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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. When the doors were shut we began to speculate on our numbers. Everybody was desponding. 'We have lost it. We are only 280 at most. I do not think we are 250. They are 300. Alderman Thompson has counted them. He says they are 299.' This was the talk on our benches. I wonder that men who have been long in Parliament do not acquire a better coup d'œil 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 300. As the tellers passed along our lowest row on the left-hand side, the interest was insupportable, 291, 292-we were all standing up and stretching forward, telling with the tellers. At 300 there was a short cry of joy -at 302 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 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 303; then that number rose to 310, then went down to 307. Alexander Barry told me that he had counted, and that they were 304. 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 301." 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 passages and the stairs into the waitingrooms 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."

He recommended his sister Hannah at one time to "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." He thus spoke of his own defects as an orator:

"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 excitement 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 audience 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 often. 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."

In a letter to his sister Hannah he described a first visit to Holland House, where he became a favourite with Lord and Lady Holland. He concludes a description with the words: "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." Samuel Rogers at this time, in trying to dissuade him from writing reviews, paid him a high compliment: "You may do anything, Mr Macaulay." An amusing tribute to the fame of Sir Walter Scott, was the fact of all the servant maids, in a house where he was dining, asking leave to stand in the passage and see him pass. Macaulay, in his usual direct way, condemned the character of Lord Byron, one of his principal reasons being

that he "never heard a single expression of fondness for him fall from the lips of any of those who knew him well."

Writing to Ellis he remarked regarding his review of Croker's "Boswell" in the Edinburgh Review: "My article on Croker has not only smashed his book, but has hit the Westminster Review incidentally. 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."

When the Reform Bill at last became law, Macaulay was appointed one of the Commissioners of the Board of Control. He was triumphantly returned for the borough of Leeds in 1832. Writing in this same year he says:

earth but thee? But for you, in the midst of all these successes, 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 restlessness within me quite new and almost inexplicable."

Macaulay offered to resign his office of Commissioner of the Board of Control when the Slavery Emancipation Bill came up before Parliament, but the difficulty was removed by the members departing from their first proposal. In the autumn of 1834 he was offered a membership of the Supreme Council of Calcutta, to draw up a new code of Indian laws, which he accepted, because it would allow him to secure a competence. Political thraldom was hateful to him. "I went to India," he said afterwards, "to get an independence, and I have got it." His sister Hannah accompanied him, but she had not been long in Calcutta when she married Mr, afterwards Sir Charles Trevelyan. He read as industriously as ever in the new country. "Calcutta," he wrote to Mr Macvey Napier, "is called, and not without some reason, the city of palaces; but I have seen nothing in the East

"The attachment between brothers and sisters, 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 funda mental law of all society, because, in conse-like the view from the Castle Rock [Edinburgh], quence 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?"

When he received the news that his sister Margaret was to be married to Mr Edward Cropper of Liverpool, he wrote thus from Leeds: "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

nor expect to see anything like it till we stand there together again." On his return home in 1838 he found that his father was dead. While in India he saved about £20,000; this, with the legacy of £10,000, left him by General Macaulay, his uncle, made him independent for life. The essays which he afterwards wrote on Lord Clive and Warren Hastings had the most extensive sale on separate publication, as compared with the others.

When asked to write a review of Lockhart's "Life of Scott" by the editor of the Edinburgħ Review, the following were some of his reasons for not undertaking that work: "I have not, from the little that I 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 Edinburgh 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 irritabilities 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 perfection 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." Accordingly he recommended that Lord Jeffrey be asked to write the article.

Macaulay had по admiration for Lord Brougham, and when the latter quarrelled with his party, and tried to use the Edinburgh Review, then under the editorship of Mr Macvey Napier, towards the punishment of his old friends, he wrote regarding him to Ellis, in September 1838: "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 he will make it the chief object of his life to prevent Jeffrey from ever being Lord President of the Court of Session. 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." In the autumn of this same year Macaulay started for a tour in Italy. Although he never went into rhapsody over a fine landscape, either in real life or in the printed page, yet he could quickly detect the fine points of a scene. He viewed everything with the eye of the historian; the associations and traditions of the places which he visited rose up at once to his wonderful memory. Writing in Rome of the Papal Government, he says: "The Government treats us very well. The pope winks at a Protestant chapel, and indulges us in a readingroom, where the Times and Morning Chronicle make their appearance twelve days after they

He

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. ... 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." The following criticism of Bulwer occurs in his Italian journals: "He has considerable talent and eloquence; but he is fond of writing about what he only half understands, or understands 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, manliness, and simplicity of mind." At Rome he met W. E. Gladstone, with whom he had some conversation, characterising him afterwards as both a clever and an amiable man. In 1839 Macaulay accepted the Secretaryship of War: many of the leading journals bearing a grudge against him, made distinct enough expression of it. In 1840 he was elected M.P. for Edinburgh.

The great historian was in the habit of picking up street ballads and preserving them. He left behind him a scrap-book, containing eighty ballads. In 1842 his "Lays of Ancient Rome" were issued by Longman, without any preliminary puffing, and became instantly popular. Professor Wilson, in Blackwood, gave the book a most cordial welcome. Up till 1875 upwards of 100,000 copies had been sold. The Ameri can publishers, quick to discern a profitable literary scheme, especially when there is no copyright in the question, had, as in the case of Carlyle and De Quincey's essays, reprinted a selection of Macaulay's essays from the Edinburgh Review. As copies of this American edition were finding their way into the English market, by way of self-defence, Messrs Longman urged upon Macaulay the necessity of setting about an authorised edition of his essays. Early in 1843 he began the work; when published they were immensely successful, and have continued to be increasingly in demand ever since. In spite of the applause and profit gained by their publication, he said, in writing to Napier, that "there are few of them which I read with satisfaction. These 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." In revising these essays for publi cation, he was careful to remove the passing strictures made on the author from that which was of permanent literary value. In 1841

Serjeant Talfourd brought in a measure into the House of Commons for extending the term of copyright in a book to sixty years from the death of the author. A speech made by Macaulay induced the House to reject this bill. Lord Mahon in the following year introduced a scheme giving protection to authors for twentyfive years from the date of death. Macaulay unfolded a counter scheme, giving protection for forty-two years from the date of publication, and backed by a terse and vigorous speech. The bill was remodelled in accordance with the principle of giving forty-two of copyright from the date of publication, and this was adopted by a large majority. The fact remains that Macaulay's own essays, coming under the scope of the act which he helped to create, have been reprinted in several rival editions by different publishers. After the rising of the session of Parliament in 1843, Macaulay started for a trip up and down the Loire. His letters to his sister, says his biographer, abundantly prove that he could have spoken off a very passable historical handbook for Central France, without any special training for the subject. In 1845, what between attendance on the House of Commons and writing articles, Macaulay had dropped his connection with the Edinburgh Review. In 1846 he acted as Paymaster-General of the Army, and in July of the same year went down to Edinburgh to seek re-election, where he was successful. In the following year, at a general election, he lost his seat for Edinburgh. "The vague charge," says Mr Trevelyan, "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." Writing to his sister Hannah after the result had been declared, he mentioned that "Radicals, 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." His table was after wards covered with letters of condolence from friends, and with invitations to stand for other constituencies.

His attitude and conversational manner are thus sketched by Mr Trevelyan: "Sitting bolt upright, his hands resting on the arms of his chair, or folded over the handle of his walkingstick; knitting his great eyebrows if the subject was one which had to be thought out as he went along, or brightening 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 intelligible 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." While his historical studies were engrossing more and more of his attention, it became difficult to induce him to step outside into society beyond his own more immediate circle of friends and relations, where he was always happiest and most at home. The society of his sister Hannah's children was thoroughly enjoyed by him; he was an inimitable playfellow-inventing games and dramas for their amusement. When absent from his nieces he would write them playful letters. He was himself easily moved at whatever appealed to his sentiment of pity in a novel or in real life. He was never happier than in spending an afternoon with his nephews and nieces sight-seeing in London. During the Easter holidays he would also often take them on a brief visit to some of the cathedral towns of England, varied sometimes by a trip to the Continent.

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When the first volumes of Macaulay's great work, the "History of England," were published, congratulations flowed in upon him from all quarters. Before it appeared, he had written to his publishers: "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." The fortune of the book was secure in three days. Thirteen thousand copies were sold in less than four months. "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." Lord Jeffrey wrote: 'My dear Macaulay, 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." He was delighted with the pleasure which he gave to Miss Edgeworth. A gentleman near Manchester read the volume every night after work to his poorer neighbours. At the close of the last meeting, one of the audience rose and proposed a vote of thanks to Mr Macaulay "for having written a history which working-men can understand." In his journal, Macaulay commented on the fact by saying, "I really prize this vote." Rival editions of the work

soon also appeared in America and on the Continent.

The history of the rise and progress of this great work will be best given in notes from his own journals. In a letter written to Napier on 20th July 1838, shortly after his return from India, the first mention is made of this work.

"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 administration-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 narrative down I have not determined. The death of George IV. 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 IV.'s reign will be to me then what the American War and the coalition are to me now."

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He wrote from Rome in the same year: "Tuesday, December 18.—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 beginning. 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 II. as a preface to the history of William III.; and if I did, a history of Charles II. would still be equally necessary as a preface to that of the reign of James II. 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 subject. I really think that posterity will not willingly let my book die."

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 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 principal 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-by, a lively picture of the state of the Kirk is indispensable.”

After the two first volumes had been published, he wrote thus 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. I will see whether anything is to be got from other diplomatic collections. 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, 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."

"When employed upon his 'History,"" says Mr Trevelyan, "he habitually preserved in writing such materials as were gathered elsewhere than from the shelves of his own library, instead of

Three years later, on 5th November 1841, continuing the facile, though hazardous, course Macaulay writes to Napier:

"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

which he had pursued as a reviewer, and trusting to his memory alone. The fruits of many a long hour passed among the Pepsyian book-cases, the manuscripts at Althorp, or the archives

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