to be in one of the most highly favoured parts of his own highly favoured country. Fields of wheat, woodlands, meadows bright with daisies and clover, slope gently down to the edge of the Boyne." Macaulay passed two days in Londonderry, and made the most of each minute of daylight He penetrated into every corner where there still lurked a vestige of the past, and called upon every inhabitant who was acquainted with any tradition worth the hearing. He drove through the suburbs ; he sketched a ground-plan of the streets ; alone or in company, he walked four times round the walls of the city for which he was to do what Thucydides had done for Platoea, A few extracts from the voluminous records of those two days will give some notion of what Macaulay meant by saying that he had seen a town. "August 31, 1849. I left a card for Captain Leach of the Ordnance Survey, and then wandered round the walls, and saw the Cathedral. It has been spoiled by architects who tried to imitate the Gothic style without knowing what they were about. l The choir, however, is neat and interesting. Leach came, a sensible, amiable young officer, as far as I could judge. I went again round the walls with him. The circuit is a short one. It may be performed, I should say, in twenty minutes. Then we got into a car, crossed the wooden bridge, and took a view of the city from the opposite bank of the river. Walker's pillar is well placed, and is not contemptible. 2 The honest divine, in his canonicals, haranguing with vehemence, is at the top, and makes a tolerable figure at some distance. Then we crossed again, and drove to Boom Hall, so called from the memorable 1 "On the highest ground stood the Cathedral, a church which, though erected when the secret of Gothic architecture was lost, and though ill qualified to sustain a comparison with the awful temples of the middle ages, is not with- out grace and dignity." Macaulay's History of England, Chapter XII. 2 "A lofty pillar, rising from a bastion which bore during many weeks the heaviest fire of the enemy, is seen far up and far down the Foyle. On the summit is the statue of Walker, such as when, in the last and most terrible emergency, his eloquence roused the fainting courage of his brethren. In one band he grasps a Bible. The other, pointing down the river, seems to direct the eyes of his famished audience to the English topmasts in the distant bay." 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 499 boom. The mistress of the house, a very civil lady, came out and acted as Cicerone. We walked down to the very spot where the boom was fastened. It was secured by a chain which passed through the earth of the bank, and was attached to a huge stone. Our hospitable guide would insist that an iron ring, fixed in one of the rocks close by, had been part of the apparatus to secure the boom. I felt very sceptical, and my doubts were soon changed into certainties : for I lifted up my eyes, and, about fifty yards off, I saw just such another ring fastened to another rock. I did not tell the good lady what I thought, but, as soon as we had taken our leave, I told Leach that these rings were evidently put there for the same purpose, that of securing shipping. He quite agreed with me, and seemed to admire my sagacious incredulity a great deal more than it at all deserved." " Saturday, September i. As soon as I had breakfasted, Sir R. Ferguson came, and walked round the walls with me. Then he took me to the reading-room, where I met Captain Leach, and a Mr. Gilmour, a great man here. They walked with me round the walls, which I have thus gone over four times. The bastions are planted as gardens. The old pieces of ordnance lie among the flowers and shrubs : strange antique guns of the time of Elizabeth and Charles the First : Roaring Meg, a present of the Fishmongers with the date 1642; another piece of the same date given by the Vintners; and another by the Merchant Tailors. The citizens are to the last degree jealous of the in- tegrity of these walls. 1 No improvement which would deface them would be proposed without raising a storm : and I do not blame them. Every stone has some fact, or at least some legend, connected with it. I found no difficulty, sometimes, in separating the facts from the legends. The picture of the whole is in my mind, and I do not know that there would be any advantage in putting the plan on paper." Put it on paper, however, he did ; and indeed, when em- 1 " The wall is carefully preserved ; nor would any plea of health or con- venience be held by the inhabitants sufficient to justify the demolition of that sacred enclosure which, in the evil time, gave shelter to their race and their religion ... It is impossible not to respect the sentiment which indicates itself by these tokens. It is a sentiment which belongs to the higher and purer part of human nature, and which adds not a little to the strength of States. A people which takes no pride in the noble achievements of remote ancestors will never achieve anything to be remembered with pride by remote descendants. Yet it is impossible for the moralist or the statesman to look with unmixed complacency on the solemnities with which Londonderry commemorates her deliverance, and on the honours which she pays to those who saved her." K K 2 500 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. ployed upon his History, he habitually preserved in writing such materials as were gathered elsewhere than from the shelves of his own library, instead of continuing the facile, though hazardous, course which he had pursued as a Reviewer, and trusting to his memory alone. The fruits of many a long hour passed among the Pepysian Bookcases, the manuscripts at Althorp, or the archives of the French War Office, were gar- nered into a multitude of pocketbooks of every possible shape and colour. Of these a dozen still remain, ready to the hands of any among Macaulay's remote heirs who may be tempted to commit the posthumous treachery of publishing the common- place book of a great writer. His industry has had its reward. The extent and exactness of his knowledge have won him the commendation of learned and candid writers who have travelled over ground which he has trod before. Each, in his own particular field, recognises the high quality of Macaulay's work ; and there is no testimo- nial so valuable as the praise of an enlightened specialist. Such praise has been freely given by Mr. Bagehot, the Editor of the Economist, in that very attractive treatise which goes by the name of " Lombard Street" He commences one import- ant section of his book with a sentence in which, except for its modesty, I am unwilling to find a fault. "The origin of the Bank of England has been told by Macaulay, and it is never wise for an ordinary writer to tell again what he has told so much better.' And Mr. Buckle, who was as well acquainted with the social manners of our ancestors as is Mr. Bagehot with their finance, appends the following note to what is per- haps the most interesting chapter in his History of Civilisation: ' ' P>erything Mr. Macaulay has said on the contempt into which the clergy fell in the Reign of Charles the Second is per- fectly accurate ; ' and, from evidence which I have collected, I know that this very able writer, of whose immense research few people are competent judges, has rather under-stated the case than over-stated it. On several subjects I should venture to differ from Mr. Macaulay ; but I cannot refrain from express- ing my admiration of his unwearied diligence, of the consum- mate skill with which he has arranged his materials, and of the noble love of liberty which animates his entire work. These are qualities which will long survive the aspersions of his puny detractors, men who, in point of knowledge and ability, '"I shall soon have done this ecclesiastical part of my narrative. Some people may imagine that I infer too much from slight indications ; but no one who has not soaked his mind with the transitory literature of the day is really entitled to judge." Macaulay ';> Journal. 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 501 are unworthy to loosen the shoe-latchet of him they foolishly attack." The main secret of Macaulay's success lay in this, that to extraordinary fluency and facility he united patient, minute, and persistent diligence. He well knew, as Chaucer knew before him, that There is na workeman That can bothe worken wel and hastilie. This must be done at leisure parfaitlie. If his method of composition ever comes into fashion, books probably will be better, and undoubtedly will be shorter. As soon as he had got into his head all the information relating to any particular episode in his History, (such, for instance, as Argyll's expedition to Scotland, or the attainder of Sir John Fenwick, or the calling in of the clipped coinage,) he would sit down and write off the whole story at a headlong pace ; sketch- ing in the outlines under the genial and audacious impulse of a first conception ; and securing in black and white each idea, and epithet, and turn of phrase, as it flowed straight from his busy brain to his rapid fingers. His manuscript, at this stage, to the eyes of any one but himself, appeared to consist of column after column of dashes and flourishes, in which a straight line, with a half-formed letter at each end, and another in the middle, did duty for a word. It was from amidst a chaos of such hieroglyphics that Lady Trevelyan, after her brother's death, deciphered that account of the last days of William which fitly closes the History. 1 As soon as Macaulay had finished his rough draft, he began to fill it in at the rate of six sides of foolscap every morning ; written in so large a hand, and with such a multitude of erasures, 2 that the whole six pages were, on an average, com- pressed into two pages of print. This portion he called his " task," and he was never quite easy unless he completed it daily. More he seldom sought to accomplish ; for he had 1 Lord Carlisle relates how Mr. Prescott, as a brother historian, was much interested by the sight of these manuscript sheets, "in which words arc as much abbreviated as ' cle' for 'castle.' " - Mr. Woodrow, in the preface to his collection of the Indian Education minutes, says: " Scarcely five consecutive lines in any of Macaulay's minutes will be found unmarked by blots or corrections. He himself, in a minute dated November 3, 1835, says, 'After blotting a great deal of paper I can re- commend nothing but a reference to the Governor-General in Council.' My copyist was always able instantly to single out his writing by the multiplicity of corrections and blots which mark the page. These corrections are now ex- ceedingly valuable. When the first master of the English language corrects his own composition, which appeared faultless before, the correction must be based on the highest rules of criticism." 502 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. learned by long experience that this was as much as he could do at his best ; and except when at his best, he never would work at all. " I had no heart to write," he says in his journal of March 6, 1851. " I am too self-indulgent in this matter, it may be : and yet I attribute much of the success which I have had to my habit of writing only when I am in the humour, and of stopping as soon as the thoughts and words cease to flow fast. There are therefore few lees jn my wine. It is all the cream of the bottle." ' Macaulay never allowed a sentence to pass muster until it was as good as he could make it. He thought little of recast- ing a chapter in order to obtain a more lucid arrangement, and nothing whatever of reconstructing a paragraph for the sake of one happy stroke or apt illustration. Whatever the worth of his labour, at any rate it was a labour of love. " Antonio Stradivari has an eye That winces at false work, and loves the true." Leonardo da Vinci would walk the whole length of Milan that he might alter a single tint in his picture of the Last Supper. Napoleon kept the returns of his army under his pillow at night, to refer to in case he was sleepless ; and would set him- self problems at the Opera, while the overture was playing. " I have ten thousand men at Strasburg ; fifteen thousand at Magdeburg ; twenty thousand at Wurtzburg. By what stages must they march so as to arrive at Ratisbon on three successive days ? " What his violins were to Stradivarius, and his fresco to Leonardo, and his campaigns to Napoleon, that was his History to Macaulay. How fully it occupied his thoughts did not appear in his conversation ; for he steadily and successfully resisted any inclination to that most subtle form of selfishness, which often renders the period of literary creation one long 1 In small things as well as in great, Macaulay held that what was worth doing at all was worth doing well. He had promised to compose an epitaph for his uncle, Mr. Babington. In June 1851, he writes: "My delay has not arisen from any want of respect or tenderness for my uncle's memory. I loved and honoured him most sincerely. But the truth is, that I have not been able to satisfy myself. People who are not accustomed to this sort of literary exer- cise often imagine that a man can do it as he can work a sum in rule of three, or answer an invitation to dinner. But these short compositions, in which every word ought to tell strongly, and in which there ought to be at once some point and much feeling, are not to be produced by mere labour. There must be a concurrence of luck with industry. It is natural that those who have not considered the matter should think that a man, who has sometimes written ten or twelve effective pages in a day, must certainly be able to write five lines in less than a year. But it is not so ; and if you think over the really good epi- taphs which you have read, and consider how small a proportion they bear to the thousands that have been written by clever men, you will own that I am right." 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 503 penance to all the members of an author's family. But none the less his book was always in his mind ; and seldom indeed did he pass a day, or turn over a volume, without lighting upon a suggestion which could be applied to an useful purpose. In May 1851, he writes : "I went to the Exhibition and lounged there during some hours. I never knew a sight which extorted from all ages, classes, and nations, such unanimous and genuine admiration. I felt a glow of eloquence, or something like it, come on me from the mere effect of the place, and I thought of some touches which will greatly improve my Steinkirk." It is curious to trace whence was derived the fire which sparkles through every line of that terse and animated narrative, which has preserved from unmerited oblivion the story of a defeat more glorious to the British arms than not a few of our victories. Macaulay deserved the compliment which Cecil paid to Sir Walter Raleigh as the supreme of commendations : " I know that he can labour terribly." One example will serve for many in order to attest the pains which were ungrudgingly bestowed upon every section of the History. ''March 21. To-morrow I must begin upon a difficult and painful subject, Glencoe." " ,] farch 23. I looked at some books about Glencoe. Then to the Athenaeum, and examined the Scotch Acts of Parliament on the same subject. Walked a good way, meditating. I see my line. Home, and wrote a little, but thought and prepared more." "March 25. Wrote a little. Mr. Lovell Reeve, editor of the Literary Gazette, called, and offered to defend me about Penn. I gave him some memoranda. Then to Glencoe again, and worked all day with energy, pleasure, and, I think, success." " March 26. Wrote much. I have seldom worked to better purpose than on these three days." " March 27. After breakfast I wrote a little, and then walked through April weather to Westbourne Terrace, and saw my dear little nieces. 1 Home, and wrote more. I am getting on fast with this most horrible story. It is even worse than I thought. The Master of Stair is a perfect lago." "March 28. I went to the Museum, and made some extracts about Glencoe." On the 29th, 3oth, and 3ist of March, and the ist and 2nd 1 In the summer of 1849 my father changed house from Clapham Common to 20 Westbourne Terrace. 504 LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. xi. of April, there is nothing relating to the History except the daily entry, "Wrote." " April 3. Wrote. This Glencoe business is infernal." " April 4. Wrote ; walked round by London Bridge, and wrote again. To-day I finished the massacre. This episode will, I hope, be interesting." " April 6. Wrote to good purpose." " April 7. Wrote and corrected. The account of the massacre /s now, I think, finished." " April 8. I went to the Museum, and turned over the Gazette de Paris, and the Dutch despatches of 1692. I learned much from the errors of the French Gazette, and from the profound silence of the Dutch ministers on the subject of Glencoe. Home, and wrote." "April g. A rainy and disagreeable day. I read a Life of Romney, which I picked up uncut in Chancery Lane yesterday : a quarto. That there should be two showy quarto lives of a man who did not deserve a duodecimo ! Wrote hard, re-writing Glencoe." " April 10. Finished Don Carlos. I have been long about it ; but twenty pages a day in bed while I am waiting for the news- paper will serve to keep up my German. A fine play, with all its faults. Schiller's good and evil genius struggled in it ; as Shake- speare's good and evil genius, to compare greater things with smaller, struggled in Romeo and Juliet. Carlos is half by the author of the Robbers and half by the author of Wallenstein ; as Romeo and Juliet is half by the author of Love's Labour's Lost and half by the author of Othello. After Romeo and Juliet Shakespeare never went back, nor Schiller after Carlos. Wrote all the morning, and then to Westbourne Terrace. I chatted, played chess, and dined there." "April II. Wrote all the morning. Ellis came to dinner. I read him Glencoe. He did not seem to like it much, which vexed me, though I am not partial to it. It is a good thing to find sincerity." That author must have had a strong head, and no very exaggerated self-esteem, who, while fresh from a literary success which had probably never been equalled, and certainly never surpassed, at a time when the booksellers were waiting with almost feverish eagerness for anything that he chose to give them, spent nineteen working days over thirty octavo pages, and ended by humbly acknowledging that the result was not to his mind. l8 4 7-49- LORD MACAULAY. 505 When at length, after repeated revisions, Macaulay had satisfied himself that his writing was as good as he could make it, he would submit it to the severest of all tests, that of being read aloud to others. Though he never ventured on this ex- periment in the presence of any except his own family, and his friend Mr. Ellis, it may well be believed that even within that restricted circle he had no difficulty in finding hearers. " I read," he says in December 1849, " a portion of my History to Hannah and Trevelyan with great effect. Hannah cried, and Trevelyan kept awake. I think what I have done as good as any part of the former volumes : and so thinks Ellis." Whenever one of his books was passing through the press, Macaulay extended his indefatigable industry, and his scrupulous precision, to the minutest mechanical drudgery of the literary calling. There was no end to the trouble that he devoted to matters which most authors are only too glad to leave to the care and experience of their publisher. He could not rest until the lines were level to a hair's breadth, and the punctua- tion correct to a comma ; until every paragraph concluded with a telling sentence, and every sentence flowed like running water. 1 I remember the pleasure with which he showed us a communication from one of the readers in Mr. Spottiswoode's office, who respectfully informed him that there was one ex- pression, and one only, throughout the two volumes of which he did not catch the meaning at a glance. And it must be remembered that Macaulay's punctilious attention to details was prompted by an honest wish to increase the enjoyment, and smooth the difficulties, of those who did him the honour to buy his books. His was not the accuracy of those who consider it necessary to keep up a distinction, in small matters, between the learned and the unlearned. As little of a purist 1 Macaulay writes to Mr. Longman about the Edition of 1858: "I have no more corrections to make at present. I am inclined to hope that the book will be as nearly faultless, as to typographical execution, as any work of equal extent that is to be found in the world." On another occasion he says : "I am very unwilling to seem captious about such a work as an Index. By all means let Mr. go on. But offer him, with all delicacy and courtesy, from me this suggestion. I would advise him to have very few heads, except proper names. A few there must be, such as Convocation, Nonjurors, Bank of England, National Debt. These are heads to which readers who wish for information on those subjects will naturally turn. But I think that Mr. will on consideration perceive that such heads as Priestcraft, Priesthood, Party Spirit, Insurrection, War, Bible, Crown, Con- troversies, Dissent, are quite useless. Nobody will ever look at them ; and, if every passage in which party-spirit, dissent, the art of war, and the power of the Crown are mentioned, is to be noticed in the Index, the size of the volumes will be doubled. The best rule is to keep close to proper names, and never to deviate from that rule without some special occasion." 506 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. as it is possible for a scholar to be, his distaste for Mr. Grote's exalted standard of orthography interfered sadly with his ad- miration for the judgment, the power, and the knowledge of that truly great historian. He never could reconcile himself to seeing the friends of his .boyhood figure as Kleon, and Alkibiades, and Poseidon, and Odysseus ; and I tremble to think of the outburst of indignation with which, if he had lived to open some of the more recent editions of the Latin poets, he would have lighted upon the Dialogue with Lydia, or the Ode to Lyce, printed with a small letter at the head of each familiar line. Macaulay's correspondence in the summer and autumn of 1848 is full of allusions to his great work, the first volumes of which were then in the hands of the publisher. On the 22nd of June he writes to Mr. Longman : " If you wish to say, ' History of England from the Accession of James II.,' I have no objection ; but I cannot consent to put in anything about an Introductory Essay. There is no Introductory Essay, unless you call the first Book of Davila, and the first three chapters of Gibbon, Introductory Essays." In a letter to his sister Selina he says : " Longman seems content with his bargain. Jeffrey, Ellis, and Hannah all agree in predicting that the book will succeed. I ought to add Marian Ellis's judgment ; for her father tells me that he cannot get the proof-sheets out of her hand. These things keep up my spirits : yet I see every day more and more clearly how far my performance is below excellence." On the 24th of October 1848 he writes to my mother : " I do not know whether you have heard how pleasant a day Margaret passed with me. We had a long walk, a great deal of chat, a very nice dinner, and a quiet, happy evening. That was my only holiday last week. I work with scarcely any intermission from seven in the morning to seven in the after- noon, and shall probably continue to do so during the next ten days. Then my labours will become lighter, and, in about three weeks, will completely cease. There will still be a fort- night before publication. I have armed myself with all my philosophy for the event of a failure. Jeffrey, Ellis, Longman, and Mrs. Longman seem to think that there is no chance of such a catastrophe. I might add Macleod, who has read the third chapter, and professes to be on the whole better pleased than with any other history that he has read. The state of my own mind is this : when I compare my book with what I imagine history ought to be, I feel dejected and ashamed ; but when I compare it with some histories which have a high repute, I feel reassured." 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 507 He might have spared his fears. Within three days after its first appearance the fortune of the book was already secure. It was greeted by an ebullition of national pride and satisfaction which delighted Macaulay's friends, and reconciled to him most who remained of his old political adversaries. Other hands than his have copied and preserved the letters of congratulation and approval which for months together flowed in upon him from every quarter of the compass ; but prudence forbids me to admit into these pages more than a very few samples of a species of correspondence which forms the most uninviting portion of only too many literary biographies. It is, however, worth while to reproduce the phrases in which Lord Halifax expressed the general feeling that the History was singularly well timed, " I have finished," he writes, " your second volume, and I cannot tell you how grateful all lovers of truth, all lovers of liberty, all lovers of order and of civilised freedom, ought to be to you for having so set before them the History of our Revolution of 1688. It has come at a moment when the lessons it inculcates ought to produce great practical effects on the conduct of the educated leaders of what is now going on abroad ; but I fear that the long education in the working of a constitution such as ours is not to be supplied by any reading or meditation. Jameses we may find ; but Europe shows no likeness of William." " My dear Macaulay," says Lord Jeffrey, "the mother that bore you, had she been yet alive, could scarcely have felt prouder or happier than I do at this outburst of your graver fame. I have long had a sort of parental interest in your glory ; and it is now mingled with a feeling of deference to your intellectual superiority which can only consort, I take it, with the character of a female parent." A still older friend than Lord Jeffrey ,- Lord Auckland, the Bishop of Sodor and Man, wrote of him in more racy, but not less affectionate, language. " Tom Macaulay should be embalmed and kept. I delight in his book, though luckily I am not half through it, for I have just had an ordination, and my house is pervaded by Butler's Analogy and young priests. Do you think that Tom is not a little hard on old Cranmer ? He certainly brings him down a peg or two in my estimation. I had also hated Cromwell more than I now do ; for I always agree with Tom ; and it saves trouble to agree with him at once, because he is sure to make you do so at last. Since I have had this book I have hated the best Insular friend we have for coming in and breaking up the evening. At any other crisis we should have embraced him on both sides of his face." Among all the incidents connected with the publication of 508 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. his History nothing pleased Macaulay so much as the gratifica- tion that he contrived to give to Maria Edgeworth, as a small return for the enjoyment which, during more than forty years, he had derived from her charming writings. ' That lady, who was then in her eighty-third winter, and within a few months of her death, says in the course of a letter addressed to Dr. Holland : " And now, my good friend, I require you to believe that all the admiration I have expressed of Macaulay's work is quite unin- fluenced by the self-satisfaction, vanity, pride, surprise, I had in finding my own name in a note ! ! ! ! ! I had formed my opinion, and expressed it to my friends who were reading the book to me, before I came to that note. 2 Moreover, there was a mixture of shame, and a twinge of pain, with the pleasure and the pride I felt in having a line in this immortal History given to me, when there is no mention of Sir Walter Scott throughout the work, even in places where it seems impossible that the historian could resist paying the becoming tribute which genius owes, and loves to pay, to genius. Perhaps he reserves himself for the '45 ; and I hope in heaven it is so. Meanwhile be so good as to make my grateful and deeply felt thanks to the great author for the honour which he has done me." Macaulay's journal will relate the phases and gradations which marked the growing popularity of his book, in so far as that popularity could be measured by the figures in a publisher's ledger. But, over and above Mr. Longman's triumphant bul- letins, every day brought to his ears a fresh indication of the hold which the work had taken on the public mind. Some of the instances which he has recorded are quaint enough. An officer of good family had been committed for a fortnight to the House of Correction for knocking down a policeman. The authorities intercepted the prisoner's French novels, but allowed him to have the Bible, and Macaulay's History. 3 At Dukin- 1 Macaulay on one occasion pronounces that the scene in the Absentee, where Lord Colambre discovers himself to his tenantry and to their oppressor, is the best thing of the sort since the opening of the Twenty-second book of the Odyssey. 2 This note is in the sixth chapter, at the bottom of a page describing the habits of the old native Irish proprietors in the seventeenth century. "Miss Edgeworth's King Corny belongs to a later and much more civilised generation ; but whoever has studied that admirable portrait can form some notion of what King Corny's great-grandfather must have been." 3 London gossip went on to say that the gallant captain preferred picking oakum to reading about the Revolution of 1688 ; gossip which avenged Guicciardini for the anecdote told by Macaulay in the second paragraph of his Essay on Burleigh. "There was, it is said, a criminal in Italy, who was suffered to make his choice between Guicciardini and the galleys. He chose the history. But the war of Pisa was too much for him. He changed his mind, and went to the oar." 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 509 field, near Manchester, a gentleman, who thought that there would be a certain selfishness in keeping so great a pleasure to himself, invited his poorer neighbours to attend every evening after their work was finished, and read the History aloud to them from beginning to end. At the close of the last meeting, one of the audience rose, and moved, in north-country fashion, a vote of thanks to Mr. Macaulay, " for having written a history which working men can understand." l The people of the United States were even more eager than the people of the United Kingdom to read about their common ancestors ; with the advantage that, from the absence of an international copyright, they were able to read about them for next to nothing. On the 4th of April, 1849, Messrs. Harper of New York wrote to Macaulay : " We beg you to accept here- with a copy of our cheap edition of your work. There have been three other editions published by different houses, and another is now in preparation ; so there will be six different editions in the market. We have already sold 40,000 copies, and we presume that over 60,000 copies have been disposed of. Probably, within three months of this time, the sale will amount to two hundred thousand copies. No work, of any kind, has ever so completely taken our whole country by storm." An indirect compliment to the celebrity of the book was afforded by a desperate, and almost internecine, controversy which raged throughout the American newspapers as to whether the Messrs. Harper were justified in having altered Macaulay's spelling to suit the orthographical canons laid down in Noah Webster's dictionary. Nor were the enterprising publishers of Paris and Brussels behindhand in catering for readers whose appetite for cheap literature made them less particular than they should have been as to the means by which they gratified it. " Punch " devoted the half of one of his columns to a serio-comic review of Galignani's edition of the History. " This is an extraordinary work. A miracle of cheapness. A handsomely printed book, in royal octavo, (if anything be royal in republican France,) and all at the low charge of some js. 6d. of English money. Many thousands of this impression of Mr. Macaulay's works it must delight his amour propre as an author to know it have been circulated in England. ' Sir,' said a Boulogne bookseller, his voice slightly trembling with emotion, * Sir, it is impossible to supply travellers ; but we expect a few thousand kilogrammes more of the work by to-morrow's train, and then, for a week, we may rub on.' It is cheering to find that 1 Macaulay says in his journal : " I really prize this vote." Sio LIFE AND LETTERS OF en. xi. French, Belgian, and American booksellers are doing their best to scatter abroad, and at home too, the seeds of English literature. ' Sir,' said the French bookseller, holding up the tome, ' you will smuggle it thus : Divide the book in two ; spread it over your breast ; button your waistcoat close ; and, when you land, look the picture of innocence in the face-of the searchers.' " It is a characteristic trait in Macaulay that, as soon as his last proof-sheet had been despatched to the printers, he at once fell to reading a course of historians from Herodotus downwards. The sense of his own inferiority to Thucydides did more to put him out of conceit with himself than all the unfavourable comments which were bestowed upon him, (sparingly enough, it must be allowed,) by the newspapers and reviews of the day. He was even less thin-skinned as a writer than as a politician. When he felt conscious that he had done his very best, when all that lay in his own power had been faithfully and diligently performed, it was not his way to chafe under hostile criticism, or to waste time and temper by engag- ing in controversies on the subject of his own works. Like Dr. Johnson, " he had learned, both from his own observation, and from literary history, in which he was deeply read, that the place of books in the public estimation is fixed, not by what is written about them, but by what is written in them ; and that an author whose works are likely to live is very unwise if he stoops to wrangle with detractors whose works are certain to die." 1 "I have never been able," Macaulay says in a letter dated December 1849, "to discover that a man is at all the worse for being attacked. One foolish line of his own does him more harm than the ablest pamphlets written against him by other people." It must be owned that, as far as his History was concerned, Macaulay had not occasion to draw largely upon his stock of philosophy. Some few notes of disapprobation and detraction might here and there be heard ; but they were for the most part too faint to mar the effect produced by so full a chorus of eulogy ; and the only loud one among them was harsh and dis- cordant to that degree that all the bystanders were fain to stop their ears. It was generally believed that Mr. Croker had long been praying that he might be spared to settle accounts with his old antagonist. His opportunity had now arrived ; and people gave themselves up with a safer conscience to the fascination of the historian's narrative, because the Quarterly Review would be certain to inform them of all that could be 1 This passage is taken from Macaulay's article on Dr. Johnson in the En- cyclopaedia Britannica. 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 51! said either against the book or against the author. But Mac- aulay's good fortune attended him even here. He could not have fared better had he been privileged to choose his own adversary, and to select the very weapons with which the assault was to be conducted. After spending four most unprofitable months in preparing his thunder, Mr. Croker discharged it in an article so bitter, so foolish, and, above all, so tedious, that scarcely anybody could get through it, and nobody was convinced by it Many readers, who looked to professional critics for an authoritative opinion on the learning and accuracy of a contem- porary writer, came to the not unreasonable conclusion that the case against Macaulay had irretrievably broken down, when they saw how little had been made of it by so acrimonious and so long-winded an advocate. Nothing would have opened the pages of the Quarterly Review to that farrago of angry trash except the deference with which its proprietor thought himself bound to treat one who, forty years before, had assisted Can- ning to found the periodical. The sole effect which the article produced upon the public was to set it reading Macaulay's review of Croker's Boswell, in order to learn what the injury might be which, after the lapse of eighteen years, had sting enough left to provoke a veteran writer, political!, and man of the world into such utter oblivion of common sense, common fairness, and common courtesy. The Whig press, headed by the Times and the Scotsman, hastened to defend the historian ; and the Tory press was at least equally forward to disown the critic. A subsequent page in this volume will show that Croker's arrow did not go very far home. Indeed, in the whole of Macaulay's journal for the year 1849 there can be detected but one single indication of his having possessed even the germ of an author's sensibility. ''February 17. I went to the Athenaeum, and saw in a weekly literary journal a silly, spiteful attack on what I have said about Procopius in the first pages of my first chapter. I was vexed for a moment, but only for a moment. Both Austin and Mahon had looked into Procopius, and were satisfied that I was right ; as I am. I shall take no notice." A year later he wrote to Mr. Longman : " I have looked through the tenth volume of Lingard's History in the new edition. I am not aware that a single error has been pointed out by Lingard in my narrative. His estimate of men and of institutions naturally differs from mine. There is no direct reference to me, but much pilfering from me, and a little carping at me. I shall take no notice either of the pilfering or the carping." After once his judgment had become mature, Macaulay, at all 512 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xi. times and under all temptations, acted in strict accordance with Bentley's famous maxim, (which in print and talk alike he dearly loved to quote,) that no man was ever written down, except by himself. 1 "Lord Macaulay," said an acute observer, who knew him well, "is an almost unique instance of a man of transcendent force of character, mighty will, mighty energy, giving all that to literature instead of to practical work ; " and it cannot be denied that, in his vocation of historian, he showed proof of qualities which would have commanded success in almost any field. To sacrifice the accessory to the principal ; to plan an extensive and arduous task, and to pursue it without remission and without" misgiving ; to withstand resolutely all counter- attractions, whether they come in the shape of distracting pleasures or of competing duties ; such are the indispensable conditions for attaining to that high and sustained excellence of artistic performance which, in the beautiful words of George Eliot, " must be wooed with industrious thought and patient renunciation of small desires." At a period when the mere rumour of his presence would have made the fortune of an evening in any drawing-room in London, Macaulay consented to see less and less, and at length almost nothing, of general society, in order that he might devote all his energies to the work which he had in hand. He relinquished that House of Commons which the first sentence of his speeches hushed into silence, and the first five minutes filled to overflowing. He watched, without a shade of regret, or a twinge of envy, men, who would never have ventured to set their claims against his, rise one after another to the summit of the State. "I am sincerely glad," said Sir James Graham, "that Macaulay has so greatly succeeded. The sacrifices which he has made to literature deserve no ordinary triumph ; and, when the states- men of this present day are forgotten, the historian of the 1 Bentley's career was one long exemplification of his famous saying. In the year 1856 Macaulay writes, after what was perhaps his tenth re -perusal of Bishop Monk's life of the great critic : " Bentley seems to me an eminent instance of the extent to which intellectual powers of a most rare and admir- able kind may be impaired by moral defects. It was not on account of any obscuration of his memory, or of any decay in his inventive faculties, that he fell from the very first place among critics to the third or founh rank. It was his insolence, his arrogance, his boundless confidence in himself, and disdain of everybody else, that lowered him. Instead of taking subjects which he thoroughly understood and which he would have treated better than all the other scholars in Europe together, he would take subjects which he had but superficially studied. He ceased to give his whole mind to what he wrote. He scribbled a dozen sheets of Latin at a sitting, sent them to the press without reading them over, and then, as was natural, had to bear the baiting of word-catching pedants who were on the watch for all his blunders." 1847-49- LORD MACAULAY. 513 Revolution will be remembered." Among men of letters, there were some who maintained that the fame of Macaulay's volumes exceeded their deserts ; but his former rivals and col- leagues in Parliament, one and all, rejoiced in the prosperous issue of an undertaking for the sake of which he had surrendered more than others could ever hope to win. > 1 Macaulay sacrificed to the demands of literature an exceptional, and most enviable, position in the House of Commons ; where he exercised a com- manding influence over his brother-members on all matters which lay outside party politics. His speeches on Copyright, on the Government of India, and on the Dissenters' Chapels Bill, turned votes by the score, and in some cases by the hundred. A respected statesman, who had made a speciality of the Factory Laws, and of popular Education, used to declare that everything worth saying about the principle of those two great questions might be found in Macaulay's two re-published speeches. His argument for the Anatomy Bill, an indispensable, but, (at the time when it was proposed,) a most un- popular measure, is a model of persuasive reasoning, and apt illustration, packed into fesver than forty sentences. His oratory had a warm, and lifelong, admirer in Mr. Gladstone, who fre- quently in after years discoursed to me about Macaulay, and always in very much the same words, as is the wont of an old man when talking to a younger one. On one occasion his own Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking within three feet of us as we sat together on the Treasury Bench, expressed himself as endorsing his opponent's argument " to a certain extent." " Endorse to a certain extent ! " said Mr. Gladstone. ' ' What a phrase ! We want your uncle back among us. He was a famous purist ; a jealous guardian of the English language." I then asked his opinion of Macaulay's manner of Parliamentary speaking ; and he described it as unaffected, forcible, and quite sufficiently impressive. "But the House," (so Mr. Gladstone added,) "cared nothing about his manner. Our one and only thought was not to miss a single word that he said." LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xn. CHAPTER XII. 1848-1852. Extract? from Macaulay's diary Herodotus Mr. Roebuck Anticipations of failure and success Appearance of the History Progress of the sale The Duke of Wellington Lord Palmerston Letters to Mr. Ellis Lord Brougham on Euripides Macaulay is elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University His inaugural address Good resolutions Croker Dr. Parr The Historical Professorship at Cambridge Byron Tour in Ireland Althorp Lord Sidmouth Lord Thurlow Death of Jeffrey Mr. Richmond's portrait of Macaulay Dinner at the Palace Robert Montgomery Death of Sir Robert Peel The Pre- lude Ventnor Letters to Mr. Ellis Plautus Fra Paolo Gibbon The Papal Bull Death of Henry Hallam Person's Letters to Arch- deacon Travis Charles Mathews Windsor Castle Macaulay sets up his carriage Opening of the great Exhibition of 1851 Cobbett Malvern Letters to Mr. Ellis Wilhelm Meister The battle of Wor- cester Palmerston leaves the Foreign Office Macaulay refuses an offer of the Cabinet Windsor Castle King John Scene of the Assassination Plot Royal Academy dinner. ''NOVEMBER 18, 1848. Albany. After the lapse of more than nine years, I begin my journal again. ' What a change ! I have been, since the last lines were written, a member of two Parliaments, and of two Cabinets. I have published several volumes with success. I have escaped from Parliament, and am living in the way best suited to my temper. I lead a college life in London, with the comforts of domestic life near me ; for Hannah and her children are very dear to me. I have an easy fortune. I have finished the first two volumes of my History. Yesterday the last sheets went to America, and within 1 It must be remembered that whatever was in Macaulay's mind may be found in his diary. That diary was written, throughout, with the unconscious candour of a man who freely and frankly notes down remarks which he expects to be read by himself alone ; and with the copiousness natural to one who, ex- cept where it was demanded for the purpose of literary effect, did not willingly compress anything which he had to say. It may, therefore, be hoped that the extracts presented in these volumes possess those qualities in which, as he has himself pronounced, the special merit of a private journal lies. In a letter dated August 4, 1853, he says : " The article on the Life of Moore is spiteful. Moore, however, afforded but too good an opportunity to a malevolent assail- ant. His diary, it is evident to me, was written to be published, and this destroys the charm proper to diaries." 1848-52. LORD MACAULAY. 515 a fortnight, I hope, the publication will take place in London. I am pretty well satisfied. As compared with excellence, the work is a failure : but as compared with other similar books I cannot think it so. We shall soon know what the world says. To-day I enjoyed my new liberty, after having been most severely worked during three months in finishing my History and correcting proofs. I rose at half after nine, read at break- fast Fearon's Sketches of America, and then finished Lucian's critique on the bad historians of his time, and felt my own withers unwrung. Ellis came to dinner at seven. I gave him a lobster curry, woodcock, and macaroni. I think that I will note dinners as honest Pepys did." "Monday, November 20. Read Pepys at breakfast, and then sate down to Herodotus, and finished Melpomene at a sitting. I went out, looked into the Athenaeum, and walked about the streets for some time ; came home, and read Terpsi- chore, and began Erato. I never went through Herodotus at such a pace before. He is an admirable artist in many respects ; but undoubtedly his arrangement is faulty." "November 23. I received to-day a translation of Kant from Ellis's friend at Liverpool. I tried to read it, but found it utterly unintelligible, just as if it had been written in Sanscrit. Not one word of it gave me anything like an idea except a Latin quotation from Persius. It seems to me that it ought to be possible to explain a true theory of metaphysics in words which I can understand. I can understand Locke, and Berke- ley, and Hume, and Reid, and Stewart. I can understand Cicero's Academics, and most of Plato: and it seems odd that in a book on the elements of metaphysics by a Liverpool mer- chant I should not be able to comprehend a word. I wrote my acknowledgments with a little touch of the Socratic irony. "Roebuck called, and talked to me about the West Riding. He asked me to stand. I told him that it was quite out of the question ; that I had made up my mind never again to make the smallest concession to fanatical clamour on the subject of Papal endowment I would not certainly advise the Govern- ment to propose such endowment, but I would say nothing tending to flatter the absurd prejudices which exist on that sub- ject. I thanked him for his goodwill, and asked him to break- fast on Monday. I find that Macculloch and Hastie have a wager on the sale of my History. Macculloch has betted that it will sell better than Lord Campbell's book. Hastie bets on Lord Campbell Green of Longman's house is to be arbiter." L L 2 Si6 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xn. "November 25. Read my book while dressing, and thought it better than Campbell's, with all deference to Mr. Hastie. But these things are a strange lottery. After breakfast I went to the British Museum. I was in the chair. It is a stupid, useless way of doing business. . An hour was lost in reading trashy minutes. All boards are bad, and this is the worst of boards. If I live, I will see whether I cannot work a reform here. Home, and read Thucydides. I admire him more than ever. He is the great historian. The others one may hope to match : him, never. "November 29, 1848, Wednesday. I was shocked to learn the death of poor Charles Buller. It took me quite by surprise. I could almost cry for him. l I found copies of my History on my table. The suspense must now soon be over. I read my book, and Thucydides's, which, I am sorry to say, I found much better than mine." " November 30. Tufnell 2 sent for me, and proposed Liskeard to me. I hesitated ; and went home, leaving the matter doubt- ful. Roebuck called at near seven to ask about my intentions, as he had also been thought of. This at once decided me ; and I said that I would not stand, and wrote to Tufnell telling him so. Roebuck has on more than one occasion behaved to me with great kindness and generosity ; and I did not choose to stand in his way." "December 4, 1848. Stayed at home all the day, making corrections for the second edition. Shaw, the printer, came to tell me that they are wanted with speed, and that the first edi- tion of 3,000 is nearly out Then I read the eighth book of Thucydides. On the whole he is the first of historians. What is good in him is better than anything that can be found else- where. But his dry parts are dreadfully dry ; and his arrange- ment is bad. Mere chronological order is not the order for a complicated narrative. " I have felt to-day somewhat anxious about the fate of my book. The sale has surpassed expectation : but that proves 1 " In Parliament I shall look in vain for virtues which I loved, and for abilities which I admired. Often in debate, and never more than when we discuss those questions of colonial policy which are every day acquiring a new importance, I shall remember with regret how much eloquence and wit, how much acuteness and knowledge, how many engaging qualities, how many fair hopes, are buried in the grave of poor Charles Buller." Macaulay's Speech at Edinburgh in 1852. a Mr. Tufnell was then Patronage Secretary, or, in more familiar parlance, Treasury Whip. 1848-52. LORD MACAULAY 517 only that people have foimed a high idea of what they are to have. The disappointment, if there is disappointment, will be great All that I hear is laudatory. But who can trust to praise which is poured into his own ear ? At all events, I have aimed high ; I have tried to do something that may be remem- bered ; 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 that I have witnessed." "December 12, 1848. Longman called. A new edition of 3,000 copies is preparing as fast as they can work. I have reason to be pleased. Of the Lay of the Last Minstrel two thousand two hundred and fifty copies were sold in the first year ; of Marmion two thousand copies in the first month ; of my book three thousand copies in ten days. Black says that there has been no such sale since the days of Waverley. The success is in every way complete beyond all hope, and is the more agreeable to me because expectation had been wound up so high that disappointment was almost inevitable. I think, though with some misgivings, that the book will live. I put two volumes of Foote into my pockets, and walked to Clapham. They were reading my book again. How happy their praise made me, and how little by comparison I care for any other praise ! A quiet, happy, affectionate evening. Mr. Conybeare makes a criticism, in which Hannah seems to agree, that I sometimes repeat myself. I suspect there is truth in this. Yet it is very hard to know what to do. If an important principle is laid down only once, it is unnoticed or forgotten by dull readers, who are the majority. If it is inculcated in several places, quick-witted persons think that the writer harps too much on one string. Probably I have erred on the side of repetition. This is really the only important criticism that I have yet heard. " I looked at the Life of Campbell by a foolish Dr. Beattie ; a glorious specimen of the book-making of this age. Campbell may have written in all his life three hundred good lines, rather less than more. His letters, his conversation, were mere trash. ' 1 This was rather ungrateful to Campbell, who had provided Macaulay with an anecdote, which he told well and often, to illustrate the sentiment with which the authors of old days regarded their publishers. At a literary dinner Camp- bell asked leave to propose a toast, and gave the health of Napoleon Bonaparte. The war was at its height, and the very mention of Napoleon's name, except in conjunction with some uncomplimentary epithet, was in most circles regarded as an outrage. A storm of groans broke out, and Campbell with difficulty 5i8 LIFE AND LETTERS Of CM. xil. A life such as Johnson has written of Shenstone, or Akenside, would have been quite long enough for the subject ; but here are three mortal volumes. I suppose that, if I die to-morrow, I shall have three volumes. Really, I begin to understand why Coleridge says that Life in ' Death is more horrible than Death. 1 " I dined with Miss Berry. She and her guests made an idol of me ; but I know the value of London idolatry, and how soon these fashions pass away." 2 "January n, 1849. I am glad to find how well my book continues to sell. The second edition of three thousand was out of print almost as soon as it appeared, and one thousand two hundred and fifty of the third edition are already bespoken. I hope all this will not make me a coxcomb. I feel no intoxi- cating effect ; but a man may be drunk without knowing it. If my abilities do not fail me, I shall be a rich man ; as rich, that is to say, as I wish to be. But that I am already if it were not for my dear ones. I am content, and should have been so with less. On the whole I remember no success so complete, and I remember all Byron's poems and all Scott's novels." " Saturday, January 27. Longman has written to say that only sixteen hundred copies are left of the third edition of five thousand, and that two thousand more copies must be imme- diately printed, still to be called the third edition. I went into the City to discuss the matter, and found William Longman and Green. They convinced me that the proposed course was right ; but I am half afraid of this strange prosperity. Thir- teen thousand copies, they seem quite confident, will have been taken off in less than six months. 3 Of such a run I had never could get a few sentences heard. " Gentlemen," he said, " you must not mis- take me. I admit that the French Emperor is a tyrant. I admit that he is a monster. I admit that he is the sworn foe of our own nation, and, if you will, of the whole human race. But, gentlemen, we must be just to our great enemy. We must not forget that he once shot a bookseller." The guests, of whom two out of every three lived by their pens, burst into a roar of laughter, and Camp- bell sate down in triumph. 1 See Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner ; " Part the third. 2 "There is nothing," Macaulay says elsewhere, "more pitiable than an ex-lion or ex-lioness. London, I have often thought, is like the sorceress in the Arabian Nights, who, by some mysterious law, can love the same object only forty days. During forty days she is all fondness. As soon as they are over, she not only discards the poor favourite, but turns him into some wretched shape, a mangy dog or spavined horse. How many hundreds of victims have undergone this fate since I was born ! The strongest instances, I think, have been Betty, who was called the young Roscius ; Edward Irving ; and Mrs. Beecher Stowe." 3 As a matter of fact they were taken off in less than four months. 1848-52. LORD MACAULAY. 519 dreamed. But I had thought that the book would have a per manent place in our literature ; and I see no reason to alter that opinion. Yet I feel extremely anxious about the second part. Can it possibly come up to the first ? Does the subject admit of such vivid description and such exciting narrative ? Will not the judgment of the public be unduly severe ? All this disturbs me. Yet the risk must be run ; and whatever art and labour can do shall be done." "February 2. Mahon sent me a letter from Arbuthnot, saying that the Duke of Wellington was enthusiastic in admira- tion of my book. Though I am almost callous to praise now, this praise made me happy for two minutes. A fine old fellow ! The Quakers have fixed Monday at eleven for my opportunity. 1 Many a man, says Sancho, comes for wool, and goes home shorn. To dinner at Lansdowne House. All were kind and cordial. I thought myself agreeable, but perhaps I was mis- taken. Lord Lansdowne almost made up his mind to come to the interview with the Quakers ; but a sense of decorum withheld him. Lord Shelburne begged so hard to be admitted that I could not refuse him, though I must provide myself with a different kind of second in such a combat. Milman will come if he can." " Saturday, February 3. Longman came. He brought two reviews of my book, North British and British Quarterly. When he was gone I read both. They are more than sufficiently eulogistic. In both there are squeezes of acid. Part of the censure I admit to be just, but not all. Much of the praise I know to be undeserved. I began my second part, and wrote two foolscap sheets. I am glad to see how well things are going in Parliament. Stanley is surely very foolish and inconsiderate. What would he have done if he had succeeded ? He is a great debater : but as to everything else he is still what he was thirty years ago, a clever boy. All right in the Commons. Excellent speech of Palmerston. What a knack he has for falling on his feet ! I never will believe, after this, that there is any scrape out of which his cleverness and his good for- tune will not extricate him. And I rejoice in his luck most sincerely ; for, though he now and then trips, he is an excellent Minister, and I cannot bear the thought of his being a sac- rifice to the spite of foreign powers." Of all English statesmen, Macaulay liked Lord Palmerston 1 A deputation from the Society of Friends proposed to wait upon Macau- lay to remonstrate with him about his treatment of William Penn in the fifth and eighth chapters of the History. $20 LIFE. AND LETTERS OP CH. xii. the best ; and never was that liking stronger than during the crisis through which the nations of the Continent were passing in 1848 and 1849. His heart was entirely with the Minister who, whenever and wherever the interests of liberty and huma- nity were at stake, was eager to prove that those to whom the power of England was committed did not wield the pen, and on occasion did not bear the sword, in vain. But Palmerston's foreign policy was little to the taste of some among his political opponents. They had not been able to digest his civility to Republican Governments ; nor could they forgive him for having approved the conduct of the Admiral who anchored British men-of-war between the broadsides of the King of Naples' ships and the defenceless streets of Palermo. An amendment on the Address was moved in both Houses, hum- bly representing to her Majesty that her affairs were not in such a state as to justify Parliament in addressing her in the language of congratulation. The Peers, dazzled by Lord Stanley's reck- less eloquence, ran the Ministry within two votes of a defeat which, in the then existing condition of affairs abroad, would have been nothing short of a European calamity. In the Commons Lord Palmerston opposed the amendment in a speech of extraordinary spirit, 1 which at once decided the for- 1 "If you say that you cannot congratulate us, I say, 'Wait till you are asked.' It would be highly improper to ask the House to express on the pre- sent occasion any opinion on the foreign relations of the country. * * * The real fault found with her Majesty's Government is that we are not at war with some of our allies. Our great offence is that we have remained on amicable terms with the Republican Government of France. There are those who ihink that the Government of a Republic is not sufficiently good company for the Government of a Monarchy. Now, I hold that the relations between Govern- ments are, in fact, the relations between those nations to which the Govern- ments belong. What business is it of ours to ask whether the French nation thinks proper to be governed by a king, an emperor, a president, or a consul ? Our object, and our duty, is to cement the closest ties of friendship between ourselves and our nearest neighbour that neighbour who in war would be our most formidable enemy, and in peace our most useful ally. * * * This, then, is the state of the matter. We stand here charged with the grave offence of having preserved a good understanding with the Republic of France, and of having thereby essentially contributed to the maintenance of peace in Europe. We are charged with having put an end to hostilities in Schleswig-Holstein which might have led to a European war. We are accused of having per- suaded Austria and Sardinia to lay down their arms, when their differences might have involved the other powers of Europe in contention. We are re- proached with having prevented great calamities in Sicily, and with labouring to restore friendly relations between the King of Naples and his subjects. These are the charges which the House is called upon to determine for, or against, us. We stand here as men who have laboured assiduously to prevent war, and, where it had broken out, to put an end to it as soon as was practi- cable. We stand here as the promoters of peace under charges brought against us by the advocates of war. I leave it to the House to decide between us and our accusers, and I look forward with confidence to the verdict which the House will give." 1848-52. LORD MACAULAV. 521 tune of the debate ; a motion for adjournment was thrown out by 221 votes to 80 ; and Mr. Disraeli, rightly interpreting the general feeling of the House, took the judicious course of withdrawing the hostile amendment. " Sunday, February 4. I walked out to Clapham yesterday afternoon ; had a quiet, happy evening ; and went to church this morning. I love the church for the sake of old times. I love even that absurd painted window with the dove, the lamb, the urn, the two cornucopias, and the profusion of sunflowers, passion-flowers, and peonies. Heard a Puseyite sermon, very different from the oratory which I formerly used to hear from the same pulpit." " February 5, 1849. Lord Shelburne, Charles Austin, and Milman to breakfast. A pleasant meal. Then the Quakers, five in number. Never was there such a rout. They had ab- solutely nothing to say. Every charge against Penn came out as clear as any case at the Old Bailey. They had nothing to urge but what was true enough, that he looked worse in my His- tory than he would have looked on a general survey of his whole life. But that is not my fault. I wrote the History of four years during which he was exposed to great temptations ; during which he was the favourite of a bad king, and an active solicitor in a most corrupt court. His character was injured by his associations. Ten years before, or ten years later, he would have made a much better figure. l But was I to begin my book ten years earlier or ten years later for William Penn's sake ? The Quakers were extremely civil. So was I. They complimented me on my courtesy and candour." This will, perhaps, be the most convenient place to insert some extracts from Macaulay's letters to Mr. Ellis. " Albany : January 10, 1849. " I have had a pastoral epistle in three sheets from St. Henry of Exon, and have sent him three sheets in answer. We are the most courteous and affectionate of adversaries. You cannot think how different an opinion I entertain of him since he has taken to sub- scribing himself, ' with very high esteem, ' My admiring reader.' 1 If Macaulay's History was not a Life of William Penn, this book is still less so. Those who are honourably jealous for Penn's reputation will forgive me if I do not express an opinion of my own with regard to the controversy ; an opinion which, after all, would be valueless. In my uncle's papers there can be found no trace of his ever having changed his mind on the merits of the question. 522 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. XII. How is it possible to hold out against a man whose censure is con- veyed in the following sort of phrase ? ' Pardon me if I say that a different course would have been more generous, more candid, more philosophical ; all which I may sum up in the words, more like yourself.' This is the extreme point of his severity. And to think how long I denied to this man all share of Christian charity ! " 1 " March 6, 1849. " Pray tell Adolphus how much obliged I am to him for his criticisms. I see that I now and then fell into error. I got into a passion with the Stuarts, and consequently did less damage than I should have done if I had kept my temper. " I hear that Croker has written a furious article against me, and that Lockhart wishes to suppress it, declaring that the current of public opinion runs strongly on my side, and that a violent attack by a personal enemy will do no harm to me and much harm to the Quarterly Review. How they settle the matter I care not, as the Duke says, one twopenny damn." a " March 8, 1849. "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 2/. 2s. Hume's History of England in eight volumes, highly valuable as an introduc- tion 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 live, however, in hope of seeing one day an advertisement of a new group of figures ; Mr. Macaulay, in one of his own coats, conversing with Mr. Silk Buckingham in Oriental costume, and Mr. Robert Montgomery in full canonicals." "March 9, 1850. " I hope that Roebuck will do well. If he fails it will not be from the strength of his competitors. What a nerveless, milk- 1 Unfortunately these were only the preliminaries of the combat. When the Bishop passed from compliments to arguments, he soon showed that he had not forgotten his swashing blow. Macaulay writes with the air of a man whose sole object is to be out of a controversy on the shortest and the most civil terms. ' ' Before another edition of my book appears, I shall have time to weigh your observations carefully, and to examine the works to which you have called my attention. You have convinced me of the propriety of making some alterations. But I hope that you will not accuse me of pertinacity if I add that, as far as I can at present judge, the alterations will be slight, and that on the great point at issue my opinion is unchanged." To this the Bishop rejoins : " Do not think me very angry, when I say that a person willing to come to such a conclusion would make an invaluable foreman of a jury to convict another Algernon Sidney. Sincerely, I never met so monstrous an attempt to support a foregone conclusion." * It was the Duke of Wellington who invented this oath, so disproportioned to the greatness of its author. 1848-52. LORD MACAU LAY, 523 and-water set the young fellows of the present day are ! declares that there is not in the whole House of Commons any stuff, under five-and-thirty, of which a Junior Lord of the Treasury can be made. It is the same in literature, and, I imagine, at the bar. It is odd that the last twenty-five years, which have witnessed the greatest progress ever made in physical science, the greatest victories ever achieved by man over matter, should have produced hardly a volume that will be remembered in 1900, and should have seen the breed of great advocates and Parliament- ary orators become extinct among us. " One good composition of its kind was produced yesterday ; the judgment in Gorham's case. 1 I hope you like it. I think it excellent, worthy of D'Aguesseau or Mansfield. I meant to have heard it delivered : but, when I came to Whitehall, I found the stairs, the passages, and the very street so full of parsons, Puseyite and Simeonite, that there was no access even for Privy Council- lors ; and, not caring to elbow so many successors of the Apostles I walked away. " 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 door- way 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 hoped once for a place, is dead." " February 12. I bought a superb sheet of paper for a guinea, and wrote on it a Valentine for Alice. I dined at Lady Charlotte Lindsay's with Hallam and Kinglake. I am afraid that I talked too much about my book. Yet really the fault was not mine. People would introduce the subject. I will be more guarded ; yet how difficult it is to hit the right point ! To turn the conversation might look ungracious and affected." "February 13, 1849. I sent off Alice's Valentine to Fanny to be forwarded. 2 The sale keeps up ; eighty or more a day. It is strange. People tell me that Miss Aikin abuses my book 1 On March 8, 1850, Lord Langdale delivered the judgment of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. * The Miss Macaulays resided at Brighton. The many weeks which their brother spent there in their company added much to his health and comfort. For the most part he lived at the Norfolk Hotel ; but he sometimes took a lodg- ing in the neighbourhood of their house. His article on Bunyan in the Ency- clopaedia Britannica was written in one of the houses in Regency Square. 524 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xiL like a fury, and cannot forgive my treatment of her Life of Ad- dison. Poor creature ! If she knew how little I deserve her ill-will, and how little I care for it, she would be quieter. If she would have let me save her from exposing herself, I would have done so ; ' and, when she rudely rejected my help, and I could not escape from the necessity of censuring her, I censured her more leniently, I will venture to say, than so bad a book was ever censured by any critic of the smallest discernment. From the first word to the last I never forgot my respect for her petti- coats. Even now, I do not reprint one of my best reviews foi fear of giving her pain. But there is no great magnanimity in all this." "February 14. At three came Fanny and the children. Alice was in perfect raptures over her Valentine. She begged quite pathetically to be told the truth about it. When we were alone together she said, ' I am going to be very serious.' Down she fell before me on her knees, and lifted up her hands : ' Dear uncle, do tell the truth to your little girl. Did you send the Valentine ? ' I did not choose to tell a real lie to a child even about such a trifle, and so I owned it. "February 15. To dinner with Baron Parke. Brougham was noisily friendly. I know how mortally he hates and how bitterly he reviles me. But it matters little. He has long out- lived his power to injure. He has not, however, outlived his power to amuse. He was very pleasant, but, as usual, exces- sively absurd, and exposed himself quite ludicrously on one subject He maintained that it was doubtful whether the tragic poet was Euripides or Euripides. It was Euripides in his Ainsworth. There was, he said, no authority either way. I answered by quoting a couple of lines from Aristophanes. I could have overwhelmed him with quotations. ' Oh ! 'said this great scholar, ' those are Iambics. Iambics are very capricious and irregular : not like hexameters.' I kept my countenance, and so did Parke. Nobody else who heard the discussion un- derstood the subject." In November 1848 Macaulay had been elected Lord Rec- tor of the University of Glasgow. The time was now approach- ing for the ceremony of his Installation : one of those occa- sions which are the special terror of an orator, when much is expected, and everything has been well said many times before. His year of office fortunately chanced to be the fourth centen- ary of the body over which he had been chosen to preside ; 1 See pages 429 and 430. 1848-52. LORD MACAULAY. 525 and he contrived to give point and novelty to his inaugural Address by framing it into a retrospect of the history and con- dition of the University at the commencement of each succes- sive century of its existence. "March 12. I called on the Lord Advocate, settled the date of my journey to Glasgow, and consulted him about the plan of my speech. He thought the notion very good ; grand, indeed, he said ; and I think that it is striking and original with- out being at all affected or eccentric. I was vexed to hear that there is some thought of giving me the freedom of Glasgow in a gold box. This may make it necessary for me to make a speech on which I had not reckoned. It is strange, even to myself, to find how the horror of public exhibitions grows on me. Hav- ing made my way in the world by haranguing, I am now as unwilling to make a speech as any timid stammerer in Great Britain." The event proved that his apprehensions were superfluous. " I took the oath of office," he writes in his journal of March 21, 1849 ; " signed my name ; and delivered my Address. It was very successful ; for, though of little intrinsic value, it was not unskilfully framed for its purpose, and for the place and time. The acclamations were prodigious." "March 22. Another eventful and exciting day. I was much annoyed and anxious, in consequence of hearing that there were great expectations of a fine oration from me at the Town Hall. I had broken rest, partly from the effect of the bustle which was over, and partly from the apprehension of the bustle which was to come. I turned over a few sentences in my head, but was very ill satisfied with them. Well or ill satisfied, however, I was forced to be ready when the Lord Provost called for me. I felt like a man going to be hanged ; and, as such a man generally does, plucked up courage to behave with decency. We went to the City Hall, which is a fine room, and was crowded as full as it could hold. Nothing but huzza- ing and clapping of hands. The Provost presented me with a handsome box, silver gilt, containing the freedom of the City, and made a very fair speech on the occasion. I returned thanks with sincere emotion, and, I hope, with propriety. What I said was very well received, and I was vehemently applauded at the close. At half-past two I took flight for Edinburgh, and, on arriving, drove straight from the station to Craig Crook. I had a pleasant, painful, half-hour with Jeffrey; perhaps the last He was in almost hysterical excitement 526 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xn. His kindness and praise were quite overwhelming. The tears were in the eyes of both of us." "March 26. Longman has written to say that the third edi- tion is all sold oft to the last copy. I wrote up my journal for the past week : an hour for fourteen pages, at about four minutes a page. Then came a long call from Macleod, with whom I had much good talk, which occupied most of the morning. I must not go on in this dawdling way. Soon the correspondence to which my book has given occasion will be over ; the correcting of proof-sheets for fresh editions will also be over ; the mornings will be mild : the sun will be up early ; and I will try to be up early too. I should like to get again into the habit of working three hours before breakfast Once I had it, and I may easily recover it A man feels his con- science so light during the day when he has done a good piece of work with a clear head before leaving his bed-room. I think I will fix Easter Tuesday for the beginning of this new system. It is hardly worth while to make the change before we return from our tour." 1 "" April 13. To the British Museum. I looked over the Travels of the Duke of Tuscany, and found the passage the existence of which Croker denies. His blunders are really in- credible. 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 everybody sick I could almost pity him. But he is a bad, a very bad man : a scandal to politics and to letters. " I corrected my article on Addison for insertion in the collected Essays. I shall leave out all the animadversions on Miss Aikin's blunders. She has used me ill, and this is the honourable and gentlemanlike revenge." " Friday, May 5, 1849. A lucky day on which to begin a new volume of my journal. Glorious weather. A letter from Lord John to say that he has given my brother John the living of Aldingham, worth i,ioo/. a year, in a fine country, and 1 At Easter 1849 we went to Chester, Bangor. and Lichfield. 1848-52. LORD MACAULAY. 527 amidst a fine population. Was there ever such prosperity ? I wrote a few lines of warm thanks to Lord John. To Long- man's. A thousand of the fifth edition bespoken. Longman has sent me Southey's Commonplace Book ; trash, if ever there was trash in a bookseller's shop. " I read some of Dr. Parr's correspondence while I dressed. I have been dawdling, at odd moments, over his writings, and over the memoirs of him, during the last week. He certainly was very far from, being all humbug. Yet the proportion of humbug was so great that one is tempted to deny him the merit which he really possessed. The preface to the Warbur- tonian Tracts is, I think, the best piece." "June 28. After breakfast to the Museum, and sate till three, reading and making extracts. I turned over three vo- lumes of newspapers and tracts ; Flying Posts, Postboys, and Postmen. I found some curious things which will be of direct service ; but the chief advantage of these researches is that the mind is transported back a century and a half, and gets fami- liar with the ways of thinking, and with the habits, of a past generation. I feel that I am fast becoming master of my sub- ject ; at least, more master of it than any writer who has yet handled it." ''June 29. To the British Museum, and read and extracted there till near five. I find a growing pleasure in this employ- ment. The reign of William the Third, so mysterious to me a few weeks ago, is beginning to take a clear form. I begin to see the men, and to understand all their difficulties and jealousies." "June 30. To day my yearly acount with Longman is wound up. I may now say that my book has run the gauntlet of criticism pretty thoroughly. I have every reason to be con- tent. The most savage and dishonest assailant has not been able to deny me merit as a writer. All critics who have the least pretence to impartiality have given me praise which I may be glad to think that I at all deserve. My present enterprise is a more arduous one, and will probably be rewarded with less applause. Yet I feel strong in hope. " I received a note from Prince Albert. He wants to see me at Buckingham Palace at three to-morrow. I answered like a courtier ; yet what am I to say to him ? For of course he wants to consult me about the Cambridge Professorship. l How can I be just at once to Stephen and to Kemble ? " 1 The Professorship of Modern History. The Chair was eventually filled by Sir James Stephen. 528 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. XH. " Saturday, July i. To the Palace. The Prince, to my ex- treme astonishment, offered me the Professorship ; and very earnestly, and with many flattering expressions, pressed me to accept it. I was resolute, and gratefully and respectfully declined. I should have declined, indeed, if only in order to give no ground to anybody to accuse me of foul play ; for I have had difficulty enough in steering my course so as to deal properly both by Stephen and by Kemble ; and, if I had marched off with the prize, I could not have been astonished if both had entertained a very unjust suspicion of me. But, in truth, my temper is that of the wolf in the fable. I cannot bear the collar, and I have got rid of much finer and richer collars than this. It would be strange if, having sacrificed for liberty a seat in the Cabinet and 2,5oo/. a year, I should now sacrifice liberty for a chair at Cam- bridge and 4oo/. a year. Besides, I never could do two things at once. If I lectured well, my History must be given up ; and to give up my History would be to give up much more than the emoluments of the Professorship if emolument were my chief object, which it is not now, nor ever was. The Prince, when he found me determined, asked me about the other can- didates." "July 21. I went to a shop near Westminster Bridge, where I yesterday remarked some volumes of the Morning Chronicle, and bought some of them to continue my set. I read the Morning Chronicle of 18 1 1. How scandalously the Whig Press treated the Duke of Wellington, till his merit became too great to be disputed ! How extravagantly unjust party spirit makes men ! " Some scribbler in the Morning Post has just now a spite to Trevelyan, and writes several absurd papers against him every week. He will never hear of them probably, and will certainly not care for them. They can do him no harm ; and yet I, who am never moved by such attacks on myself, and who would not walk across the room to change all the abuse that the Morning Post has ever put forth against me into panegyric, cannot help being irritated by this low, dirty wickedness. To the Museum, and passed two or three hours usefully and agreeably over maps and tracts relating to Londonderry. I can make something of that matter, unless I have lost my cunning." " August 3. I am now near the end of Tom Moore's Life of Byron. It is a sad book. Poor fellow ! Yet he was a bad fellow, and horribly affected. But then what, that could spoil a character, was wanting ? Had I at twenty-four had a peerage, 1848-52. LORD MACAULAY 529 and been the most popular poet and the most successful Lovelace of the day, I should have been as great a coxcomb, and possibly as bad a man. I passed some hours over Don Juan, and saw no reason to change the opinion which I formed twenty-five years ago. The first two cantos are Byron's masterpiece. The next two may pass as not below his average. Then begins the de- scent, and at last he sinks to the level of his own imitators in the Magazines." Macaulay spent the last half of August in Ireland, 1 and, as his custom was, employed himself during the days that preceded his tour in studying the literature of the country. He turned over Swift's Correspondence, and at least a shelf-full of Irish novels ; and read more carefully Moore's Life of Sheridan, and the Life of Flood, which did not at all meet his fancy. " A stupid, ill-spelt, ill-written book it is. He was a remarkable man ; but one not much to be esteemed or loved. I looked through the Memoirs of Wolfe Tone. In spite of the fellow's savage, unreasonable hatred of England, there is something about him which I cannot help liking. Why is it that an Irishman's, or Frenchman's, hatred of England does not excite in me an an- swering hatred ? I imagine that my national pride prevents it. England is so great that an Englishman cares little what others think of her, or how they talk of her." " August 16, 1849. The express train reached Holyhead about seven in the evening. I read, between London and Ban- gor, the Lives of the Emperors, from Maximin to Carinus in- clusive, in the Augustan History, and was greatly amused and interested. It is a pity that Philip and Decius are wanting to the series. Philip's strange leaning towards Christianity, and the vigour and ability of Decius, and his inveterate hostility to the new religion, would be interesting even in the worst history ; and certainly worse historians than Trebellius Capitolinus and Vopiscus are not easily to be found. Yet I like their silliest garrulity. It sometimes has a Pepys-like effect. " We sailed as soon as we got on board. The breeze was fresh and adverse, and the sea rough. The sun set in glory, and then the starlight was like the starlight of the Trades. I put on my great-coat and sate on deck during the whole voyage. As I could not read, I used an excellent substitute for reading. I went through Paradise Lost in my head. I could still repeat half of it, and that the best half. I really never enjoyed it so much. In the dialogue at the end of the fourth book Satan and Gabriel 1 See pages 496-499. M M 530 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xii. became to me quite like two of Shakespeare's men. Old Sharp once told me that Henderson the actor used to say to him that there was no better acting scene in the English drama than this. I now felt the truth of the criticism. How admirable is that hit in the manner of Euripides : ' But wherefore thou ! Wherefore with thee Came not all hell broke loose ? " I will try my hand on the passage in Greek Iambics; or set Ellis to do it, who will do it better. " I had got to the end of the conversation between Raphael and Adam, admiring more than ever the sublime courtesy of the Archangel, when I saw the lights of Dublin Bay. I love entering a port at night. The contrast between the wild, lonely sea, and the life and tumult of a harbour when a ship is coming in, have always impressed me much." "August 17. Off to Dublin by railway. The public buildings, at this first glance, struck me as very fine ; and would be considered fine even at Paris. Yet the old Parlia- ment House, from which I had expected most, fell below my expectations. It is handsome, undoubtedly ; indeed, more than handsome ; but it is too low. If it were twice as high as it is, it would be one of the noblest edifices in Europe. It is remarkable that architecture is the only art in which mere bulk is an element of sublimity. There is more grandeur in a Greek gem of a quarter of an inch diameter, than in the statue of Peter the Great at Petersburg. There is more grandeur in Raphael's Vision of Ezekiel than in all West's and Barry's acres of spoiled canvas. But no building of very small dimensions can be grand, and no building as lofty as the Pyramids or the Colosseum can be mean. The Pyramids are a proof : for what on earth could be viler than a pyramid thirty feet high ? "The rain was so heavy that I was forced to come back in a covered car. While in this detestable vehicle I looked rapid- ly through the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan, and thought that Trajan made a most creditable figure. I saw the outside of Christ Church Cathedral, and felt very little inclina- tion to see the inside. Not so with St. Patrick's. Ruinous, and ruinous in the worst way, undergoing repairs which there are not funds to make, it is still a striking church ; but the interest which belongs to it is chiefly historical. In the choir I saw Schomberg's grave, and Swift's furious libel written above. 1 1 The inscription on Schomberg's tablet relates, in most outspoken phrases, how the Dean and Chapter of St. Patrick's in vain importuned the Duke's 1848-52 LORD MACAULAY. 531 Opposite hang the spurs of St. Ruth, and the chain-ball which killed him ; not a very Christian-like ornament for the neigh- bourhood of an altar. In the nave Swift and Stella are buried. Swift's bust is much the best likeness of him that I ever saw ; striking and full of character. Going away through Kevin Street I saw the Deanery ; not Swift's house, though on the same site. Some of the hovels opposite must have been standing in his time ; and the inmates were probably among the people who borrowed small sums of him, or took off their hats to him in the street." "August 24. Killarney. A busy day. I found that I must either forego the finest part of the sight or mount a pony. Ponies are not much in my way. However, I was ashamed to flinch, and rode twelve miles, with a guide, to the head of the Upper Lake, where we met the boat which had been sent for- ward with four rowers. One of the boatmen gloried in having rowed Sir Walter Scott and Miss Edgeworth, twenty-four years ago. It was, he said, a compensation to him for having missed a hanging which took place that very day. Nothing can exceed the beauty of the Upper Lake. 1 I got home after a seven hours' ramble, during which I went twelve miles on horseback, and about twenty by boat. I had not crossed a horse since in June 1834 I rode with Captain Smith through the Mango Gar- den near Arcot. I was pleased to find that I had a good seat ; and my guide, whom I had apprised of my unskilfulness, pro- fessed himself quite an admirer of the way in which I trotted and cantered. His flattery pleased me more than many fine compliments which have been paid to my History. heirs to erect him a monument, and how at length they were reduced to erect one themselves. The last line runs thus : ' ' Plus potuit fama virtutis apud iilienos, quam sanguinis proximitas apud suos." 1 " Killarney is worth some trouble," Macaulay writes to Mr. Ellis. "I never in my life saw anything more beautiful ; I might say, so beautiful. Ima- gine a fairer Windermere in that part of Devonshire where the myrtle grows wild. The ash-berries are redder, the heath richer, the very fern more deli- cately articulated than elsewhere. The wood is everywhere. The grass is greener than anything that I ever saw. There is a positive sensual pleasure in looking at it. No sheep is suffered to remain more than a few months on any of the islands of the lakes. I asked why not. I was told that they would die of fat ; and, indeed, those that I saw looked like Aldermen who had passed the Chair." 3 In a letter written from Dublin on his way home Macaulay says : "I was agreeably disappointed with what I saw of the condition of the people in Meath and Louth, when I went to the Boyne, and not much shocked by any- thing that I fell in with in going by railway from Dublin to Limerick. But from Limerick to Killarney, and from Killarney to Cork, I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. Hundreds of dwellings in ruins, abandoned by the late inmates who have fled to America ; the labouring people dressed literally, M 1 2 532 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xii. After his fortnight in Ireland, Macaulay took another fort- night in France, and then applied himself sedulously and con- tinuously to the completion of his twelfth chapter. For weeks together the account of each day ends or begins with the words : " My task ; " " Did tny task ; " " My task, and some- thing over." " September 22. Wrote my regular quantity, six foolscap pages of my scrawl, which will be about two pages in print. I hope to hold on at this pace through the greater part of the year. If I do this, I shall, by next September, have rough- hewn my third volume. Of course the polishing and retouch- ing will be an immense labour." " October 2. Wrote fast, and long. I do not know thai I ever composed with more ease and pleasure than of late. I have got far beyond my task. I will only mention days when I fall short of it ; and I hope that it will be long before I have occasion to make such an entry." " October 9. Sate down again to write, but not in the vein. I hope that I shall not break my wholesome practice to-day, for the first time since I came back from France. A French- man called on me, a sort of man of letters, who has translated some bits of my History. When he went, I sate down dogged- ly, as Johnson used to say, and did my task, but somewhat against my will." " October 25, 1849. My birthday. Forty-nine years old. I have no cause of complaint. Tolerable health ; competence ; liberty ; leisure ; very dear relations and friends ; a great, I may say a very great, literary reputation. ' Nil amplius oro, Maia nate, nisi ut propria haec mihi munera faxis.' l But how will that be ? My fortune is tolerably secure against anything but a great public calamity. My liberty depends on myself, and I shall not easily part with it. As to fame, it may not rhetorically, worse than the scarecrows of England ; the children of whole villages turning out to beg of every coach and car that goes by. But I will have done. I cannot mend this state of things, and there is no use in breaking my heart about it. I am comforted by thinking that between the poorest English peasant and the Irish peasant there is ample room for ten or twelve well-marked degrees of poverty. As to political agitation, it is dead and buried. Never did I see a society apparently so well satisfied with its rulers. The Queen made a conquest of all hearts." 1 " My only prayer is, O son of Maia, that thou wilt make these blessings my own," ' 1848-52. LORD MACAULAY. 533 fade and die ; but I hope that mine has deeper roots. This I cannot but perceive, that even the hasty and imperfect articles which I wrote for the Edinburgh Review are valued by a gene- ration which has sprung up since they were first published. While two editions of Jeffrey's papers, and four of Sydney's, have sold, mine are reprinting for the seventh time. Then, as to my History, there is no change yet in the public feeling of England. I find that the United States, France, and Germany confirm the judgment of my own country. I have seen not less than six German reviews, all in the highest degree lauda- tory. This is a sufficient answer to those detractors who attri- bute the success of my book here to the skill with which 1 have addressed myself to mere local and temporary feelings. I am conscious that I did not mean to address myself to such feelings, and that I wrote with a remote past, and a remote future, constantly in my mind. The applause of people at Charleston, people at Heidelberg, and people at Paris has reached me this very week ; and this consent of men so differ- ently situated leads me to hope that I have really achieved the high adventure which I undertook, and produced something which will live. What a long rigmarole ! But on a birthday a man may be excused for looking backwards and forward." " Not quite my whole task ; but I have a grand purple patch to sew on, l and I must take time. I have been delighted to hear of Milman's appointment to St. Paul's : honestly delighted, as much as if a good legacy had been left me." " December 5. In the afternoon to Westbourne Terrace. I read my Irish narrative to Hannah. Trevelyan came in the middle. After dinner I read again. They seemed much, very much, interested. Hannah cried. I could not at all command my voice. I think that, if I ever wrote well, I have done so here. But this is but a small part of my task. However, I was pleased at the effect which I produced ; and the more so as I am sensible that I do not read my own compositions well." "December 7. I bought Thiers's new volume, and read it in the street. He is fair enough about Vimiera and Corunna, and just to the English officers, but hardly so to the private soldiers. After dinner I read Thiers again, and finished him. I am afraid of saying to other people how much I miss in historians who pass for good. The truth is that I admire no historians much except Herodotus, Thucydides, and Tacitus. 1 The Relief of Londonderry. 534 LIFE AND LETTERS OF CH. xn. Perhaps, in his way, a very peculiar way, I might add Fra Paolo. The modern writers who have most of the great quali- ties of the ancient masters of history are some memoir writers ; St. Simon for example. There is merit, no doubt, in Hume, Robertson, Voltaire, and Gibbon. Yet it is not the thing. I have a conception of history more just, I am confident, than theirs. The execution is another matter. But I hope to im- prove." In a letter of December 19, 1849, Macaulay writes : " Lord Spencer has invited me to rummage his family papers ; a great proof of liberality, when it is considered that he is the lineal descendant of Sunderland and Marlborough. In general, it is ludicrous to notice how sore people are at the truth being told about their ancestors. I am curious to see that noble library ; the finest private library, I believe, in England." " December 20. Althorp. This is a very early house. We had breakfast at nine, preceded by prayers in the chapel. I was just in time for them. After breakfast I went to the library. The first glance showed what a vast collection it was. Mr. Appleyard was Cicerone. Though not much given to admire the merely curious parts of libraries, I was greatly pleased with the old block-printing ; the very early specimens of the art at Mentz ; the Caxtons ; the Florence Homer ; the Alduses ; the famous Boccaccio. I looked with particular interest into the two editions of Chaucer by Caxton, and at the preface of the latter. Lord Spencer expressed his regret that his sea educa- tion had kept him ignorant of much that was known to scholars, and said that his chief pleasure in his library was derived from the pleasure of his friends. This he said so frankly and kindly that it was impossible not to be humbled by his superiority in a thing more important even than learning. He reminded me of his brother, my old friend and leader." ''December 21. After breakfast to-day I sate down to work. Appleyard showed me the pamphlet corner, and I fell to vigor- ously. There is here a large collection of pamphlets formerly the property of General Conway. The volumes relating to William's reign cannot have been fewer than fourteen or fifteen \ the pamphlets, I should think, at least a dozen to a volume. Many I have, and many are to my knowledge at the British Museum. But there were many which I had never seen ; and I found abundant, and useful, and pleasing occupation for five or six hours. I filled several sheets of paper with notes. 1848-52. LORD MACAU LAY. 535 Though I do not love country-house society, I got pleasantly through the evening. In truth, when people are so kind and so honest, it would be brutal not to be pleased To-day I sent io/. to poor 's family. I do not complain of such calls ; but I must save in other things in order to meet them." " December 26. I bought Thackeray's Rebecca and Row- ena, a very pretty, clever piece of fooling : but I doubt whether everybody will taste the humour as I do. I wish him success heartily. I finished the Life of Lord Sidmouth. Ad- dington seems to me to have had more pluck than I had given him credit for. As to the rest, he was narrow-minded and im- becile, beyond any person who has filled such posts since the Revolution. Lord Sidmouth might have made a highly credit- able figure, if he had continued to be Speaker, as he well might have done, twenty years longer. He would then have left as considerable a name as Onslow's. He was well qualified for that sort of work. But his sudden elevation to the highest place in the State not only exposed his incapacity, but turned his head. He began to think highly of himself exactly at the moment when everybody else began to think meanly of him. There is a punctiliousness, a sense of personal dignity, an ex- pectation of being consulted, a disposition to resent slights, t