The materials for the biography of Lord Macaulay are scanty, and the writer of the present sketch has been able to glean few facts regarding his career which are not generally known. His life was comparatively barren in events, and though he rose to conspicuous social, literary, and political station, he had neither to struggle nor scramble for advancement. Almost as soon as his talents were displayed they were recognized and rewarded, and he attained fortune and power without using any means which required the least sacrifice, either of the integrity or the pride of his character.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was born at Rothley Temple, Leicestershire, on the twenty-fifth of October, 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, the son of a Scotch Presbyterian clergyman, was one of the worthiest and ablest antislavery philanthropists and politicians of his time, distinguished, even among such men as Wilberforce, Clarkson, and Stephen, for courage, sagacity, integrity, and religious principle. His mother was the daughter of Thomas Mills, a bookseller in Bristol, and belonged to the Society of Friends. Under her loving care he received his early education, and was not sent from home until his thirteenth year, when he was placed in a private academy. As a boy, he astonished all who knew him, by the brightness and eagerness of his mind, and the extent and variety of his acquisitions. Two lately published letters, written by Hannah More to his father, afford a pleasing glimpse of him, as he appeared to a shrewd and affectionate observer of his early years. She speaks of his “great superiority of intellect and quickness of passion,” at the age of eleven. He ought, she thinks, to have competitors, for “he is like the prince who refused to play with anything but kings.”

“I never,” she says, “saw any one bad propensity in him; nothing except natural frailty and ambition, inseparable perhaps from such talents and so lively an imagination; he appears sincere, veracious, tender-hearted, and affectionate.” He was a fertile versifier, even at that tender age, but she “observed with pleasure that though he was quite wild till the ebullitions of his muse were discharged, he thought no more of them afterwards than the ostrich is said to do of her eggs after she has laid them.” In another letter, written about two years afterwards, when the bright lad was nearly fourteen, she says, “the quantity of reading Tom has poured in, and the quantity of writing he has poured out, is astonishing.” Poetry continued to be his passion, but his venerable friend still testifies to his promising habit of throwing his verses away as soon as he had read them to her. “We have poetry,” she writes, “for breakfast, dinner, and supper. He recited all Palestine, while we breakfasted, to our pious friend, Mr. Whalley, at my desire, and did it incomparably.” She refers to his loquacity, but that quality seems not, in her presence, to have been connected with dogmatism, for she calls him very docile. At that early age he appears to have been sufficiently master of his stores of information to play with them, and his wit kept pace with his understanding. “Several men of sense and learning,” she says, “have been struck with the union of gayety and rationality in his conversation.” Accuracy of expression seems also to have been as striking a trait of the boy’s mind as volubility of utterance. One fault is mentioned, which was probably the result of his absorption in study and composition. Incessantly occupied, mentally, he paid but little attention to his personal appearance, and in dress was something of a sloven. Neither his father nor Hannah More could cure him of this fault, and, up to the time he became a peer, this neglect of externals seems to have been a characteristic trait. A fellow-pupil at the academy to which he was sent, describes him as “rather largely-built than otherwise, but not fond of any of the ordinary physical sports of boys; with a disproportionately large head, slouching or stooping shoulders, and a whitish or pallid complexion; incessantly reading or writing, and often reading or repeating poetry in his walks with his companions.” In October, 1818, the precocious youth entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and during the whole period of his residence at the University his special studies did not divert him from gratifying his thirst for general knowledge, and taste for general literature. In 1819 he gained the chancellor’s medal for a poem on the subject of Pompeii, and in 1821 the same prize for one on Evening. For these, and for all compositions of the kind, he afterwards professed to feel the utmost scorn. Two years after his second success as a prize poet, we find him comparing prize poems to prize sheep. “The object,” he says, “of the competitor for the agricultural premium is to produce an animal fit, not to be eaten, but to be weighed. The object of the poetical candidate is to produce, not a good poem, but a poem of the exact degree of frigidity and bombast which may appear to his censors to be correct or sublime. In general prize sheep are good for nothing but to make tallow candles, and prize poems are good for nothing but to light them.”

In 1821 he was elected Craven University Scholar; and in 1822 he graduated, and received his degree of B. A.; though he did not compete for honors, owing, it is said, to his dislike for mathematics. Between this period and 1824, when he was elected Fellow of his College, he contributed to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine the poems and essays, in which, for the first time, we detect the leading traits of his intellectual character. He possessed the feeling and the faculty of the poet only so far as they are necessary for the interpretative and representative requirements of the historian. He possessed the understanding of the philosopher only so far as it is necessary to throw into relations the vividly conceived facts derived from the records of the annalist. He could not create, but he could reproduce; he could not vitally combine, but he could logically dispose. The fair operation of these mental qualities was disturbed by the peculiarities of his disposition. He had boundless self-confidence, which had been consciously or unconsciously pampered by friends who admired the remarkable brilliancy of his powers. Independence of thought was thus early connected with imperiousness of will and petulant disrespect for other minds. Having no self-distrust, there was nothing to check the positiveness of his judgments. Where more cautious thinkers doubted he dogmatized; their probabilities were his certainties; and generally the tone of his judgments seemed to imply his inward belief in the maxim of the egotist—“difference from me is the measure of absurdity.” Lord Melbourne afterwards acutely touched upon this foible, when he lazily expressed his wish that he “was as sure of anything as Tom Macaulay was of everything.”

A portion of this positiveness is perhaps to be referred as much to the vividness of his perceptions as to the autocracy of his disposition. All that he read he remembered; and his memory, being indissolubly connected with his feelings and his imagination, vitalized all that it retained. Facts and persons of a past age were not to him hidden in the words which pretended to convey them to the mind, but were perceived as actual events and living beings. He could recollect because he could realize and reproduce. To his mental eye the past was present, and he had the delight of the poet in viewing as things what the historian had recorded in words. All men are more positive in regard to what they have seen than in regard to what they have heard. If what they have seen awakens in them joy and enthusiasm, their expression is instinctively dogmatic, especially if they come into collision with persons of fainter and colder perceptions, whose understandings are sceptical because their sensibilities are dull. Such, to some degree, at least, was the dogmatism of Macaulay in his statements of facts. In respect to his positiveness in opinion, it may be said that his leading opinions were blended with his moral passions, and an unmistakable love of truth animates even his fiercest, haughtiest and most disdainful treatment of the opinions of opponents. These qualities do not of course wholly explain or extenuate the leading defect of his character; for behind them, it must be admitted, were the triumphant consciousness of personal vigor, the insolent sense of personal superiority, and the relentlessness of temper which so often accompanies strength of intellectual conviction.

Among his contributions to Knight’s Quarterly Magazine, the Fragment of a Roman Tale and The Athenian Revels, indicate that at college he had studied the ancient classics so thoroughly as to gain no little insight into Greek and Roman life. Alcibiades, CÆsar, and Catiline, seem as real to him as Canning and Wellington. In the papers on Mitford’s History of Greece and The Athenian Orators, the same tendency of mind is displayed in a critical direction. His intellect penetrates to the realities of the society and the individuals he assumes to judge, and the independence, originality, and decision of his thinking, correspond to the clearness of his perceptions. The Conversation between Cowley and Milton is an example of the same sympathetic historic imagination exercised in the discussion of great historical questions, yet angrily debated; and in the poem of The Battle of Naseby, which purports to be written by Obadiah Bind-their-Kings-in-Chains-and-their-Nobles-with- links-of-Iron, Serjeant in Ireton’s Regiment, an attempt is made to reproduce the fiercest and gloomiest religious passions which raged in the breasts of the military fanatics among the Puritans. The critical papers on Dante and Petrarch exhibit the general characteristic of the writer’s later literary criticism—intellectual sympathy superior to rules, but submissive to laws; praising warmly, but at the same time, judging keenly; and as intolerant of faults as sensitive to merits. The style, both of the historical and critical articles, is substantially the style of Macaulay’s more celebrated essays. There is less energy and freedom of movement, a larger use of ornament for the sake of ornament, and a more obvious rhetorical artifice in the declamatory passages, but in essential elements it is the same.

In the choice of a profession, Macaulay fixed upon the law. He was called to the bar in February, 1826, but we hear of no clients; and it is doubtful if he ever mastered the details of his profession. Sydney Smith, who knew him at this time, said afterwards—“I always prophesied his greatness from the first moment I saw him, then a very young and unknown man, on the Northern Circuit. There are no limits to his knowledge, on small subjects as well as great: he is like a book in breeches.” Indeed, politics and literature had, from the first, attractions too strong for him to resist; and before he entered on the practice of his profession, he had, by one article in a review, passed at a bound to a conspicuous place among the writers of the time.

It might have been expected, from his family connections, that he would be a zealous whig and abolitionist, and his first contribution to the Edinburgh Review was on the subject of West India Slavery. It was published in the number for January, 1825, and in extent of information, force and acuteness of argument, severity of denunciation and sarcasm, and fervor and brilliancy of style, it ranks high among the many vigorous productions in which Macaulay has recorded his love of freedom and hatred of oppression, and exhibited his power of making tyranny ridiculous as well as odious. It is curious that this paper, so full of the peculiar traits of his character and style, should not have been generally recognized as his, after his subsequent articles had familiarized the public with his manner of expression. But the date of his first contribution to the Review is still commonly considered to be the month of August, 1825, when his article on Milton appeared, and at once attained a wide popularity. Though when, in 1848, the author collected his Essays, he declared that this article “hardly contained a paragraph that his matured judgment approved,” and regretted that he had to leave it unpruned of the “gaudy and ungraceful ornament” with which it was overloaded, its popularity has survived its author’s harsh judgment.

Whatever were its youthful faults of taste, impertinences of statement, and errors of theory, few articles which had ever before appeared in a British journal contained so much solid matter in so compact and readable a form. If it did not touch the depths of the various topics it so confidently discussed, it certainly contained a sufficient number of strong and striking thoughts to rescue its brilliancy from the charge of superficiality. If the splendor of its rhetoric seemed consciously designed for display, this defect applies in great measure to Macaulay’s rhetoric in general. He popularizes everything. He converts his acquirements into accomplishments, and contrives that their show shall always equal their substance; but in this essay, as in the dazzling-series of essays which succeeded it, a discerning eye can hardly fail to perceive beneath the external glitter of the periods, the presence of two qualities which are sound and wholesome, namely, broad common sense, and earnest enthusiasm.

Following the article on Milton, came, in the Edin burgh Review for February, 1826, the month in which he was called to the bar, a paper on the London University. This was succeeded in March, 1827, by a powerful and well-reasoned, but exceedingly bitter and sarcastic antislavery article on the Social and Industrial Capacities of Negroes. In June of the same year, appeared a paper, evidently written by him, entitled “The Present Administration,” one of the most acrimonious and audacious political articles ever published in the Edinburgh Review. Its tone was so violent and virulent, and excited so much opposition, that, in the next number of the Review, a kind of apology was offered for it under the form of explaining its real meaning. Macaulay’s real meaning is evident; he “meant mischief;” but in the confused sentences of his apologist hardly any meaning is perceptible; and there is something ludicrous in the very supposition that the meaning of the clearest and most decisive of writers could be mistaken by the public he addressed, and especially by the Tories he assailed.

In all editions of his Essays, the admirable article on Machiavelli, one of the ablest, most elaborate, and most thoughtful productions of his mind, succeeds the article on Milton. It was published in the number of the Review for March, 1827. Between 1827 and 1830 appeared the articles on Dryden, History, Hallam’s Constitutional History, Southey’s Colloquies on Society, and the three articles on the Utilitarian Theory of Government. These proved the capacity of the author to discuss both political and literary questions with a boldness, brilliancy, and effectiveness, hardly known before in periodical literature. Each essay included an amount of digested and generalized knowledge which might easily have been expanded into a volume, but which, in its condensed form and sparkling positiveness of expression, was all the more efficient. To the Whig party as well as to the Whig Review, such an ally had claims which could not be disregarded; and in 1830, through the interest of Lord Lansdowne, he was elected a member of Parliament for the borough of Caine. His reputation was so well established that no idea of patronage entered into this arrangement; and he could afterwards boast, with honest pride, that he was as independent when he sat in Parliament as the nominee of Lord Lansdowne as when he represented the popular constituencies of Leeds and Edinburgh.

As an orator, he won a reputation second only to his reputation as a man of letters. From all accounts he owed little to his manner of speaking. “His head,” we are told, “was set stiff on his shoulders, and his feet were planted immovable on the floor. One hand was fixed behind him across his back, and in this rigid attitude, with only a slight movement of his right hand, he poured forth, with inconceivable velocity, his sentences.” His first speech was on the Jews’ Disabilities Bill, on the fifth of April, 1830, followed in December by one on Slavery in the West Indies. Both evinced the broad views of the statesman as well as the generous warmth of the reformer. He threw himself with characteristic ardor into the great struggle for Parliamentary Reform, and his speeches on that measure, not only drew forth unbounded applause from his party and unwilling admiration from his opponents, but, as read now, after the excitement of the occasion has subsided, justify in a great degree the enthusiastic praise of those who heard them delivered. Clear and logical in arrangement, abundant in precedents and arguments, fearless in tone, and animated in movement, they are particularly marked by that fusion of intelligence and sensibility which makes passion intelligent and reason impassioned. The rush of the declamation is kept carefully within the channels of the argument; they convince through the very process by which they kindle. Their style is that of splendid and animated conversation; though carefully premeditated they have the appearance of being spontaneous; and indeed were not, as is commonly supposed, originally written out and committed to memory, but thought out and committed to memory. Without writing a word, he could prepare an hour’s speech, in his mind, carefully attending even to the most minute felicities of expression, and then deliver it with a rapidity so great that no reporter could follow him. The effect on the House of these declaimed disquisitions can perhaps be best estimated by quoting a passage from one of his political opponents, whose pen, in the heat of faction, was unrestrained by any of the proprieties of controversy. In the number of the Noctes Ambrosiano, for August, 1831, Macaulay is sneered at as a person whom it is the fashion among a small coterie to call “the Burke of the age.” After admitting him to be “the cleverest declaimer on the Whig side of the House,” the account thus proceeds: “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 trumpetlike, and the action so grotesquely emphatic, that you might hear a pin drop in the House. Even Manners Sutton himself listens.”

In the Reformed Parliament, which met in January, 1833, Macaulay took his seat as member for Leeds. He was soon after made Secretary of the Board of Control. An economist of his reputation, he did not speak often, but reserved himself for those occasions when he could speak with effect. Throughout his parliamentary career he showed no inclination to mingle in strictly extemporaneous debate, though it seems difficult to conceive that a man of such intellectual hardihood as well as intellectual capacity, and who in conversation was one of the most fluent and well-informed of human beings, lacked the power of thinking on his legs. It is probable that he disliked the drudgery of practical political life, and was incapable of the continuous party passion which sustains the professional politician. An ardent Whig partisan, his partisanship was still roused by the principles of his party rather than by its expedients. Literature and the philosophy of politics had more fascination for him than the contentions of the House of Commons; and he has repeatedly expressed contempt for the sophisms and misstatements which, though they will not bear the test of careful perusal, pass in the House for facts and arguments when volubly delivered in excited debate. Indeed, from 1830 to 1834, the period when he was most ambitious for political distinction and preferment, his contributions to the Edinburgh Review indicate that while in Parliament he gave as much time and thought to literature as he did before he became a member. To this period belong his articles on Saddler’s Law of Population, Bunyan, Byron, Hampden, Lord Burleigh, Mirabeau, Horace Walpole, the elder Pitt, Croker’s Edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, the Civil Disabilities of the Jews, and the War of the Succession in Spain. Only one of his speeches can perhaps compare with the best of these articles In range of thought and knowledge, and richness of diction. This was the speech which he delivered as Secretary of the Board of Control, in July 1833, on the new India Bill of the Whig government. Few persons were in the house; but Jeffrey, who was in London, wrote to one of his correspondents in regard to it:—“Mac 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.”

Since the time of Burke, no speech in Parliament on the subject of India had equalled this in comprehensiveness of thought and knowledge. It justified his appointment, made a few months after, of member and legal adviser of the Supreme Council of India. Shiel, in a mocking defence of Macaulay from the sneers of some person who questioned his abilities, thus alluded to this appointment:—“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!” The largeness of the salary, nearly twice that of the President of the United States, was probably Macaulay’s principal inducement to accept the office. His means were small; the gains of the office would in a few years make him independent of the world; and though he seemed, in accepting it, to abandon the objects of his political ambition, he really chose the right course to advance them. Pecuniary independence would relieve him from all imputations of being a political adventurer; and he had every reason to suppose that he might reach, in England, high political office all the more surely if it were understood that the emoluments of high political office were not the primary objects of his ambition. Apart from such considerations as these, there was something in the terms of his appointment eminently calculated to induce him to accept it. The special object of his mission was to prepare a new code of Indian law; and it is impossible to read his articles on the Utilitarian Theory of Government, and Dumont’s Recollections of Mirabeau, without perceiving that he had studied jurisprudence as a science, and that he considered the province of the jurist as even superior to that of the statesman. He went to India in 1834, with the feeling that he could prepare a code at once practical and just. For four years he labored to solve this problem, and the decision of his countrymen appeared to be that, though his solution might be just, it was not practical. In the opinion, especially of those East Indians whose interests were affected by its justice, it was a “Black Code.” When it was published, on his return from India in 1838, it was mercilessly denounced and ridiculed. Alarmists prophesied that, if adopted, it would lead to the downfall of the British power in India. Wits calculated, with malicious accuracy, the number of guineas which each word cost the British people. Between alarmists and wits the whole project fell through. There was a general impression that the code would not work, and, while its ability was admitted, its practicability was denied.

During his absence in India only two of his articles, the review of Mackintosh’s History of the Revolution in England in 1688, and the paper on Bacon, were published in the Edinburgh Review. The sketch of Bacon’s life and philosophy is one of the most elaborate, ingenious and brilliant products of his mind, but it is full of extravagant overstatements. It is biography and criticism in a series of dazzling epigrams; the exaggeration of epigram taints both the account of Bacon’s life and the estimate of Bacon’s philosophy; but the charm of the style is so great that, for a long time yet to come, it will probably influence the opinion which even educated men form of Bacon, though to thoughtful students of the age of Elizabeth and James, and to thoughtful students of the history of scientific and metaphysical speculation, it may seem as inaccurate in its disposition of facts as it is superficial in philosophy.

Soon after his return from India, in June, 1838, Macaulay was offered the office of Judge Advocate, which he declined. In 1839 the whigs of Edinburgh invited him to offer himself as a candidate for the representation of that city in Parliament. In a private letter to Adam Black, he gave the reasons why, if elected, the position would be agreeable to him. “I should,” he wrote, “be able to take part in politics, as an independent Member of Parliament, with the weight and authority which belongs to a man who speaks in the name of a great and intelligent body of constituents. I should, during half the year, be at leisure for other pursuits to which I am more inclined, and for which I am perhaps better fitted; and I should be able to complete an extensive literary work which I have long meditated.” He expressed an unwillingness to accept office under the government he intended to support, on the ground that he disliked the restraints of official life. “I love,” he says, “freedom, leisure, and letters. Salary is no object to me, for my income, though small, is sufficient for a man who has no ostentatious tastes.” In regard to the expenses of the election, he makes one condition which may surprise those American readers, who suppose that none but English politicians who are corrupt, pay money to get into Parliament. “I cannot,” he says, “spend more than £500 on the election. If, therefore, there be any probability that the candidate will be required to pay more than this, I hope you will look round for another person.” On the 29th of May, 1839, he made a speech to the electors, which for clearness and pungency of statement and argument is a model for all orators who are called upon to address a popular audience. It was probably this speech which drew forth the unintentional compliment from the Edinburgh artisan, that he thought he could have made it himself. “Ou! it was a wise-like speech, an’ no that defecshunt in airgument; but, eh! man”—with a pause of intense disappointment—“I’m thinkin’ I could ha’ said the haill o’ it mysel’!”

After some inefficient radical opposition, Macaulay, on the fourth of June, was declared duly elected. In September of the same year he was induced to accept the office of Secretary at War, in Lord Melbourne’s administration. In 1841, when Sir Robert Peel came into power, he went into opposition, and some of his ablest speeches were made during the five years the tories were in office. In 1842, his “Lays of Ancient Rome,” were published, and attained a wide popularity. In 1843 he published a collection of his Essays, contributed to the Edinburgh Review, including the masterly biographies of Temple, Clive, Hastings, Frederic the Great, and Addison, and the papers on Church and State, Ranke’s History of the Popes, and the Comic Dramatists of the Restoration, written since his return from India. In July, 1846, on the return of the Whigs to power, he was made Paymaster-General of the Forces. Though his speech and vote on the Maynooth College Bill, in 1845, had roused a serious opposition to him among the dissenters of Edinburgh, he was still reelected to Parliament, though not without a severe struggle, on his acceptance of office. In 1847 Parliament was dissolved. By this time his offences against the theological opinions of his constituents had been increased by his support of what they called the system of “godless education,” which the government to which he belonged had patronized. The publicans and spirit dealers of the city were also in ill-humor with the Whig government, on account of the continuance of “undue restrictions in regard to their licenses.” From the state of the mob that yelled and hissed round the hustings, there would have seemed to be no “undue restriction” on the disposal of spirituous liquors to carry the election. Adam Black sums up the opposition to Macaulay as consisting of “the no-popery men, the godless-education men, the crotchety coteries, and the dealers in spirits.” To all these Macaulay was blunt and unconciliating, strong in the feeling that he had excited their hatred by acts which his conscience prompted and his reason approved. He would not recant a single expression, much less a single opinion.

“The bray of Exeter Hall,” a phrase in his Maynooth speech particularly obnoxious to the dissenters, he would not take back, and it was used against him with great effect. A Mr. Cowan, a man of no note, was selected as the opposing candidate, as if his enemies had determined to mortify his pride as well as deprive him of his seat. His speeches from the hustings were continually interrupted by a mob who, infuriated by fanaticism or whiskey, received his statements with insults, and answered his arguments by jeers. “If,” exclaimed Macaulay in one of his speeches, “your representative be an honest man”—“Ay! but he’s no that!” was a cry that came back from the crowd. To interruptions and to insults, however, he presented a bold front, and met outrage with defiance. He would not condescend to humor at the hustings the prejudices he had offended in Parliament, but reaffirmed his opinions in the most pointed and explicit language. One of his arguments was that, in regal’d to the Maynooth grant, no principle was involved. A sum had always been yearly voted to support that Roman Catholic College; the only cause of complaint against him was that he had spoken and voted for an additional sum. He was therefore opposed, not on a principle, but on a quibble. “And,” he exclaimed, “if you want a representative who will peril the peace of the empire for a mere quibble, that representative I will not be.”

He was defeated, and after it was known that he was defeated, he was hissed. In his speech to the crowd, announcing that his political connection with Edinburgh was dissolved forever, he alluded to this last circumstance as unprecedented in political warfare. To hiss a defeated candidate, he reminded them, was below the ordinary magnanimity of the most factious mob. In his farewell address to the electors, written after he had returned to London, he indicated that, to an honest, honorable, and patriotic statesman, there might be solid consolations, even to personal pride, in the circumstances of his defeat. “I shall always be proud,” he writes, “to think that I once enjoyed your favor, but permit me to say I shall remember, not less proudly, how I risked and how I lost it.” The following noble poem, published since his death, contains, perhaps, the most authentic record of his feelings on the occasion:—

Lines Written In August, 1847.

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.

Pale flickered on the hearth the dying flame,
And all was silent in that ancient hall,
Save when by fits on the low night-wind came
The murmur of the distant water-fall.

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.

“Without one envious sigh, one anxious scheme,
The 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.

“Fortune, that lays in sport the mighty low,
Age, that to penance turns the joys of youth,
Shall leave untouched the gifts which I bestow,
The sense of beauty and the thirst of truth.

“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.

“For aye mine emblem was, and aye shall be,
The ever-during plant whose bough I wear,
Brightest and greenest then, when every tree
That blossoms in the light of Time is bare.

“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;

“Not then alone, when myriads, closely pressed
Around thy car, the shout of triumph raise;
Nor when, in gilded drawing-rooms, thy breast
Swells at the sweeter sound of woman’s praise.

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 snow-birds 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;

“Thine, when around thy litter’s track all day
White sand-hills 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.

“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.”

He now devoted his time to a work he had long meditated, and for which he had not only collected a considerable portion of the materials, but had probably written some portion of the text,—the History of England, from the Accession of James II. The first two volumes of this were published in the autumn of 1848, and gave him a literary reputation far beyond what he had acquired by his historical essays. The book was as popular as any of Scott’s or Dickens’s novels, while its solid merits of research and generalization placed it among the great historical works of the century. Its circulation, large in England, was immense in the United States; and in every portion of the world where English literature is esteemed, it was widely read, either in the original text or in carefully prepared translations.

In 1852, the city of Edinburgh, desirous of repairing the injustice it had done to Macaulay in 1847, elected him its representative without his appearing as a candidate. He accepted the trust, though his health had begun to fail, and he was already visited with the symptoms of the disease which eventually caused his death. He wrote to Adam Black, in August, 1852, that “any excitement, or any violent exertion, instantly brings on a derangement of the circulation, and an uneasy feeling of the heart.” He was unable to perform his parliamentary duties to his own satisfaction from the first, and repeatedly expressed his desire to resign. He was withheld from so doing by the assurances he received from Edinburgh that his constituents were satisfied with his partial attendance on the duties of his post. At length, in January, 1856, he became aware of his incapacity to serve any longer without serious prejudice to his health, and resigned his seat. Meanwhile, two more volumes of his History had been completed and published, evincing that the energy of his mind was not affected by the ills of his body. He also had devoted some time to preparing a volume of his speeches for the press, and published them in 1854. In 1857, without any solicitation on his part, and entirely to his own surprise, he was elevated to the peerage. Though it was known that his health was infirm, there was no apprehension on the part of the public that he would not live to complete a large portion of the immense work he had contemplated. His delightful biographies of Atterbury, Bunyan, Goldsmith, Johnson, and Pitt, contributed to the new edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, proved that his faculties were in their full vigor and splendor. It was therefore with a shock of painful surprise that all readers of the English race heard of his sudden death, by disease of the heart, on the 28th of December, 1859. It was felt, even by those who most vehemently disagreed with him in opinion, that in losing him England lost the man who, beyond all other men, carried in his brain the facts of her history. He was buried, with great pomp, in the Poet’s Corner of Westminster Abbey, “at the foot of Addison’s monument and beside the remains of Sheridan.”

The first and strongest impression we derive from a consideration of Macaulay’s life and writings is that of the robust and masculine qualities of his intellect and character. Since his death it has become generally known that he was by no means deficient in those tender and benevolent feelings which found little expression in his works. Among his intimate friends and relations he passed as one of the most affectionate of men, and his benevolence to unsuccessful artists and men of letters, absorbed no inconsiderable portion of his income. But in his speeches in parliament, in his essays, and in his history, he makes the impression of a stout, strong, and tough polemic, who is thoroughly well furnished for combat, and who neither gives nor expects quarter. No tenderness to frailty interferes with the merciless severity of his judgments. His own political and personal integrity was without a stain. “You might,” said Sydney Smith, in testifying to his incorruptibility and his patriotism, “lay ribbons, stars, garters, wealth, titles, before him in vain. He has an honest, genuine love of his country, and the world could not bribe him to neglect her interests.” This integrity of character gave a certain puritan relentlessness of tone to his intellectual and moral judgments. He had a warm love for what was beautiful and true, but, in his writings, it generally took the negative form of hatred for what was deformed and false. He abhorred meanness, baseness, fraud, falsehood, conniption, and oppression, with his whole heart and soul, and found a grim delight in holding them up to public execration. His talent for this work, and his enjoyment of it, were so great, that he was tempted at times to hunt after criminality for the pleasure of punishing it. He acquired a diseased taste for character that was morally tainted, in order that he might exercise on its condemnation the rich resources of his scorn and invective. His progress through a tract of history was marked by the erection of the gallows, the gibbet, and the stake, and he was almost as insensible to mitigating circumstances as Judge Jeffreys himself. He seemed to consider that the glory of the judge rested on the number of the executions; and he has hanged, drawn, and quartered many individuals, whose cases are now at the bar of public opinion, in the course of being reheard.

The last and finest result of personal integrity is intellectual conscientiousness, and this Macaulay cannot be said to have attained. His intellect, bright and broad as it was, was the instrument of his individuality. His sympathies and antipathies colored his statements, and he rarely exhibited anything in “dry light.” In this respect, he is inferior to Hallam and Mackintosh, who are inferior to him in extent of information, and genius for narrative. The vividness of his perceptions confirmed the autocracy of his disposition, and his convictions had to him the certainty of facts. It must be admitted that he had some reason for his dogmatism. He excelled all Englishmen of his time in his knowledge of English history. There was no drudgery he would not endure in order to obtain the most trivial fact which illustrated the opinions or the manners of any particular age. Indeed, the minuteness of his information astonished even antiquaries, and in society was sometimes thought “to be erected into a colossal engine of colloquial oppression.” And this information was not a mere assemblage of dead facts. It was vitalized by his passions and imagination; it was all alive in the many-peopled domain of his “vast and joyous memory;” and it was so completely possessed as to be always in readiness to sustain an argument or illustrate a principle. The songs, ballads, satires, lampoons, plays, private correspondence of a period, were as familiar to him as the graver records of its annalists. But in disposing his immense materials he followed the law of his own mind rather than the law inherent in the facts. Instead of viewing things in their relations to each other, he viewed things in their relation to himself. His representation of them, therefore, partook of the limitations of his character. That character was broad, but it would be absurd to say that it was as broad as the English race. He Macaulayized English history as a distinguished poet of the century was said to have Byronized human life. Even in some of his most seemingly triumphant statements it will be found that a different disposition of the facts will result in establishing an opposite opinion. Take the article on Bacon, the most glaring of all the instances in which he has refused to assume the point of view of the person he has resolved to condemn; and any intellect, resolute enough to resist the marvellous fascination of the narrative, can easily redispose the facts so as to arrive at an opposite conclusion.

A prominent cause of Macaulay’s popularity is to be found in the definiteness of his mind. He always aspired to present his matter in such a form as to exclude the possibility of doubt, either in his statement or argument. Of all great English writers he is therefore the least suggestive. All that he demands of a reader is simple receptiveness. Selection, arrangement, reasoning, pictorial representation, are all done by himself. This explicitness, too, is purchased at some sacrifice of truth. His comprehensiveness is apt to be of that kind which arrives at broad generalizations by excluding a number of the facts and principles it ought to include. Real comprehensiveness of mind is impossible unless the interior life of the separate facts included in the sweeping generalization is adequately comprehended. Shakspeare, of all English minds, is the most comprehensive; and Shakspeare, in virtue of his comprehensiveness, would doubt in many instances where Macaulay is most certain. The most perfect exhibition of Macaulay’s talent is his analysis and representation of the character of James II., from a hostile point of view. He catches his victim in a series of cunningly contrived traps, and the poor creature, in Macaulay’s narrative, cannot move a step without falling into the trap marked folly or the trap marked wickedness. Shakspeare’s method of dealing with character was entirely different.

As an artist Macaulay is greater in his Essays than in his History of England. Each of his essays is a unit. The results of analysis are diffused through the veins of narration, and details are strictly subordinated to leading conceptions. In his History details are so numerous as to confuse the mind. Events succeed each other in their chronological rather than their intellectual order; and his readers gain an intense perception of particular facts without any general view of the whole field. The power of the author to interest us is as evident in his account of the Bank of England as in his account of the Massacre of Glencoe. We pass from one topic to another without any sense of the connection of topics. Picture succeeds picture as in the anarchy of a panorama. It seems as if we were reading the work of a poet who had turned annalist. By emphasizing everything, interest in particulars is obtained at the expense of general effect. It is only by turning to the table of contents that we are able to generalize the events of a reign. There are scores of pages in the third and fourth volumes which we read as we read a newspaper, where an account of a murder may be succeeded immediately by an account of a masquerade. Prescott, who cannot be named with Macaulay in respect to fulness of matter, fertility of thought, originality of style, and unwearied energy of mind, is still superior to him in the artistic disposition of his materials. In reading Prescott, we have but a faint impression of the author and no feeling at all of the felicity of the style, but the real business of the historian is none the less performed, for we get a large view of facts in their true relations, and are enabled to take in the subject he treats of as a whole. In Macaulay the narrative of particular facts and incidents is incomparably bright and stimulating, but the facts and incidents are not seen from a commanding point.

In his essays, especially his biographical and historical essays, this defect is not observable. They rank among the finest artistic products of the century. They partake of the imperfections of his thinking and the limitations of his character, but they are still perfect of their kind. The articles on Machiavelli, Banyan, Clive, Hastings, Frederic the Great, Barere, Chatham, not to mention others, are eminent specimens of that critical and interpretative biography, in which the character of the biographer appears chiefly to give unity to the representation of facts and the application of principles. The amount of knowledge each of them includes can only be estimated by those who have patiently read the many volumes they so brilliantly condense. In style they show a mastery of English which has been attained by no other English author who did not possess a creative imagination. The art of the writer is shown as much in his deliberate choice of common and colloquial phrases as in those splendid passages in which he almost seems to exhaust the resources of the English tongue. As a narrator, in his own province, it would be difficult to name his equal among English writers; to his narrative, all his talents and accomplishments combined to lend fascination; and in it he exhibited the understanding of Hallam, and the knowledge of Mackintosh, joined to the picturesqueness of Southey, and the wit of Pope.

E. P. W.