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TREVELYAN'S MACAULAY.

BY EDWARD R. RUSSELL.

LORD MACAULAY is a figure of sufficient importance in English literature to demand to be contemplated afresh when any important revelation is made as to the features of his character and the method of his life. And a great communication has lately been made to the public, by the fittest and most competent person, with the effect of apprising us of just that which was unknown in reference to this great author's personality. Apart from the interest of its contents, Mr. Trevelyan's work has been pronounced worthy to rank with two or three great biographies which have distanced all other books of their class. If opportunity served, and it were possible to compare the materials at the command of the good and bad writers by whom our biographical shelves have been stocked, it would be an interesting question, how and wherein such a life as has been produced by Lord Macaulay's nephew comes to differ so notably and acceptably from many others written with similar advantages. On the whole, this Society will not be unwilling to review the career of a writer who did so much to form the minds of men now middle-aged, under the agreeable and yet searching light which has been newly shed upon it. The subject is simple, and of moderate interest, compared with many that we have discussed; and it would not be consistent with the claims of the Society to make it as entertaining as it might be if even a tithe of the anecdotes in Mr. Trevelyan's book were now to be recited. But it is fitting that a literary association should take appreciative notice of this new appraisement of a great literary man.

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What strikes one first and last in the book is that it makes us love a man whom we have previously only admired. Some of us may not even have greatly admired Macaulay. A fashion of depreciating him set in very early as a reaction from the popular idolatry which resulted from the publication of his History; and that fashion is one of the many which are unthinkingly followed by thoughtful persons. Those who are thus prepossessed will find little in Mr. Trevelyan's volumes to affect their literary judgment. Evidences of profound knowledge and laborious care are so irresistible on Macaulay's own pages that not even detractors require to be convinced by his biographer of the solidity of his acquirements or the thoroughness of his authorship; and where the true lustre of his genius has not been recognised it is not to be expected that the discovery of unlooked-for tenderness of heart and generous self-sacrifice will be specially interesting. But to those who have remained steadily convinced that Macaulay was one of the wisest as well as most brilliant of men-one whose opinions and decisions it is always dangerous to reject-one who often in a sentence gave the result of more effectual thought than goes to the composition of whole rambling pages of some of his censors, clumsy reasoners who make their books their workshops, and absolve themselves from literary style under the poor conceit that they are "thinkers "-those, I say, who have thus estimated Macaulay, and who consider him a safe guide in political theory and a true analyst of the philosophy of character, will experience no common joy when they find that Mr. Trevelyan withdraws a veil of dimness and coldness which has hitherto hung between their hearts and the great writer to whom they have hitherto paid hearty but distant homage.

No one expected that that veil would ever be removed. By the outside world Macaulay was deemed a mere man of books, dry and unsympathetic towards ordinary life, its

pleasures and its personages. In the inner circle of Whig literature and politics he probably exhibited a certain roughness and abruptness which misled even intimate acquaintances as to the real fibre of his nature. No one suspected the existence of the great hidden treasure of family affection, of unconquerable playfulness, of keen enjoyment of life along with the easiest resignation under all circumstances, and of absolute unconcious generosity and unselfishness, which we have now been invited to inspect.

If I may detain you a moment longer from the contemplation of the book, let me ask your attention beforehand to the main teaching of its story. What a world of good it would do if it only persuaded men that there is still such a thing as simplicity of character! Not in some theologically distressed Scotch laddie invented by George MacDonald; nor in a grim sententious heroine of Currer Bell, or a sentimental one of Miss Muloch; nor in the mere brave soldier or breezy commodore of an improving biography; nor in a Bristol merchant who made his fortune and supported all sorts of religious institutions without ever so much as grazing even the most awkward of the Ten Commandments. Simplicity of character under no such conventional forms, but in a man of the world, of letters, of politics; of business, ambitious and eager for success; not by any means indifferent even to the peculiar pleasures of high life, and never pretending to despise them; but incapable from the beginning to the end of sullying his nature by a single ignoble compliance for any purpose whatever; always alive to simple satisfactions, whether subtler and loftier satisfactions were or were not available; finding equally unaffected delight in duty and in leisure; easily consolable for everything except family griefs, and not inconsolable even for these while there was work to be done or a book to be re-read, or a long walk to be

taken with Homer for a companion. Macaulay was ever and always in possession of the sweet balm of rational contentment, amidst the chances and changes, small and great, of an exciting life. He was so because he was perfectly natural, heartily sound, entirely genuine, though by no means demonstrative, altogether without intrigue or selfseeking. He was so because he always enjoyed himself in his own way, or rather in his own many ways, while never intermitting the most delicate and eager consideration for the enjoyment of those who were dear to him.

The mould in which this fresh and original character was formed might have been pronounced in all respects but one very unlikely to produce it. That one respect was the absolute and natural conscientiousness which pervaded the atmosphere in which Macaulay spent his childhood and youth. His father, we all know, was the devoted worker who, in comparative retirement, contributed almost as greatly by his indefatigable labours as did the most prominent of his coadjutors by their public agitation to that abolition of slavery which, as Mr. Trevelyan suggests, was not only the great triumph of the Evangelical party, but the precursor of all the great agitations which since then, as never before, have so greatly influenced the course of our legislation and government. Now, the Evangelical party is commonly called narrow, and it certainly was never very broad; but it was intensely conscientious, not merely as a party, but through and through in the personal characters of most of its members. In Zachary Macaulay this quality was the natural hereditary outcome of an honourable and unbroken Presbyterian genealogy. There was a grimness in his personal prejudices which prevented his character from being engaging, but the clear philanthropy and uncompromising honesty of his nature made him a good and beloved example; while a

certain sagacious moderation in not insisting on rules of reading and occupation which he could not enforce saved his family both from the gloom and from the hypocrisy which it is to be feared prevailed at that date in some serious households.

Thomas Babington Macaulay's career was marked out from the first with more or less distinctness by his intense love of books, while his distinction as an author was precociously foreshadowed by astonishing achievements in verse and prose at a very early age. From three he had read incessantly. He is first shown to us lying on the rug before the fire, devouring bread and butter and a book at the same time. He used to invent stories, and tell them with, for a child, great pomp of diction. Hannah More knew him from a very early date, and remembered first seeing him as a fair young child, who came to the door when she called to see his parents, and told her that they were out, but if she would come in, he would bring her a glass of "old spirits," which, as the good old lady had never tasted anything stronger than cowslip wine, greatly amused her. Stories of his infant wit are abundant and good. At Strawberry-hill, where he was taken to see the Orford collection, and enjoyed it with all the gravity of an adult, though, as, indeed, in all such cases through his life, with all the eagerness of a child, a footman spilled some hot coffee over his legs. Lady Waldegrave was much concerned, and asked him presently how he felt. "Thank you, madam," said the miniature Dr. Johnson"thank you, madam, the agony is abated." On another occasion, observing from the window that a maid-servant had disturbed some oyster-shells which bounded a little garden he was allowed to have, he astonished some guests by walking into the midst of a group and saying solemnly to his mother, "Cursed be Sally, for it is written, Cursed is he that removeth his neighbour's landmark."

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