reforms drew down on him a torrent of abuse, especially from the English society in Calcutta and the Mofussil, to which he seems to have been entirely indifferent. And as he strolled up and down his garden at early dawn or in the full splendour of Indian moonlight, his mind became gradually more and more indifferent to politics. What, he said, is the fame of Townshend to that of Hume, of Lord North to that of Gibbon, of Lord Chatham to that of Johnson?

'I am more than half determined to abandon politics, and to give myself wholly to letters; to undertake some great historical work which may be at once the business and the amusement of my life; and to leave the pleasures of pestiferous rooms, sleepless nights, aching heads, and diseased stomachs to Roebuck and to Praed.'

At the close of 1837 Macaulay embarked with his sister and her husband in the Lord Hungerford' East Indiaman to return to England. The voyage was long and stormy. Zachary Macaulay died in May 1838, before his children reached their native shore. The first business which awaited the returning legislator was a literary quarrel, that threatened to end in a duel. Lord Brougham had assumed towards Macaulay an attitude which boded no good. And, above all, the prospects of the political party with which Macaulay was so closely connected by principle and by regard were extremely depressing. We have read with curiosity and interest the remarks of Mr. Trevelyan on the causes which led to the fall of Lord Melbourne's government, differing as they do very widely from the impressions we ourselves retain of that event. But whatever those causes were, the fact is certain that a reaction had quickly succeeded to the violent emotions of the Reform agitation; that the party and the Parliament which had carried so many great measures, was soon broken up, partly by the secession of its more conservative members, but much more by the imprudent. pressure of its radical adherents. At the moment of King William's death the Cabinet was on the verge of defeat. It was rescued for a time by the popularity and Whig proclivities of the young Queen. But we regard it as a misfortune to the Whig party that the existence of the Ministry was prolonged after it had lost its power; and certainly there never was a moment less calculated to encourage a Whig statesman to resume his connexion with public affairs.

Macaulay proceeded to make a tour in Italy in the autumn. following his return. He visited that country, as his nephew justly remarks, with the eyes of an historian, but he had a faint appreciation of the beauties of natural scenery and still less of the great works of medieval art. The charm of those

portions of his Italian journals which are given to the reader consists in the vast array of historical associations which those spots, consecrated by the heroism of ages, awakened in his memory. And it is probable that he here first conceived the idea of those Roman ballads which he afterwards executed with such singular felicity.* A proposal from Lord Melbourne to take the office of Judge Advocate followed him to Florence in November 1838, but the offer did not strike him as even 'tempting,' and was declined.

In Rome Macaulay had met Mr. Gladstone, then the rising hope of the Tory party. Oddly enough his first task on returning to London was to read and review Mr. Gladstone's Essay on Church and State, which he did with the exclamation, The Lord hath delivered him into our hand;' and certainly never was a crude theory more mercilessly demolished. Mr. Gladstone acted on the principle that a soft answer turneth away wrath, for he addressed his critic in the following terms:

"I have been favoured with a copy of the forthcoming number of the Edinburgh Review'; and I perhaps too much presume upon the bare acquaintance with you, of which alone I can boast, in thus unceremoniously assuming you to be the author of the article entitled Church and State,' and in offering you my very warm and cordial thanks for the manner in which you have treated both the work, and the author on whom you deigned to bestow your attention. In whatever you write, you can hardly hope for the privilege of most anonymous productions. a real concealment; but, if it had been possible not to recognise you, I should have questioned your authorship in this particular case, because the candour and singlemindedness which it exhibits are, in one who has long been connected in the most distinguished manner with political party, so rare as to be almost incredible. . . . In these lacerating times one clings to everything of personal kindness in the past, to husband it for the future; and, if you will allow me, I shall earnestly desire to carry with me such a recollection of your mode of dealing with a subject upon which the attainment of truth, we shall SO agree,

Some of these Lays must already have been composed in his mind, for he says: I then went towards the river, to the spot where the old 'Pons Sublicius stood and looked about to see how my Horatius agreed 'with the topography. Pretty well; but his house must be on Mount Palatinus, for he never could see Mount Cælius from the spot where 'he fought.' This evidently refers to the passage:

'But he saw on Palatinus

The white porch of his home,
And he spake to the noble river
That rolls by the walls of Rome.'

Yet his brother Charles seems to have supposed that the 'Lays' were composed after his return to England.

materially depends upon the temper in which the search for it is instituted and conducted."

How much this letter pleased Macaulay is indicated by the fact of his having kept it unburned; a compliment which, except in this single instance, he never paid to any of his correspondents.'

The elevation of Mr. Abercromby, the Speaker, to the Peerage, in May 1838, left a seat for Edinburgh vacant, and the Liberal constituency of our ancient city willingly accepted Macaulay as their candidate. He conciliated the Radicals by adopting the Ballot, but in all other respects his political creed consisted in an emphatic renewal of his devoted attachment to Whig principles. The passage, in these days, it may be well to quote.

"I look with pride," said Macaulay, "on all that the Whigs have done for the cause of human freedom and of human happiness. I see them now hard pressed, struggling with difficulties, but still fighting the good fight. At their head I see men who have inherited the spirit and the virtues, as well as the blood, of old champions and martyrs of freedom. To those men I propose to attach myself.. While one shred of the old banner is flying, by that banner will I, at least, be found. Whether in or out of Parliament-whether speaking with that authority which must always belong to the representative of this great and enlightened community, or expressing the humble sentiments of a private citizen-I will to the last maintain inviolate my fidelity to principles which, though they may be borne down for a time by senseless clamour, are yet strong with the strength, and immortal with the immortality, of truth; and which, however they may be misunderstood or misrepresented by contemporaries, will assuredly find justice from a better age. 999

The day came, even in Edinburgh, when the enthusiasm excited by this patriotic language was forgotten; but the day never came when Macaulay flinched from those principles; and the day will never come when those who follow, at however great a distance, in his footsteps, will forsake them.

It was not long before Macaulay was called upon to make a considerable sacrifice to his sense of public duty. The most cherished desire of his heart had been to devote himself, on his return to England, to some great literary work, for in his eyes all that he had hitherto achieved was desultory and ephemeral. He applied himself, indeed, with fresh energy to the Review, and it was at this time that the splendid articles on Clive and Warren Hastings were written, to be followed by many others. But the magnum opus he had in view-the work which was to hand down his name to posterity, and perhaps be read and admired at the distance of a thousand years, was his English History. The plan was already framed in his mind, though

in proportions very different from those which it afterwards assumed; and on March 9, 1839, it appears from his journal that he wrote a portion of the introduction. Pretty well,' was his own note upon it, but a little too stately and rhetorical.' But before the close of September he received a letter from Lord Melbourne, with an offer of the Secretaryship at War and a seat in the Cabinet. No doubt to attain to a place in the executive Government of England before a man is forty, by sheer force of intellect, is a triumph and a temptation which few men of strong political feelings and ambition could resist. But in accepting office Macaulay added nothing to his own fame. He had no inducement to accept it but the consciousness that it was his duty to support what he knew to be a falling government. His powers of debate were wasted in violent and fruitless altercations, and his duties as Secretary at War might have been as well performed by a chief clerk of the department. In one respect his short ministerial career was remarkable. He gave a strenuous support to Lord Palmerston in the transactions of 1840 which nearly led to war with France; and he did not side with the dissentient voices in the Cabinet, though amongst them were several names dearest to the Whig party and to himself. The struggle of the Cabinet was not of long duration. In less than two years the Melbourne Ministry fell, and Macaulay was liberated from office.

He wrote at this time to Macvey Napier :

'I am not at all disappointed by the elections. They have, indeed, gone very nearly as I expected. Perhaps I counted on seven or eight votes more; and even these we may get on petition. I can truly say that I have not, for many years, been so happy as I am at present. Before I went to India, I had no prospect in the event of a change of Government, except that of living by my pen, and seeing my sisters governesses. In India I was an exile. When I came back, I was for a time at liberty; but I had before me the prospect of parting in a few months, probably for ever, with my dearest sister and her children. That misery was removed; but I found myself in office, a member of a Government wretchedly weak, and struggling for existence. Now I am free. I am independent. I am in Parliament, as honourably seated as man can be. My family is comfortably off. I have leisure for literature; yet I am not reduced to the necessity of writing for money. If I had to choose a lot from all that there are in human life, I am not sure that I should prefer any to that which has fallen to me. I am sincerely and thoroughly contented.'

These agreeable prognostications were to a great extent realised. Eighteen years of life still remained to him, and he spent them in full and unbroken enjoyment. His influence

in Parliament was considerable, and on more than one occasion he turned the opinion of the House, by the incomparable ingenuity of his arguments. He lost his seat for Edinburgh indeed, but that was the result of a proud and manly adherence to principle and to his determination never to degrade the character of a representative. Although he gradually withdrew from general society, and was bored by the vacuity of country houses and big dinners, he clung more closely to the intercourse of his relations and intimate friends; and meanwhile the History steadily, though slowly, advanced.

The

It is this period of Macaulay's life which offers the greatest interest to those of the present generation who enjoyed his society, and Mr. Trevelyan has fortunately preserved to us considerable portions of his daily journal at this time. events recorded are indeed slight and few, but the picture of that animated and accomplished company of kindred minds is full of brilliancy and truth. It was an age of social breakfasts. Macaulay himself preferred a party of friends, assembled at a breakfast table to eat muffins and broiled salmon, to any other mode of entertainment; and if he did not set the fashion, he certainly adopted it with great cordiality and gave it an unusual charm. Hallam, Sydney Smith, Lord Carlisle, Lord Stanhope, M. Van de Weyer, Senior, and Bishop Wilberforce shared this taste, and the breakfasts were incessant at their respective houses. Bright as those mornings always were, the brightest were the days on which Macaulay appeared, or on which he assembled the same party at the Albany or on Campden Hill. Rogers' breakfasts were a thing apart, for at them the chief object of the host seemed to be to exhibit himself and tell his own stories over again, with the well-known fall of the lip or the anticipated tear. But Macaulay's parties were perfectly natural and unaffected, the conversation was spontaneous and unprepared; yet involuntarily the circle found itself drawing closer round the magician's chair:

'So charming left his voice that they awhile

Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear.'

Not less congenial to Macaulay were the dinners of The Club' that remarkable society founded in 1764 by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, which has numbered amongst its members the best talkers of a century, but certainly none more brilliant than him who was elected on March 19, 1839. twenty years Macaulay constantly attended these dinners, which are held on alternate Tuesdays during the Session. He was there completely in his element. Each of the guests was

VOL. CXLIII. NO. CCXCII.

P P

For