readily concede it, inferior to Mill as a powerful and original thinker-less as a logician, less as an abstract philosopher. But he carried with him through life the most intense enjoyment of it; he was blest with affections for those nearly allied to him as warm and tender as ever touched the heart of man; he was harassed by no bitter or lawless passions; his sense of his own powers never swelled into vanity or affectation; everything amused and delighted him which set in motion the aerial shapes of his imagination; his conversation was the most brilliant and varied that had been heard for a century-if indeed anything like it was ever heard at all; and he held fast to manly, liberal, and enlightened principles, with a passionate earnestness which left no room for scepticism or despondency. These qualities may be traced in his writings, and they contributed largely to the charm with which he grouped the personages of history in the most picturesque and dramatic forms, giving to everything he touched the freshness of life. He has been accused of heightening the colours and exaggerating the attitudes he threw upon the canvas; but this was no more than the result of his own exuberant nature. He saw all things in strong light and shade, because there was sunshine on them all. Nothing was hazy or indistinct; nothing overcast with doubt or gloom.. This, however, is not the time or the place to expatiate in needless criticism or panegyric on Lord Macaulay's writings. They enjoy a popularity beyond the range of fiction, and they have merits which will fascinate the world when the most popular fictions of the day have ceased to please. Our business to-day is to trace, what his nephew well calls the joyous and shining 'pilgrimage' of their author through the world, and we rejoice that these volumes record in the familiar language of common life the warmth of heart, the enthusiasm, and the simplicity of character which were united in Lord Macaulay to the most marvellous attainments. No man was ever less anxious to obtrude his personal claims to distinction on the world. He cultivated literature as an art, but the artist was kept out of sight. His work was purely objective. Even in his speeches and in his conversation, and still more in his writings, the nature of his discourse, the subject of his descriptions, absorbed him altogether. His biographer justly remarks that it would be almost as hard to compose a picture of the author from his History, his Essays, and his Lays, as to evolve an idea of Shakspeare from 'Henry the Fifth' and 'Measure for Measure.' His manner of life, his habits of thought, his lively affections were really known to those only who enjoyed his intimacy. With a vast acquaintance his bosom friends were few in number,

and of these by far the nearest and dearest were the members of his own family. By them, or by their descendants, the veil of privacy which it pleased him to retain over his inner life is now removed, and this publication presents to his admirers a living picture of himself, traced to a considerable extent by his own hand.

Scotland may claim both John Mill and Macaulay as her descendants, but not as her children—or, if children, they were, in some respects, undutiful sons. Yet Macaulay paid his debt to the land of his forefathers by his splendid contributions to a Journal which is identified with Scotland by its best and dearest traditions; and the most brilliant of his Parliamentary speeches were delivered by him as the representative of our Scottish capital. Something, no doubt, he owed to the fervour and daring of the old Highland spirit, shown in former generations by the ministers of the Kirk, his ancestors, whom Dr. Johnson met in the Hebrides; and Zachary Macaulay, his father, retained the type of his descent unaltered. Never lived there a man of a sterner or more undoubting faith, of a higher sense of duty, of more indomitable industry in the great cause to which he devoted his existence but he was absolutely devoid of those genial, imaginative, and humorous sympathies which, in despite of himself, shed such light and gaiety over his Cameronian household. Macaulay used to say that he derived his 'joviality' from his mother, on the principle, we suppose, that it certainly did not come to him from his father. But his mother was a Quakeress, of Bristol extraction; his early education was conducted under the prim but benevolent eyes of Mrs. Hannah, More. We must leave the champions of the rival influence of hereditary gifts and of educational authority to explain as best they may, the existence of a man who owed so little to his parents or to the position in which he was born.

We shall pass summarily over the period of baby hymns and juvenile epics, which streamed from the brain of this young prodigy almost as soon as he could speak or write. Mr. Trevelyan has wisely contented himself with a brief account of these performances, and has not given them to the public-a thing Macaulay himself would especially have abhorred, for he held that nothing ought to be brought to table but the ripe. fruit of care and thought, and he held very cheap the crude efforts of his early life. Be it enough to say that when he went to Cambridge at eighteen, we already find him writing a vigorous and picturesque style, treating all subjects, himself included, with clear good sense, conversant with an astonishing amount of literature of all ages and languages, and thirsting for

distinction in the liberal arts. He had not been sent to a public school, a circumstance which had perhaps allowed him i a greater latitude and freedom in his studies, and when he entered Trinity College he entered upon the world. His first appearance in public life seems to have been at a Cambridge election, when the mob were hustling the successful candidates. His ardour was cooled by receiving a dead cat full in the face. The man who had thrown the missile assured him that it was by mistake, and that the cat was meant for Mr. Adeane. wish,' said Macaulay, that you had meant it for me and hit Mr. Adeane'-a joke worthy of an older politician.

I

Mr. Trevelyan has described with a tinge of hereditary sympathy the strong attachment of Macaulay for Cambridge, and above all for Trinity. That was indeed the starting place and the goal, the very Mecca of his life; and it was there he received the impressions which formed and moulded his character and his intellect.

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 mediæval 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 fellowship 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 commons, and dine beneath the portraits of Newton and Bacon on the daïs of the hall; again to ramble by moonlight round Neville's cloister discoursing the picturesque but somewhat 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.'

The group of men he met there was remarkable-the present Lord Grey, Lord Belper and Lord Romilly, the three brothers Villiers, Praed, Moultrie, Sidney Walker, and above all, Charles Austin,

'whose fame would now be more in proportion to his extraordinary

abilities had not his unparalleled success as an advocate tempted him before his day to retire from the toils of a career of whose rewards he had already 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 experience of the world at home and abroad,-Austin was indeed a king among his fellows. "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, combined 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 talebearers who met with more encouragement 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 attainments 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.'

No doubt a life of Lord Macaulay would be incomplete without some allusion to Charles Austin, and we thank Mr. Trevelyan for this courteous allusion to one who may in aftertimes be chiefly remembered as Macaulay's rival and friend. Austin surpassed Macaulay himself in powers of argumentative conversation. He was less discursive, more logical, and he launched shafts barbed with the scorn of scorn with a more unsparing hand. But he had infinitely less of poetic fire and human sympathy; less imagination, less of heart, and less of persistent ambition. His Radical opinions subsided at last into a mild form of Conservatism, and either from indolence or indifference to the world, he never took a pen in hand to leave behind him any trace of his great intellect. Hence he is remembered more for what he might have been than for what he was.

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 after mile through the country till the noise of their wideflowing 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 Wordsworth'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 generous 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 Lansdowne at Bowood, 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 cther 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 tc play Boswell to the others.'

Neither of these friendly disputants, certainly, wanted either