In August of 1825 there appeared in the Edinburgh Review an article on Milton which attracted instantaneous and universal attention. Though it did not, perhaps, go to the bottom of the various topics it had to deal with, it displayed so wonderful a range of knowledge, so great a variety of strong and striking thoughts, and such a splendor of rhetoric, that it dazzled and drew into an earnest enthusiasm the host of readers of that already famous journal. When it came to be known that the author of this marvellous piece of literary workmanship was a young man of only twenty-five, it was at once perceived that a new luminary had made its appearance in the galaxy of English authorship. From that time till the day when, nearly thirty years later, his services in behalf of letters were rewarded with a grave in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey, Thomas Babington Macaulay wielded a literary influence not surpassed by that of any other master of English prose.

He was the son of Zachary Macaulay, a man who had distinguished himself as an anti-slavery philanthropist even among men like Stephen, Clarkson, and Wilberforce. His mother was a daughter of Thomas Mills, a bookseller, and a Quaker. Though the lad did not inherit a fortune, his father was able without much inconvenience to give him the advantages of an education at one of the universities. Up to the age of thirteen he was taught almost exclusively by his mother; and when he was at length placed in a private school, his brightness and eagerness of mind astonished all those with whom he came in contact. That most charming of all biographies of literary men, Trevelyan’s “Life and Letters of Macaulay,” teems with evidence of his singular attainments at an early age.

At Cambridge, which he entered at the age of eighteen, he devoted himself with great fervor to the study of the classics, to reading in history and general literature, and to the development of his abilities as an extemporaneous speaker. He took whatever prizes came in his way, but, owing to his distaste for the mathematics, did not try for honors at the completion of his course. On leaving the university with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1822, his mental habits and peculiarities seem to have been substantially fixed. He was already master of vast stores of information, which he always seemed to keep under the play of his wit and his imagination. His memory was so prodigious that he could repeat the names of the popes either backward or forward; and he once remarked that if every copy of the “Paradise Lost” were to be destroyed, he thought he could reproduce the poem from memory. He read with such marvellous rapidity that he would devour a book in the course of a morning walk in London; and the vast accumulations which he thus brought into the range of his knowledge were so vitalized by his feelings and his imagination that they were always completely at his service.

Though his biographer shows us that he was one of the most charming and lovable of men, his writings would convey another impression. He appears never to have had any self-distrust; he was seldom in doubt on any subject; what to others seemed mere probabilities were to him positive certainties; indeed, on whatever question he wrote or spoke his opinions always seemed to have been irrevocably fixed long before. Lord Melbourne told the whole story when he once said: “I wish I was as cock-sure of any thing as Tom Macaulay is of every thing.”

The essay on Milton was followed at brief intervals by that remarkable series on Machiavelli, Dryden, Hallam, Hampden, Ranke, and others, which has been the delight and inspiration of so many students in England and America. Macaulay studied law, but we never hear that his literary labors were disturbed by clients. The prices which his articles commanded in the market of the Reviews enabled him to gratify his tastes; and he seems never to have had any inclination to push himself into an active practice of his profession.

One of the peculiar merits claimed for the old borough system by its friends was that it enabled young men of great promise to find an easy way into the House of Commons. Pitt, Channing, and Brougham had first been appointed from pocket boroughs, and now Macaulay was to receive a similar favor. In 1830, the very year when the Whigs, after a long exclusion from office, came into power under Lord Grey, Macaulay, through the favor of Lord Lansdowne, entered the House, as the Member for Calne. Though he afterward boasted that, while sitting as the nominee of Lord Lansdowne, he was as independent as when at a later period he represented the popular constituencies of Leeds and Edinburgh, it is worthy of note that from the first he was an ardent and unqualified supporter of the Whigs. In the great question of Representative Reform his sympathies were thoroughly enlisted on the side of Earl Grey; and his speeches on the subject, four in number, contributed not a little to the final triumph of that great movement. Some of his letters, given by Trevelyan, reveal in the most graphic light the intensity of public feeling while the contest was going on.

In the reformed Parliament of 1834 he took a seat as a member from Leeds; but in that same year his place was made vacant by his appointment as one of the Government Council for India. For this position he was amply qualified. His essays on the “Utilitarian Theory of Government” and “Dumont’s Recollections of Mirabeau” showed that he had studied jurisprudence as a science, and even that he considered the province of a jurist as superior to that of a statesman. Moreover he had made an especial study of India. In July of 1833 the Government brought forward its new India Bill, and Macaulay’s speech on the measure left perhaps even a deeper impression than had been made by either of his speeches on the Reform Bill. Jeffrey, who happened to be present, wrote to one of his correspondents: “Mack is a marvellous person. He made the very best speech that has been made this session on India. The Speaker, who is a severe judge, says he rather thinks it the best speech he ever heard.”

Trevelyan, in his life of Macaulay, has thrown out into clear light the object of his uncle in exiling himself from England during four years by going to India. While Macaulay was not without faith that he could be of service to the Government, the consideration which led to his decision was of a pecuniary nature. Though unmarried, he was not in a condition to be strictly independent, and without pecuniary independence, he was open to the charge while in Parliament of being an adventurer. The salary of the position offered was liberal, even in the English sense of that term. He was to receive £10,000 a year; and his letters show with what care he computed that, being a bachelor, he could live in India even in a governmental position on $25,000 a year, and save a similar amount for permanent investment. His hope was that at the end of five years he would be able to return with about $125,000 and henceforth devote himself with entire independence to a higher range of literary study. He had already begun to make plans for his great History.

There were, however, those who regarded the appointment as an unmerited reward for political services. When some one sneered at his abilities, Shiel, in his mocking way, replied: “Nonsense, sir! Don’t attempt to run down Macaulay; he’s the cleverest man in Christendom. Didn’t he make four speeches on the Reform Bill and get £10,000 a year? Think of that and be dumb!”

While in India Macaulay’s chief energies were devoted to the preparation of a code, by which he hoped to solve the perplexing problems that constantly thrust themselves forward in the government of that teeming peninsula. Though in this effort he was not successful, the ability and ingenuity of his work were generally acknowledged. His code was regarded as impracticable, and was finally rejected. It was during his stay in India that the essays on Mackintosh and Bacon were prepared.

Soon after his return in 1838 an election to Parliament by the important constituency of Edinburgh once more brought him into legislative activity. He supported Lord Melbourne till the downfall of his ministry, in 1841, and then became an opponent of Sir Robert Peel, in opposition to whose policy he delivered some of his ablest speeches. When a candidate for reËlection in 1847, he was defeated on account of some offence he had given in advocating a policy of liberality toward the means of educating Catholics in Ireland. But this defeat, though deeply mortifying to him at the time, was not without compensating advantages. He now had leisure to devote himself to the great literary work which for a considerable time had already been under his pen. In 1848 appeared the first two volumes of the “History of England from the Time of James the Second.” The work sprang at once into that phenomenal popularity which has scarcely yet abated, for it still enjoys the high distinction of having been more read than any other historical work in the language. The third and fourth volumes were given to the world in 1855, just as he was beginning to feel the approaches of that irresistible disease which was soon to bring his labors to an untimely end. Two years after the appearance of the fourth volume his services in behalf of history and letters were rewarded with the peerage. The numerous essays flowing from his pen still showed that the splendor of his faculties was undimmed, and it was therefore with surprise as well as sorrow that, late in December of 1859, the English-speaking world learned of his death from disease of the heart. With the unanimous concurrence of a mourning nation, he was given the highest literary honor of a burial in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey.

The peculiarities of Macaulay’s oratory were strikingly similar to those of his writings. With the exception, however, of his speech on the government of India, no one of his orations has the elaborateness so characteristic of his essays. Perhaps the most vivid notion of the methods and qualities of his address is conveyed by the description that appeared in the “Noctes AmbrosianÆ” immediately after the delivery of the speech selected for this volume. It is the description of a most ardent political enemy and a most energetic hater of all Whigs. After saying that Macaulay is “the cleverest declaimer on the Whig side of the House,” Wilson goes on to say: “He is an ugly, cross-made, splay-footed, shapeless little dumpling of a fellow, with a featureless face too—except, indeed, a good expansive forehead,—sleek, puritanical, sandy hair, large glimmering eyes, and a mouth from ear to ear. He has a lisp and burr, moreover, and speaks thickly and huskily for several minutes before he gets into the swing of his discourse; but after that nothing can be more dazzling than his whole execution. What he says is substantially, of course, stuff and nonsense; but it is so well worded, and so volubly and forcibly delivered—there is such an endless string of epigram and antithesis—such a flashing of epithets, such an accumulation of images, and the voice is so trumpet-like, and the action so grotesquely emphatic, that you might hear a pin drop in the House. Even Manners Sutton himself listens.”